Morisco historical memory skipped centuries to connect earliest Islamic triumphs with imminent apocalypse

Evidence

In the scale of priorities of the Moriscos, what they considered to be of vital importance was what had happened in the early days of Islam, what was going to happen at the end of days (and many of them believed that the end was very near); they had little time to spare for more than brief anecdotes of the more recent past, especially if it was not a specifically Islamic past. Between the days of the Companions of the Prophet and the present, apart from fragmentary and largely fictional references to the great days of the Caliphate of Cordova, apart from some slight reflection of the drama of Nasrid history, there is a void. Nothing on the muluk al-tawaif or on the Almoravids or Almohads at all! In this connection it is to be noted, as we will see in chapter 6, that when the last Granadan rebellion broke out, its leader, Fernando de Valor, assumed the Arab name of Ben Umayya, harking back to the great days of the eighth to tenth centuries, not to any nearer historical milestone. “History” for the Moriscos meant the early days of Islam and the early days of an Islamic regime in al-Andalus, not the totality of time elapsed. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 762

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the modern pattern where politically dispossessed groups compress time between a mythic golden age and an imminent end, recalling signals about how collective memory selects its past — relevant to reading on oral tradition and memory.
• SEED: A piece on how oppressed communities curate their own history — eliding the ‘middle ages’ to link founding glory directly to apocalyptic present — could draw on both Morisco reading habits and modern nationalist memory compressions.