Mudejar Religious Polemics in Late Medieval Iberia: Kitāb al-Muǧādala maʿa -l-Yahūd wa’l-Naṣārā, or The Book of the Disputation with the Jews and the Christians

This presentation focuses on a polemical text copied by a Mudejar, or, a member of the Muslim minority communities subjected to Christian rule in the medieval Iberian Peninsula. The manuscript is entitled Kitāb al-muǧādala maʿa -l-Yahūd wa’l-Naṣārā (‘The Book Called Disputation with the Jews and the Christians’) and is dated to 1405 in Pétrola (Albacete), but it is likely that the work was already in circulation among the Mudejars in the first half of the fourteenth century. To summarize the analysis of the text briefly, its contents show that the anonymous author was well acquainted with the most relevant theological and doctrinal issues in the tradition of controversies between Muslims, Christians and Jews. Moreover, he was familiar with the leading thinkers in Latin Christianity and he had a considerable and more than superficial knowledge about Arabic and Aristotelian philosophy, logic and natural sciences. Such intellectual baggage and use of sources are quite exceptional within the genre of the Mudejar religious culture. The analysis of the subjects and the rhetorical techniques used by the author brings me to the hypothesis that we might be dealing with a dispute primarily directed against the Christians (and not against Jews, as its title announces). The work could have been a refutation to an extant Christian anti-Muslim and/or anti-Jewish treatise structured according the polemical and scholastic canons of its time.