A novel that recreates the splendor of the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba and the rise of the leader Almanzor, The light of Medinaby the writer Emma Lira (Madrid, 55 years old), has today been proclaimed winner of the Edhasa Prize for historical narrative in its ninth edition. The jury, which includes Mari Pau Domínguez, Carlos García Gual, María José Solano and Sergio Vila-Sanjuán, has valued “the extraordinary sensitivity” with which the novel describes “with rich details and a veiled exoticism, the Arab-Muslim Hispania of the caliphate, at the summit of Medina Azahara, as well as the history of Almanzor before it became a legend.”
The light of medina It focuses especially, in addition to the warrior leader, on the historical figure of Lubna of Córdoba, a slave who became secretary of the chancellery of al-Hakam II and had a decisive role in organizing the caliph’s great library that he wanted to be the largest in the world and emulate the lost one of Alexandria.
This edition, 284 novels competed for the prize organized by the Edhasa publishing house and awarded 10,000 euros. Lira, author of eight previous novels, including The moon over Rome (2024) about Cleopatra Selene, daughter of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, and The captive (2025), the novelization of the film by Alejandro Amenábar, she is a collaborator in various history and cultural guide publications (one of the experts at EL PAÍS Viajes), especially in Muslim countries such as Morocco, Algeria (from which she has just returned), Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. Passionate about history and archeology and well versed in the Arab world and Islam, she wanted to claim in The light of Medina the significance of the Caliphate of Córdoba in the face of a Spanish memory quite reluctant to give it, he affirms, the importance it deserves.
The editor of Edhasa, Daniel Fernández, highlighted at the award ceremony in Barcelona the relevance with which Lira writes about the time and the way in which she brings to life very powerful Muslim figures and vindicates the role of women in those times. Fernández has pointed out the added interest of showing the splendor of the Caliphate of Córdoba at a time like the current one when there is so much debate over the massive regularization of emigrants, many of them from Islamic countries. The editor has taken the opportunity to ironize that Abascal “looks like a great Christian knight but has the face of a caliph”, adding that he even remembers the perverse vizier Iznogud from the comics created by Gosciny.
Lira has pointed out that unlike the Roman past, which is unanimously accepted and valued, the Muslim past “seems to be more lazy, and if the Romans are seen as civilizers, the Muslims are considered conquerors and are generally regarded as something foreign when they are an integral part of our history and our culture.” In this regard, he recalled that “al-Andalus was much more than Andalusia and reached the Cantabrian coast.”
He has pointed out how the Caliphate of Córdoba was like a papacy – “there could only be one caliph” – but at the time, the 10th century, three coincided: the Abbasid in Baghdad, that of the Fatimids, in North Africa and part of the Middle East, with its capital in Cairo, and in Córdoba that of the Emir Abd al-Rahman III. Lira has highlighted the splendor of that Córdoba and its capital of Medina Azahara, a civilization that celebrated life and poetry, in which courtly love was sung, including homoerotic love, and there was no shortage, although it may surprise, of wine. “That refined world allows you to use flowery prose like that of the time,” he said.
The award-winning author has highlighted the character of Lubna as the creator of the famous library of 400,000 titles of the son of Abd al-Rahman III, al-Hakam II, a library of which she speculates that part of its collection could have passed to the famous Toledo School of Translators of Alfonso X the Wise.
Lira has valued the usefulness of the historical novel to recover and delve into little-known and documented characters such as the scholar from Córdoba, who managed 200 female scribes who copied books for the library, or portray another like Almanzor, who is familiar to all of us (the one with the drum, precisely) but who few know in depth “despite having been born in Algeciras, lived in Córdoba and died in Medinaceli.” In that sense, he has reflected that Almanzor is “like the Hannibal of the Christians”, that feared warrior leader whose true personality has been hidden in a kind of damnation of memory.
The light of Medina However, despite the prominence of Almanzor, the Victorious, it is not a book of battles, but rather a rather intimate portrait of the time. “I like to tell what is not seen, and in battles you usually see everything, I am interested in why human beings cry or sigh, the behind-the-door life of Mediana Azhara.”
On the cover of the book, Almanzor has a retreat to Ridley Scott’s Saladin in The gates of heaven. Emma Lira laughs: “It seems similar, true; Saladino was also a great strategist like Almanzor and if someone like Ridley Scott has to take it to the cinema, I couldn’t agree more.” The author has ended by ensuring that she trusts that The light of Medina will prove that “the editors who believe that al-Andalus does not sell” are wrong. While Fernández has promised to take everyone present at the award ceremony (including the jury) to Cairo if the novel sells more than 50,000 copies.