Resumen de A good story well told: memory, identity, and the conquest of Iberia
Arabic accounts of the conquest of Iberia have generally been the purview of historians who view the literariness of these accounts with suspicion, as distorting and obscuring reliable historical information. This article proposes an interdisciplinary approach that appreciates the literary qualities of early Islamic historiography. A close reading of anecdotes about Mūsā b. Nuṣayr from two third/ninth-century sources (Ibn ‘Abd al-Ḥakam's Futūḥ Miṣr and Ibn Ḥabīb's Kitāb al-Ta'rīkh) reveals their verbal artistry as well as how their transmitters shaped them to serve identitarian needs. The fact that both authors were Mālikī jurists who studied with the same authorities in Egypt and who transmit many of the same historical materials makes their divergent portrayals of Mūsā especially interesting case studies of the social function of historical memory. Scholarly communities produced and maintained their status as elite by retelling historical narratives. They also expressed divergent regional identities through the selective transmission of certain stories about the conquest of Iberia
