Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c. 1050-1200 by Thomas E. Burman (review)

648book reviews Religious Polemic and the Intellectual History of the Mozarabs, c 1050— 1200. By Thomas E. Burman. [Brill's Studies in Intellectual History, Volume 52.] (Leiden: E. J. Brill. 1994. Pp. xv, 407. »94.50.) This book consists of two distinct but related parts. The second of these is a 173-page edition and translation into English, on facing pages, of the Latin manuscript entitledLiberdenudationis sive ostensionis autpatefaciens along with the editor's introduction to it. The manuscript exists but in a single copy in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It is a late medieval translation from the original Arabic, partially abbreviated, of a Christian polemic against Islam composed sometime between 1085 and 1132. The original was the product of a Mozarab author, possibly a resident in Toledo. The work was divided into twelve chapters that denounced severally Islam, Muslims, Muhammad, and the Qur"an. Known to both Ramon Lull and Ramon Marti, it figured as well in the later medieval Christian religious polemic against Islam in the Iberian peninsula. The first half of the book is comprised ofa 21 1-page study of the intellectual vitality of the Mozarab community in Iberia in the period 1050 to 1200. That study is based, as the author cautions us, upon the Liber itself and four other much shorter works that total only eighty-five pages of Arabic and Latin text. Nevertheless, the author's reading is close and sophisticated and yields results out of proportion to the scant, available material. Burham is able to demonstrate, to his satisfaction and to that ofthis reviewer, that his Mozarab polemicists were conversant with not simply the QurOn itself but a variety of the collections of Hadith literature and Muslim commentaries . They knew and utilized as well the Christian polemical literature that had already developed in the -world of the Muslim Near East. Finally, though here the argument is more labored, that they also drew on the nearcontemporary Christian theology of the medieval West. Clearly this is a valuable albeit highly specialized study but its conclusions have implications for medieval Iberian studies generally. This reviewer is more convinced every day that the vitality of the Mozarab community in Iberia before a.d. 1 200 has been underestimated where it has even been noticed. We are unlikely to get very much further with our deductions as to its quantitative importance, but studies such as this should lead us to revise sharply upward our notions of the complexity and the quality of its life. Bernard F. Reilly Villanova University ...