ABSTRACT
Arab nationalism has been one of the dominant ideologies in the Middle East and North Africa since the early twentieth century. This chapter introduces literary topoi as points of reference in Arab nationalism and investigates their function in the process of building a manifest identity. The first example is the topos of the Great Man, embodied by the medieval Sultan and Muslim knight Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, better known in the Western hemisphere as Saladin. A second, more elaborate, analysis covers the emergence and evolution of a multifaceted topos - al-Andalus, or medieval Muslim Spain - throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
