Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia by Janina M. Safran (review)

Janina Safran’s Defining Boundaries is the most broad and ambitious of a small spate of recent works that explore issues of ethno-religious identity and communal relations in al-Andalus, including Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati’s Pluralism in the Middle Ages: Hybrid Identities, Conversion, and Mixed Marriages in Medieval Iberia (New York: Routledge 2012) and Charles Lowell Tieszen’s Christian Identity Amid Islam in Medieval Spain (Leiden: Brill 2013). In it she sets out to plumb the workings of cultural change in medieval Spain that came in the wake of the Muslim conquest in the eighth century and its implications regarding religious and social relations, notably—as per the title—the elaboration and maintenance of boundaries between ethno-religious communities. As such, the author notes, “at the heart of this book … is an experiment in interpretation of Islamic legal texts as sources for understanding communal relations in [this] specific legal and historical context” (5). As she admits, this demands the scholar face the challenges of interpreting lived experience on the basis of juridical texts—texts that must be used cautiously as evidence for interaction as it took place “on the ground.” As she notes, Islamic theoretical frames, such as the binaries of dar al-Islam versus dar al-Harb, and ‘umma versus dhimma, must be used with great caution, and she seeks at bottom to complicate rigid notions of Islamic identity (and the identity ascribed to non-Muslims) by emphasizing the importance of acculturation, integration, and the contingent and shifting nature of identity and the categories used to articulate it.

Her arguments are laid out over the course of four chapters. The first, “The Structuring of Umayyad Rule,” opens with a discussion of how the legitimacy of the Umayyad regime in al-Andalus was seen to hinge on the maintenance of proper religious practice, and how the dynasty’s biggest challenge was not dealing with the minority populations or its Christian neighbors, but rather with Muslim dissenters and the members and clients of the ruling clan itself. This put the ulama in a position of particular influence and contributed to the emergence of a strongly cohesive Maliki school here—one that rigorously pursued those Muslims who undermined Islamic principles of community, whether by blaspheming, or, in the case, of the muwalladun, engaging in political rebellion, with or without the complicity of outside Christian powers. Chapter 2, “Society in Transition,” examines how Islamic identity coalesced in al-Andalus—a society that not only had a significant Christian and Jewish population, who needed to be differentiated—but was being transformed through the massive conversion of non-Muslims at the very time this process was taking place. The communities of non-Muslims, converts, and “old Muslims” could not be clearly separated, both as a consequence of their social, political, and economic integration, and because the conversion process itself meant that—at least in a transitional phase—many families were bi-religious. Among the many interesting and astute observations she makes in this chapter is a push back against Guichard’s over-emphasis on the supposedly distinctive role of the “Oriental family” structure in al-Andalus.

The third chapter, “Between Enemies and Friends,” continues with the ambiguities and conflicts that were generated by conversion, intermarriage and acculturation—ambiguities that provoked anxieties both among Christians (vid. the episode of the “Voluntary Martyrs” of Cordoba), but especially among Muslim jurists. She reviews a series of scenarios sketch out by muftis regarding mixed families, renegades, converts and dhimmis, which, while they may not relate directly to actual particular events, certainly reflect the types of conflicts and conundrums that must have been generated on a regular basis. Foremost among these are matters relating to the “pollution” of Muslims through intimate interaction with dhimmis, apostasy and blasphemy, and inheritance in mixed families. Finally, a fourth chapter, “Borders and Boundaries,” returns to the binary of dar al-Islam and dar al-Harb, in...