Fort of the soil: a story of a Moorish family

Book Title: Fortress of Dust Family of Moorish origin Author: Ahmed Abdel Latif Publisher: Dar Al-Ain for Publishing Number of Pages: 265 About the Book: "In the last forty days, my father had already bid farewell to life. He was hanging in the liminal space between life and the afterlife. He was with me in body, but his spirit was flying. With clouded eyes, he was talking to me. With hollow eyes, he was recalling a history I did not know before. Or I knew it and I do not know it. A history I looked at as if it did not belong to me. As if it belonged to me. I look at it as I look at a round seal around my waist. I look at it as someone who owns but without the freedom to act. Like a king who does not rule. A green seal bearing my identity, as if it were the antidote against the poison of loss. As if loss were the poison of identity." Through the family of Muhammad de Molina, "Fortress of Dust" traces one of the most unforgettable human tragedies: the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Moriscos. We are faced with a narrative that pleads with imagination and unofficial history to write the lives of ordinary individuals who were forced by authority (political and religious) to choose between abandoning their religion or being displaced, then they were not spared from the rack and torture, then they were not spared from expulsion on the pretext that they are Arabs and Muslims, then they were ostracized in the new land on the pretext that they are Spanish Christians. It is an epic of defeated heroes who paid their lives in a religious-political conflict they did not choose. In his new novel, and as a continuation of his literary project, Ahmed Abdel Latif raises a sharp question about religious extremism, a question that, as much as it represents the past, also represents the present. It embodies questions that exploded with the Arab Spring and once again puts us before the dilemma of identity. With a sensitive approach to the content, the author employs an unprecedented narrative form, relying on video and music—not only as auditory and visual effects but also as narrative supplements to create a state of poignant nostalgia, a state befitting a truncated heroism as well as a heroic defeat.