Guraba prophecies about al-Andalus predate the Moriscos by seven centuries

Evidence

In a number of hadiths current in the Iberian peninsula, a special role is assigned to the guraba of al-Andalus at the end of days. When I first came across such traditions (in a collection of allegedly ancient hadiths about al-Andalus translated into Spanish by the Morisco Jesuit Ignacio de las Casas, a man who will come to our attention in a quite different context in chapter 8), I mistakenly assumed that the texts being translated were late fabrications. Although I could not be certain whether they were intended to reconcile the defeated and downtrodden Muslims of Spain with their fate, or whether, on the other hand, they had been created by black propagandists on the Christian side, I could not conceive that they had not arisen outside the circumstances of the sixteenth century. They seemed to arise so directly out of the experiences of the forcibly converted Muslim communities at that time. I was quite wrong in my assumptions, for Dr. Maribel Fierro pointed out to me that hadiths containing prophecies substantially identical in their use of the term guraba. to those current in the sixteenth century are to be found in Arabic texts as early as the ninth century. In the light of Fierro’s correction, the use of the word guraba is therefore even more puzzling in the sixteenth century. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 340

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why would ninth-century hadiths about the guraba of al-Andalus at the end of days still fit so neatly into sixteenth-century Morisco experience — continuity of tradition, or genuinely parallel historical situations?
• XREF: Connects to the scholarship on how medieval religious texts get reused by later marginalized groups, e.g. the Book of Revelation redeployed across centuries; also to E.P. Thompson’s work on how inherited traditions shape popular consciousness.