The Trouble with Origins: Christians, Jews, and Converts in the Hagiography of a Sixteenth-Century Moroccan Saint

This paper will examine the depiction of Christians, Jews, and converts to Islam in the Tuḥfat al-ikhwān wa mawāhib al-imtinān fī manāqib Sīdī Riḍwān ibn Abdallāh al-Januwī, the biography of the Moroccan Sufi Sīdī Riḍwān al- Januwī (d.1583), who had an unusual background for a sixteenth-century Muslim saint. Sīdī Riḍwān encountered resistance from the religious establishment in Fes because he was the son of converts, and thus was not fit to transmit the Prophet Muhammad’s teachings. His father, described in the biography as a pious but troubled man, was a Genovese convert to Islam. His mother, heralded by the sheikh as a model of virtue, was a Jewish refugee from Iberia. This paper will focus especially on the portrayal Sīdī Riḍwān’s father, ʿAbdallāh, whose story of conversion and disappearance spans three continents, and reveals the ways in which converts’ testimonies about the traditions they left behind were used to legitimize their adopted religion. Furthermore, it explores the ways in which rumor and hearsay, central to Abdallah’s story, were used as cross-regional tools of social and political control, and how gossip also served as a literary trope to depict the unstable and destabilizing position of converts and refugees in the Early Modern Mediterranean.