A Christian Shīʿī, and Other Curious Confreres: Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr of Córdoba on Getting Along with Unbelievers

Abstract

ABSTRACTHow did medieval Muslims think that they, as Muslims, ought to conduct their social interactions with non-Muslims? Modern scholars have usually sought answers to this normative question in Islamic legal sources. Yet premodern Muslim authorities also treated it in genres other than those that are usually considered part of “Islamic law”. This essay considers a passage in which the renowned Córdoban scholar Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr (d. 463/1071) addressed the issue: the chapter in his literary anthology entitled “Fraternizing with Someone Not of Your Religion”. That chapter, like much premodern Arabic literature, displays considerable moral complexity. It advances a distinctly Islamic, morally ambiguous normative vision of social relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, one that contrasts with the relatively dour and formulaic treatment of the same subject in Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr’s juristic writings. This ambivalent treatment reflects the breadth of Islamic thought concerning how Muslims should interact with unbelievers. It also tracks with historical social realities at least as well as do treatments of the topic in the Islamic juristic discourses on which modern historians have focused. In its use of Eastern Mediterranean proof texts to intimate that Muslims have moral licence to maintain amicable relations with non-Muslims, it reflects the thoroughly trans-regional quality of premodern Muslim normative thought.