Fortress of the soil, authored by: Ahmed Abdul Latif

In the last forty days, my father had already bid farewell to life. He was hanging in the limbo between life and the hereafter. He was with me in body, but his soul was flying. With blind eyes, he was talking to me. With hollow eyes, he was recalling a history I did not know before. Or I knew it and did 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 the Soil" traces one of the most unforgettable human tragedies: the Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Moriscos. We are facing 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 expelled, then they were not spared from the gallows and torture, then they were not spared from exile under the pretext that they are Arabs and Muslims, then they were ostracized in the new land under the pretext that they are Spanish Christians. It is a saga of defeated heroes who sacrificed their lives in a religious/political conflict they did not choose. Number of pages: 262