Hassan Aourid’s al-Mūrīskī and the Stakes of Hybridity: Multilingualism and Cultural Intersections

Abstract

narrative vision that brings together history, reflection, and existential questioning. The novel is shaped by linguistic and cultural plurality, drawing on classical Arabic, poetry, the Qur’an and the Bible, Castilian, Turkish, and Moroccan Arabic. This multilingual texture reflects the fractured Morisco identity, suspended between conflicting affiliations and competing forms of belonging. Poetic quotations from al-Mutanabbī, al-Būṣīrī, and Ibn ʿArabī affirm values of dignity, patience, and Sufi love, while religious intertexts give the narrative spiritual depth and express an anxious experience of faith caught between coercion and certainty. Elegiac prose also functions as a space for memorializing characters, honoring sacrifice, and rethinking belonging and collective salvation. Through linguistic hybridity and religious and aesthetic intertextuality, the novel becomes a mirror of a wounded identity in search of meaning, and a call to rewrite memory and interrogate the present through the recovery of shared pain and violated dignity.