ABSTRACT
A logic of competition between East and West, between the abode of Islam and that of Western Christianity - or what today's mainstream media in Europe and North America sometimes call "Judaeo-Christian culture" ignoring the long history of Jewish-Muslim cultural cohesion - binds together the two themes of al-Andalus on the one hand and Saladin and the Crusades on the other. Al-Andalus has diverse meanings as a powerful topos in a trans-local Arab identity, based on cultural memory. There are two trajectories in the exploration of cultural meaning in this inquiry: The glory of conquest, which is an analysis of the perseverance of a particular literary topos in modern Arabic literature, and the permanent exile from the lost paradise, which looks at al-Andalus as a depository of nostalgic references reaching back to the glory days of Arab-Muslim civilization. Nostalgia takes on its literal meaning in this context, which is 'home-sickness': the longing for the deserted motherland.
