The intellectual production of the Mudejar community in the Iberian Peninsula continues to offer elements of great interest, not only for measuring their level of education, but also for assessing the transition of their cultural expressions from the Andalusian period to the period of Christian domination. Often read in the context of the Morisco period due to the Arab and Aljamiado textual legacy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the literature produced by the Mudejar elites undoubtedly has to be analyzed in the social, political, and intellectual context in which it emerged.
This is the case for The Book of Disputation: A Mudejar Religious-Philosophical Treatise against Christians and Jews, by Mònica Colominas, which offers a sharp and erudite study of a fascinating Mudejar text, the Kitāb al-muǧādala ma'a al-Yahūd wa-n-Naṣārā (hereinafter KM). The text, found in a miscellaneous Arabic manuscript of the Österreichische National Bibliothek of Vienna, was written in the second half of the fourteenth century and copied in the early fifteenth. This manuscript contains other polemical treatises such as the Ta'yīd al-Milla, also an anti-Jewish polemic, which was copied by thefaqīh al-Raqilī in Pedrola (Aragon). Colominas has already analyzed the texts of this manuscript in her previous comprehensive study of the religious polemics of the Mudejar communities. [1] In this new book, she focuses on KM, which is undoubtedly the most original of all the polemical treatises analyzed in her former book, and she undertakes a penetrating study of its contents and a diplomatic edition of the text, which is also linguistically distinctive.
Colominas’s long introduction to the book serves to present KM within a generic context (Mudejar religious controversies in the Iberian Peninsula), a social context (Mudejar elites), and an intellectual context (its religious and philosophical content). In this way, the reader is aware from the very beginning that the text is an Aragonese copy of a lost Arabic original, most likely written by a member of the well-known Mudejar Šarafī family, belonging to the Castilian Mudejar elite but with connections in other parts of the Iberian Peninsula. Colominas convincingly proposes the figure of Hamet Xarafí, alcalde of the Moors, who settled in Alcalá de Henares in 1351 and later served as a physician at the Aragonese court of King Peter the Ceremonious (1344-1387), as the text’s possible author.
KM is part of that chain of Arabic texts that spans from al-Andalus to the Morisco period, a chain in which, as Leonard P. Harvey pointed out, the earliest texts serve as models for later ones. In this line of intellectual tradition, KM would occupy one of the last phases in Arabic before the linguistic shift to Aljamiado in the Aragonese Islamic texts. Certain syntactical anomalies in the Arabic text, as well as the interpolation of Aljamiado segments into the sentences, seem to demonstrate this. The Mudejar text, as Colominas points out on several occasions, was probably conceived and composed for use in an educational and learning environment in a teacher/disciple relationship. Its incompleteness could indicate that we are dealing with a text that has been constructed, but without strict linearity and without being completely outlined.
Part I of the book is dedicated to a thorough explanation of KM’s contents, being read and analyzed within its “Mudejar Microcosmos.” It is in this section that KM’s great originality within the Iberian context becomes evident from the very first pages. Particularly noteworthy is its staunch defense of philosophy (and, in general, of the exercise of knowledge) as an indispensable tool for explaining the universe and its harmonious combination with Revelation. The existence and defense of this harmonious collaboration of philosophy and religion is, to say the least, surprising and, as Colominas points out, “not an obvious choice for a Muslim scholar” (65). In fact, the author’s complaint about the form of religious leadership of the Muslim scholars of his time, attached to a repetitive and fruitless tradition, although it has echoes within the medieval Islamic world, is unusual in the Hispanic Mudejar context because of its challenge to the established view of a decadent Mudejar culture.
Despite the difficulty of organizing the contents of a somewhat disorganized text like KM, in order to offer a coherent overview to the reader, Colominas makes a tremendous effort to group the thematic axes of the text around which it develops its discourse. Although the polemical purpose is present throughout the work, two sections stand out: first, “A Scholarly Defense of Religious Excellence” focuses on the elements most directly related to the social situation of the Mudejars in comparison with the Christian majority and especially with the Jewish minority. On the one hand, KM’s call to consider the noble origins of the Mudejar elite as descendants (šarīf) of the family of the Prophet Muhammad has both an obvious parallel with Jewish claims to belong to the House of David and an internal logic at a time when converts to Christianity sought to retain their titles, generating social and intellectual concern among Old Christians, who were unable to outwardly distinguish the converts. A need raised by Colominas, and which had already appeared in historiography, is the study of the use of the title šarīf among the Mudejars, which we hardly know despite the fact that it survived in several families until the Morisco period.
