Authors, Scholars, and Translators Look Back: On Radwa Ashour’s ‘Granada’

Ten years after the death of the great Radwa Ashour (1946-2014), AUC Press has finally published Ashour’s complete Granada trilogy — her best-known work — in English translation. Published in Arabic in 1994 and 1995, the trilogy has been named to many best-of lists, including the Arab Writers’ Union’s 105 best Arabic novels of the twentieth century, and it has had an unquestionable impact on the Egyptian novel.

The first volume was translated by William Granara and published by Syracuse University Press in 2003, but then the second and third volumes — which complete this multigenerational epic that centers family, social responsibility, and genocide — didn’t follow.

It wasn’t until November 2024 that the complete trilogy was published in a new translation by Kay Heikkenen. You can re-watch a launch discussion, hosted by AUC Press and moderated by ArabLit’s M Lynx Qualey, with translators Kay Heikkenen and Sarah Enany, joined by historian Mayte Green-Mercado.

In celebration of the Granada trilogy finally coming out, completely, in English translation, we asked writers and translators to tell us a little about the significance and impact of the trilogy, as they saw it, and when they first read Granada trilogy, and the impressions it left behind.

By Tugrul Mende, with ArabLit

Marilyn Booth, translator and scholar

I knew about Granada when Radwa was researching it. She was a very dear friend—much missed—and I had translated some of her short stories; the title of my collection My Grandmother’s Cactus was inspired by one of them. Radwa was very excited about this new project and she even asked me to bring her some historical sources from the UK, which I did. I know that she was very deeply engaged in the history. Also, knowing her writing, I was certain that the novel (I am not sure she envisioned a trilogy then!) would be a different kind of historical novel, with a fresh perspective—and indeed, it was. It’s great to see it all coming out now—again.

I don’t know what impact it has had on contemporary Arabic literature but perhaps it is one of the forces behind the wave of historical novels we have seen in recent years.

Rana Asfour, editor at The Markaz Review, critic, translator

When living in London in 2006, I complained incessantly to anyone who would listen about how much I missed reading novels in Arabic. As a parting gift after one visit back, I was handed a copy of Granada, in Arabic, which I started to read at the airport. I was so engrossed that when my plane landed five and a half hours later, I only had a few pages left. I had visited Alhambra with my parents as a 10-year-old trudging behind my parents: hot, cranky, and uninterested. But, here in my hands all these years later, was Radwa’s Granada. The moriscos were those whom nobody had talked about or alluded to in any of my history lessons at school or on tour at Alhambra. I was enraptured with the characters, particularly the women. As a new mother, the novel’s mothers were fierce, making do in alien cultures and environs, just as I was trying to do in London then.

Fast-forward 15 years, and my 19-year-old and I landed in Andalusia. I re-read Granada, and again, I was struck by its timelessness. The sentimentality that all Arabs experience when we talk of Andalusia is coupled with a sadness that we have yet to sort out our differences, end our internal squabbles, and rely on our self-actualization if there is hope for a better future in the region.

I returned to Ashour’s seminal book again this March. Seven months after the start of the genocide in Gaza. This time, after listening to her son Tamim’s poetry. I sat with it, my heart already broken as I read again about book burnings, tearing down of institutions, women burnt at the stake, marginalization, displacement, and erasure of culture and identity. History never forgets, but sadly, it also repeats itself, as is happening today in Palestine and Lebanon.

The Granada Trilogy remains an exceptional book. It is breathtaking in its range of emotions, in which the banalities and horrors blend together as the reader longs for the rescue that never comes. It is a testament to what a truth-seeking individual, like Radwa Ashour, can accomplish as the novel rollicks through revelations of hidden lives, suppressed truths, and inhumane atrocities. While the book presents a counter-narrative to the conventional tales of a prospering Andalusia, it also interrogates the more intimate aspects of belonging and identity. It captures a ravaged world of complacency in the face of an apocalypse and the righteous anger and endurance of individuals opposed to the injustices of ethnic erasure and colonization. The simplicity of the narrative and Ashour’s sensitive portrayal of the fall of Andalusia amplifies the overall horror of what took place all those years ago, leaving the reader with an uneasy parable about following despots who promise to restore order while offering a much-needed narrative for those puzzled by contemporary discussions on why, as a people and region, we find ourselves where we are today.

