Carmen González Gutiérrez on Religion and Urbanity in al-Andalus

Carmen González Gutiérrez, an associated member of the KFG “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” will deliver a paper on ‘Archaeology and Heritage of al-Andalus: New Inputs, Approaches and Experiences from Córdoba’ in New Cairo, Egypt.

She describes the contents of her talk in the following way:

Al-Andalus has traditionally been a very appealing field of study for researchers. However, the history of its origins, development and final disappearance has usually been addressed through the information contained in medieval written sources, which is often biased, partial and incomplete. Thus, historiography has been conceiving al-Andalus as a rather exotic reality, and its religious and cultural differences with the rest of the Medieval Europe resulted in the isolation of the Andalusi reality from wider historical and theoretical debates. Fortunately, this panorama is changing thanks to recent and on-going recovery of archaeological remains and sites. This is allowing the incorporation of the Islamic past of the Iberian Peninsula into the wider picture, and clarifying its role in the urban, historical and political global dynamics in the medieval Mediterranean. This lecture aims to introduce new research on al-Andalus focusing specifically on the case of Córdoba, capital under the Umayyads, which has witnessed extensive and relevant archaeological excavations in the last decades