The second point, “Generational Discontinuation” in the KM, is a very interesting exposition of how KM develops the primarily anti-Jewish argument of the non-continuity of nobility, preeminence, and God’s favor if they are not sustained by the fulfillment of God’s commandments and the performance of completely ethical conduct. For the author, neither God’s favor nor His punishment is hereditary nor is it perpetuated in human beings from generation to generation. On the contrary, each generation of believers begins their relationship with God from scratch and has the opportunity to choose the right path and even correct their mistakes. This leads the author, relying on Aristotle (“a good man is known by his deeds, not by his origin”), to make a staunch defense of human ethics as the only path to achieving religious excellence. This opens a subtle double track, as Colominas indicates, of introducing non-religious knowledge as a valid instrument for perfection and of considering it possible to be a good Muslim even while living among Christians.
Non-religious knowledge in KM takes the original form of introducing natural philosophy and its application in the life of the Muslim believer to make a convincing and sometimes surprising defense of Islam. The author uses natural philosophy, logic, and the rational sciences to develop his arguments, which challenges the established view of the decline and disappearance of natural philosophy in the Islamic world over time. Although we do not currently have much data on the cultivation of philosophy among Mudejars and Moriscos, KM forces us to reconsider this supposed disappearance of philosophy.
Perhaps the most acute problem with the text, as Colominas points out on several occasions, is the irregular presentation of its philosophical arguments, which are sometimes presented in a simplified or even disorganized manner. Once again, the contents are “reordered” in the study to facilitate the reader’s understanding of its philosophical message, which is articulated in a double distinction: 1) The physical conditions of the sublunary and supralunary regions; and 2) the epistemic distinction regarding the possibility of knowledge, both of the perceptible reality of the world and knowledge of God. The reorganization and explanation of the author of KM’s thoughts on religion, philosophy, and the relationships between both disciplines, which Colominas structures into seven main points, has to be highly appreciated. This is a complex and often subtle exposition that involves the interaction of several disciplines (astronomy, natural philosophy, logic, etc.) and reveals a highly original author who, at times, even distances himself from his coreligionists in his interpretations of natural phenomena or human nature. Of course, for the author--and this is one of his main theses--philosophy is an indispensable tool for defeating Jews and Christians in religious polemics.
Colominas also organizes the use of philosophy in the purely religious sphere into five sections: 1) Religious arguments against Jews and Christians, elaborating on the distinction between the sublunar and supralunar regions; 2) Explanation of knowledge and Revelation, using, as the author of KM acknowledges, the texts of Aristotle and Ibn Rušd; 3) A kind of polemical guide for Muslims based on questions; 4) The assertion that philosophy is not only compatible with, but necessary for Islam, working on sayings of natural philosophy taken from Aristotle; and 5) Stories of exemplary and pious behavior.
The final, shorter part of Colominas’s study is a sort of recapitulation of the work, intended to delve deeper into the personality of the Mudejar author of KM. Undoubtedly, one of the most important considerations she establishes is the author’s desire to adapt the work for its intended audience. Although philosophical arguments are present throughout the work, its author’s effort to simplify his speculation and emphasize a few main ideas is evident. While Aristotle and Ibn Rušd are his principal authorities, the author of KM does not explore the complexities and subtleties of these great philosophers, occasionally presenting their ideas in summary form. There is no doubt that the educational settings of the work greatly influence its structure and the development of its arguments, and one inevitably thinks of some work by Francisco Márquez Villanueva [“El caso del averroísmo popular español (hacia la Celestina)”]. This text warns of the existence of an unregulated and semi-clandestine (conciliabula) teaching of natural philosophy in thirteenth-century Castile, against which the religious Christian authorities reacted.
The second part of the book (121-227) is occupied by the diplomatic edition of the KM manuscript, a textually difficult work in which the reader easily perceives its linguistic issues. The text presents a continuous code-switching between Arabic and Romance, both in terminology and syntax. It also has peculiarities with respect to what is known of Andalusian Arabic and also has somewhat confusing features that could be attributed to the copying process of the manuscript after its creation. The text is occasionally convoluted, and its meaning is not easy to determine with certainty. Although an attempt has been made to limit the footnotes as much as possible, those that appear are essential to establishing the nature of the text.
The Book of Disputation is a crucial book for our understanding not only of the Mudejar religious world, but also for delving into other, much lesser-known aspects, such as their cultivation of philosophy and non-religious sciences, their self-perception as a noble and intellectually self-sufficient religious group, the transmission of Andalusian wisdom in later times, and education of Mudejar scholars in their particular context. KM’s text will undoubtedly generate new studies at various levels that will shed light on still poorly understood aspects of Mudejar intellectual life.
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Note:
1. The Religious Polemics of the Muslims in Late Medieval Christian Iberia (Leiden: Brill, 2018); see my review in BSOAS, 82, 1 (2019): 181-183.