Wessam Elmeligi, scholar and novelist

This trilogy has a special place in my life, without exaggeration. It seems like it was another lifetime when I read it for the first time. I was still in Egypt, before moving to the United States. I was a tenured faculty at Alexandria University. I was writing and publishing like all professors to get promoted. I wrote an article about the Granada trilogy in 2005, titled, “Voices of the Forgotten: Temporal-spatial Balance in Radwa Ashour’s Granada Trilogy” It was published by an Egyptian scholarly journal. Ashour was easily among my all time favorite writers, in any language. Later, I submitted my case for promotion. In Egypt, faculty going up for promotion need to present their work and discuss it with a committee of external examiners, a group of full professors from different universities. Naturally, those discussions can be stressful for candidates. I went in and looked at the members of the committee and there she was, Radwa Ashour herself. She was among the examiners, as she was a professor at Cairo University. Immediately, what was supposed to be a stressful situation turned into a once-in-a-lifetime experience and opportunity for me to talk to a legendary writer. While the discussion was focused on all my other papers as well, and all the professors had their share of questions, I still felt I was in a surreal world where Ashour was asking me questions about my work, rather than the other way round. This memorable experience has helped shape my understanding of the impact academia and literary work can have on each other. The intersectionality of creative and critical thinking remained an important aspect of my work.

Ashour’s trilogy fits in the category of alternate perspectives. Andalusia, Arabo-Hispanic culture, the two sides of the Mediterranean, are all part of a narrative that has been told from one perspective for way too long, for the most part. Literary works like Ashour’s Granada trilogy claim the narrative back in more than one way. It is told by the Arabs who lived there. It is told by Arab women who lived there. Twice removed from the agency to tell their narratives, Ashour’s narrators hold the world accountable for a tragic loss of a great civilization, a melting pot that was crushed. It shows what could have been and what happened. The silence of the world towards atrocities in Andalusia is not too far from the silence of the world towards Gaza. The timing of this translation is important, whether or not it is intentional. It draws attention to narratives that need to be told and silences that need to be voiced.

Faten Morsy, literature professor

When I first read Ashour’s Trilogy,  I became infatuated with the character of Saleema who reminded me of Tawaddud of The One Thousand and One Nights, the erudite slave-girl of Abu-‘l Husn who was summoned before the Caliph Harun Al Rasheed and won the contest against the theologists, scientists, poets and men of letters in Al Rasheed’s court. Saleema, in Granada Trilogy, reads Ibn Sina, Ibn Tufail and Ibn al-Bitar’s books and consequently, we are told, Saleema’s “jail becomes wider, slowly and slowly becomes wider and then its bars disappear in the light of the sun shining from the book and her mind”. I was teaching a course on the 1001 Nights then, and the students found the affinities between both characters fascinating as both Saleema and Tawaddud may be considered representations of  the young Arab/Muslim female erudite archetype.

Ashour’s text is part of a creative literary tradition of rewriting the events of the Fall of Granada whether in the West or even in Arabic.  They have been largely depicted in various historical literary texts from Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada (1669), Chateaubriand’s Les Aventures du dernier Abencérage (The Adventures of the Last Abencerrage) (1826), to Jurji Zaydan’s Fath Al-Andalus (The Conquest of Al-Andalus) (1903), Ahmed Shawqy’s Amirat Al-Andalus (The Princess of Al-Andalus) (1932) and Aziz Abaza’s  Ghoroub Al-Andalus (The Sunset of Al-Andalus) (1952). Ashour’s text, however, stands out as it writes the history of the fall of Granada from below: she offers us an epic of an ordinary family’s loss, its generational traumas and the family’s heroic attempts to survive despite the cultural and religious war waged on them after the Castilians took over Granada. From this perspective Granada is a world literature text par excellence.

Amina Zaydan, novelist

When I won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, there was a rumor that Radwa Ashour’s Granada had been nominated for the prize. Until that time, I hadn’t read the Granada trilogy. I had read the The Woman from Tantoura and others of Radwa’s works that made me realize that Radwa Ashour was no ordinary writer, but rather a first-class writer.

After I finished reading the trilogy, I wished that she had won the prize instead of me, not because one book is better than another, but because she was subjected to a great injustice for her humanitarian project and her political views.

When we move beyond the historical dimension in Radwa Ashour’s writings, and reflect them back onto our lived reality, we are faced with an echo of this bitter reality, where there are still such targeted communities, albeit with different names, clothes, and locations.

We thus can recognize the renewed value of Radwa’s humanitarian project, in a conflict that extends for generations between the good — or the people who are subjected to genocide — and the evil, represented by the gangs of white men who live off our blood and hard work. We naturally root for the good, but this good is subjected to a brutal abuse and oppression that no living conscience can endure.

How, then, did the author of these horrific scenes bring such a clear image before the reader, an image as if you were there, watching and seeing? Radwa Ashour wrote with all of her heart, to continue her support for good and its victory, even if it seems that evil is winning.

-Translated by Hend Saeed.

Read an excerpt of the new translation of Granada:

On Brittle Paper

Watch the book launch discussion: