Book Review: Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference edited by Ryan Szpiech

Abstract

Ryan Szpiech, ed. Medieval Exegesis and Religious Difference: Commentary, Conflict, and Community in the Premodern Mediterranean , New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pp. 329. $55; ISBN 978-0-8232-6462-9. Ryan Szpiech’s volume contains thirteen essays on different aspects of medieval exegesis in the context of religious disputation, polemic, and co-existence. Some essays focus on the points of intersection between exegetical traditions, others on specific polemics, and still others on individual authors’ strategies in negotiating conversion, disputation, or coexistence. The essays are grouped into four thematic sections. The first section, “Strategies of Reading on the Borders of Islam,” contains essays on individual Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors writing in the Islamicate world and how they negotiate the relationship between the three exegetical traditions. Sarah Stroumsa, in “The Father of Many Nations: Abraham in al-Andalus” (29-39), presents two Andalusi views of Abraham as a paragon of the scientist. Both draw on material from outside the religious tradition of the author; the Muslim Ibn Masarra uses ideas from Jewish mysticism of Abraham as a bearer of special knowledge, while the Jew Maimonides borrows Islamic historiographical traditions of Abraham as a man of science. Sidney Griffith’s “Ibn al-Mahrumah’s Notes in Ibn Kammunah’s Examination of the Three Religions : The Issue of the Abrogation of Mosaic Law” (40-57) is a fascinating study of a polemic study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam authored by a Christian exegete and glossed by a Jewish scholar. They provide two different views (Jewish and Christian) on the question of the abrogation of Mosaic law as a basis for Christian theology. In “Al-Biqa’i seen through Reuchlin: Reflections on the Islamic relationship with the Bible” (58-70), Walid …