In 1986 Amin Maalouf published in French Leon the Africana magnificent novel that narrates the adventures of one of the Muslims expelled from his native Granada after the conquest of the city by the Catholic Monarchs. The Lebanese writer was inspired by a real person, the traveler and scholar Hasan bin Muhamed al-Wazan (1488-1554), who, after traveling the Mediterranean, would end up in Rome at the service of the Pope and with the name that gives the novel its title. . The story is told in the first person, as if it were the memoirs of its protagonist, and, at the end of its introductory paragraph, he says: “My wisdom has lived in Rome, my passion in Cairo, my anguish in Fez, and in Granada still lives my innocence.”
Thirty years ago, Maalouf was one of the signatories of a manifesto that demanded that the Granada festival of January 2, commemorating the taking of the city by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492, be detached from its shabby and exclusive national-Catholic character and adopt another more open and plural, more in line with an enlightened and democratic Granada and Spain. The manifesto was promoted by local personalities such as Carlos Cano, Miguel Ríos, Luis García-Montero and Antonina Rodrigo, to whom dozens of other Granadans and intellectual friends of the city of the Alhambra joined such as Antonio Gala, Ian Gibson, Yehudi Menuhin, José Saramago , Juan Goytisolo and Maalouf.
#Granada
