Beyond Religious Borders: Interaction and Intellectual Exchange in the Medieval Islamic World (review)

In 1969 Fredrik Barth published a collection of articles entitled Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, which initiated nothing less than a new scholarly discussion about ethnicity. The debate had, in the estimation of Barth and his fellow contributors, focused too heavily on particular attributes defining ethnic groups and had not sufficiently explored the various boundaries separating one of these groups from another. They argue that in studying the purpose and nature of these boundaries, we can learn how ethnic groups interact with each other and also how they view themselves. Since the publication of Barth’s seminal work, scholars from academic disciplines as diverse as history, gender studies, and biblical exegesis have applied the concept of “boundary crossing” to their work with fruitful results. To this group of studies must be added the excellent essays in Beyond Religious Borders, which are the result of research conducted by the participants of the 2006–2007 research group “Jews, Christians, and Muslims Under the Caliphs and Sultans” held at the University of Pennsylvania’s Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. This book is one of the most recent additions to University of Pennsylvania Press’s Jewish Culture and Contexts series and is both an outstanding contribution to the field of Judeo-Arabic studies and also an excellent addition to the book series.

The ten essays contained in this collection cover many important aspects of interconfessional relationships in the Mediterranean world during Islam’s first six centuries. The Islamic Middle East is the geographic focus of the volume, but the fact that several of its essays touch upon Christian Europe and pre-Islamic late antiquity increases the book’s appeal to an audience beyond just those interested in Judeo-Islamic relations. The diversity of chronological and geographical topics found in these essays might have proven difficult for lesser editors to group successfully, but David M. Freidenreich and Miriam Goldstein have done a masterful job. The three essays in part I, “Contexts of Interreligious Interaction,” examine the cultural contexts within which several instances of interaction and exchange in various locations under Islamic rule occurred. Haggai Ben-Shammai examines early linguistic interaction between Muslim and Jewish communities, arguing that the beginning of Judeo-Arabic literature and culture must be placed much earlier than previously envisioned because the evidence shows Jews were employing Arabic in the contexts of education, learning, and everyday life before the advent of Islam. Milka Levy-Rubin then turns her attention to the laws governing protected non-Muslim communities, ahl al-dhimma, under Islamic rule. The widely-accepted view that early Islamic rulers only sporadically produced and rarely enforced laws concerning non-Muslim communities is, in the author’s opinion, not tenable considering the evidence. A reevaluation of the usual Islamic sources, as well as the inclusion of an understudied Samaritan chronicle, instead leads her to conclude that “starting in the second century and especially from the third century of Islam onward … Muslim authorities promulgated a crystallized set of rules that, in contrast to the above opinions, was uniformly enforced by various caliphs and rulers” (31). The first part of this volume ends with Sarah Stroumsa’s study on philosophy in al-Andalus. This chapter challenges previously-held scholarly assumptions just as the first two in this section do; the difference with Stroumsa’s contribution is that her challenge is more aimed at the accepted methodological approach to than historical interpretation of her subject. The author’s contention is that scholars of philosophy in al-Andalus have traditionally focused their studies too much on the output of only one religious community on the peninsula, which is “similar to examining an object with a single eye and is likely to produce a flat, two-dimensional picture” (53). She instead proposes a comprehensive and concurrent analysis of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish philosophical traditions, which...