Polemics between Jews and Christians in medieval Iberia were quite frequent and are generally well known, in particular the celebrated Disputation of Tortosa, held in that Catalan town in 1413–14, under the papacy of the schismatic Pope Benedict XIII. The outcome of such disputations was never in doubt, in lands where Christianity held the upper hand, but they did allow for a certain amount of interfaith debate and no doubt helped to reduce religious tensions between the two groups. Less well known are the polemical writings of Spain's Muslims against both Christians and Jews, the subject of Mònica Colominas Aparicio's The Religious Polemics of the Muslims of Late Medieval Christian Iberia: Identity and Religious Authority in Mudejar Islam. This is an interesting and generally well-written study on, principally, an Arabic manuscript held in the National Library of Austria, Vienna (MS ÖNB AF 58), which contains two important polemical works: Ta'yīd al-Milla (Against the Jews), and Kitāb al-Mujādala ma ‘a-l-Yahūd wa-n-Na ṣ ārā (Against the Christians).
The study of this manuscript and its two polemical works takes up chapters 5 and 6; before that there are four chapters that set the works in historical and religious contexts, look at the tradition of Muslim polemical writing and discuss their probable sources, and, perhaps most interesting for this reader at least, examine “The Connection between Religious Polemics and Notions of Identity and Religious Authority among the Mudejars” (chapter 1). The author has much to say here of value to students and scholars of Spain's Muslim population in the late Middle Ages, when they were all Mudejars (essentially, Muslims living under Christian rule), except for those living in the Islamic Kingdom of Granada. She notes a number of important features of the life of Spain's Mudejar population. First, physical, spatial, or geographic considerations: “It is worth noting that Mudejars, Christians and Jews tended to live near each other in neighbourhoods which had no physical barriers prior to the fifteenth century. In this respect, Molénat refers to the disputes over the occupation of the houses in Toledo, and notes that there was no separated Muslim morería in the city, and that, until the fifteenth century, Muslim houses were found among those of the Christians” (5–6). Second, and perhaps surprisingly, the exceptional status of Spain's Mudejars: they continued to live in lands that were no longer part of dār al-Islām when it was their duty to flee Spain, because “by remaining under Christian jurisdiction, religious contamination would be inevitable” (6). In spite of numerous fatwās pointing out this duty to them, the bulk of the Muslim population remained in Spain, and this does not seem to have caused them any problems within the wider Muslim world: “as far as their co-religionists and they themselves were concerned, the Mudejars were Muslims in the full sense of the term” (7). Nonetheless, this presence alongside Christians (and also Jews) for so many centuries did produce its own dynamics and did inevitably affect their sense of identity. As Corominas Aparicio shows (using recent scholarship on social identity), “religious minorities are not only directly affected by majority policies, but … those communities have an impact on the identity of the majority society as well” (16). If Muslim identity was affected by living side by side with their Christian neighbors (and we have to remember that the majority of the Mudejar population lived in the countryside, in small rural communities), so too was Christian identity.
The effects of this long cohabitation are evident in the polemical writings that are the subject of this book. It is self-evident that in order to polemicize on religious matters with your opponent you need to have a very good understanding of their faith as well as your own. This in itself brings you nearer to their beliefs, and thus into very dangerous territory. A large part of these polemical writings is of course directed as much to the local Muslim population as it is to any Christian reader. Muslim writers in Spain needed to strengthen the faith of their fellows who were subjected to constant harassment, and to arm them against Christian arguments.
Although the book is at times a hard read, it nonetheless provides much valuable information about Spain's Muslim population at the end of the Middle Ages, and will be useful for scholars working in this field. Sadly, it is plagued by errors: typographical and syntactical; poor English expression; citation of books in the text or notes that do not appear in the bibliography; names that are listed differently in the text and the bibliography, making it difficult for the reader to check the sources; and so on. One notes the lack here of a good copyeditor and proper proofreading.