Turkish Delight: Antonio Gala's La pasión turca as a Vision of Spain's Contested Islamic Heritage

ly also working on a project related to the deployment of images of the historical re ligious minorities of Spain in contemporary Spanish literature. The exact nature of the role played by Spain's Islamic/ Moorish heritage in the development of its national identity has long been polemic amongst Spanish writers, cultural historians, sociologists, and philosophers.2 Whether viewed as a toxic influence on Spanish culture, an essential part of a unique national identity or an irrelevant his torical parenthesis of no lasting impact, the Moorish/ morisco presence and its perceived contribution to contemporary Spanish identity is curiously versatile. Its apparently endless capacity for reinterpretation by generation after generation of writers and commentators for purposes more relevant to the present than to the past has been noted by Miguel ?ngel de Blunes in his introduction to Mercedes Garcia Arenal's