Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia by William D. Phillips Jr, and: The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of New Granada by Joanne Rappaport, and: Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Islamic Iberia by Janina M. Safran (review)

These three books share a core question about social differences and how people in different times and places established boundaries of behavior and relationship. William D. Philips Jr.’s book on Iberian slavery and Janina M. Safran’s on legal boundaries in Islamic Iberia examine subjects that overlap. The book by Joanne Rappaport fascinated me with its Spanish-language documents, some preserved in the peninsula, but mostly from archives in Bogotá, Colombia. However, their topics all study how and why boundaries and differences continue, but also change. That evolution of boundaries links these books despite the significant differences among slaves, religious communities, and mestizos.

Chronologically, Safran’s book, Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus; Muslims, Christians and Jews in Islamic Iberia, comes earliest. In 711 c.e., Muslims landed on Gibraltar, crossing over the straits from Morocco. For more than eight centuries, Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in a mix of rules and shifting intercommunal relations. Safran explores Umayyad rule over Christians and Jews, mostly in the tenth century c.e. Islamic rulers and legal scholars used the widely known Pact of ‘Umar as a model for dhimmīs (protected people; Jews and Christians under Islamic rule). Yet Safran emphasizes that their legal status “must be investigated locally and historically from a variety of types of evidence and vantage points” (p. 16).

Safran notes that “the political vicissitudes of the long history of al-Andalus that followed the collapse of the Umayyad rule, and the warfare that punctuated that history, posed different and varied challenges for rulers, judges and jurists and for Muslims, Christians and Jews” (p. 219). The challenges enrich the four chapters. Because of the three religions practiced in the peninsula, ample opportunities existed for boundary crossing, especially in close relationships. The Qur’an allows Muslim men to marry Christian and Jewish women, but consequences arose from such marriages. Should a Christian mother be allowed to bury her dead child in a Christian cemetery if the Muslim father is traveling? If the body had decayed, then Ibn al-Qasim recommended leaving the body in the Christian cemetery, but Ibn Rushd remarked that it is objectionable to leave the body in place if it has not decayed. The legal questions came from the lives of men and women faced with such specific situations, even as graphic as a decomposing corpse. In another example, Ibn Habib forbade ablutions for Muslim prayers with water from a Christian’s house or vessels. Or could a Muslim convert arrange the marriage of his Christian sister? Ibn al-Qasim replied categorically that a Muslim cannot arrange the marriage of a Christian woman. In another source, Ibn al-Qasim relented and allowed a Muslim father to arrange the marriage of a Christian daughter to a Muslim man, but not to a Christian man. Legal cases, like these, informed the specifics of social behavior in tenth-century al-Andalus but they also illustrate for us today a world history where Islam expanded to become a world religion. Judges ruled on real cases, not mere hypotheticals.

Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus won the 2014 Premio del Rey awarded by the American Historical Association. The citation from the AHA declared, “Safran traces how conversion, intermarriage, and acculturation complicated rigid notions of Islamic and non-Islamic identity and reveals the contingent and shifting nature of ethno-religious identity. It is a compelling and sophisticated...