EDUCATION OUTREACH
Exploring the Arab Legacy in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America By Susan Douglass
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Left: the gardens of La Tropical in Havana, Cuba; Above: Musician Ronnie Malley on the oud
Ray, Samuel Eig Professor of Jewish Stud-
ies, elaborated on Jewish Culture in Medieval Iberia, while Emilio González Ferrín of the University of Seville exposed attendees to ongoing re-evaluations of the Role of alAndalus in world history, revisiting concepts such as the Reconquista. Christina Civantos of the University of Miami, and George Abdelnour of Notre Dame University in Lebanon covered aspects of the Iberian Peninsula as a crossroads of world culture. Also among the offerings were videos from dramatic productions, including a play by Garcia Lorca staged in several Lebanese towns, and a session with Ronnie Malley, a versatile Chicago-based musician and cultural ambassador, whose production “Ziryab” reflects the role of the 9th century Andalusian in bringing new styles of music, clothing, and refined manners to the Western outpost of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula. Attendees enjoyed performances that sampled Arab and Iberian influence in South American and Caribbean music. Professor Myers, himself a well-known playwright, brought in several of his theater collaborators to present on their work. Sahar Assaf, a professor of theater
Center for Contemporary Arab Studies - Georgetown University
at AUB and director of the Golden Thread Theater in San Francisco; Enass Khansa, professor of Arabic at AUB; and Marvin Carlson, professor of theater and comparative literature at the City University of New York, demonstrated connections across the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. It was heartening to see numerous speakers—even those in overseas locations—attend live sessions beyond their own. The diversity of the scholars’ and attendees’ teaching fields fostered appreciation of the deeply interconnected cultural traditions of the Arabic, Spanish and Portuguese legacies. The program was made possible by a Title VI grant from the United States Department of Education, which is funding a National Resource Center on the Middle East and North Africa at Georgetown University, and by support from CCAS, ACMCU, and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown.
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Dr. Susan Douglass is the CCAS Education Outreach Director.
Image credits: Raphael López Guzmán for Saudi Aramco World Magazine, Jan/Feb 2021; Sounds and Notes Foundation
ast August, CCAS’s Education Outreach program, in collaboration with the Alwaleed bin Talal Center for MuslimChristian Understanding (ACMCU), hosted our annual week-long Summer Teacher Institute, offered virtually for the second year in a row due to the pandemic. The idea for this year’s topic, the Arab legacy in al-Andalus (Arabic for the Iberian Peninsula) and Latin America, was inspired by a conference and book project at the American University of Beirut (AUB) led by Robert Myers, Director of AUB’s Center for American Studies and Research. The institute, which featured as speakers the AUB book’s twelve authors, engaged current scholarship spanning 1400 years of cultural histories connecting the Arabic-speaking and Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds, ranging from the Arab-Umayyad era of the 7th century through the Hispano-Arabic period, the Golden Age of Spain and Iberia, to contemporary Latin America and the Middle East. Scholars from a range of disciplines discussed the ways these interwoven, transcultural continuities reveal how ideas, artistic practices, languages, and objects travelled and were embraced by new populations in surprising ways. The institute was attended by an audience of more than 40 educators from 14 different states and the UK. They came from the fields of history, humanities, foreign languages, and fine arts instruction, including both dance and music, at the secondary and collegiate levels. Participants engaged in the materials via a virtual platform with pre-recorded lectures and readings. Each day, two of the speakers conducted live sessions for discussion. Historians provided deep background on the week’s topic: Georgetown’s Jonathan
