Following the Dispersed Leaves From Al‐Andalus al‐Ratib : Diasporic Imaginings of Andalusī Nature and Geography in the Seventeenth Century

ABSTRACT This article examines how the seventeenth‐century scholar Ahmad ibn Muhammad al‐Maqqari (d. 1041/1632) reimagined the geography and legacy of al‐Andalus in the aftermath of the Morisco expulsion. Composed in Ottoman Damascus at the request of a local patron, his Nafh al‐Tib transforms al‐Andalus from a lost territory into a transhistorical space of cultural possibility: not nostalgic adab, I argue, but a sophisticated diasporic project that answered post‐expulsion trauma by asserting the continuity and transferability of Andalusī civilization. Drawing strategically on medieval geographical authorities, above all Ibn Saʿid al‐Maghribi and Ibn Ghalib al‐Gharnati, al‐Maqqari attributes the peninsula's exceptional fertility and refinement not to geographical advantage but to the inherited virtues of its people: their Greek civilizational legacy and their Arab lineage. In dialogue with diaspora studies, the article introduces two concepts, Andalusī environmental agency and transplantable geography, to show how al‐Maqqarī mobilized land, lineage and labour to claim that Andalusī achievement could be re‐rooted across North Africa and the Ottoman Mediterranean. His fusion of genealogy and environmental mastery at once secured his authority within Damascene scholarly circles and offered the dispersed Moriscos a framework for flourishing in new homelands—an ecocritical reading of how the memory of al‐Andalus was made portable.