The female body in the practice of minority Muslim communities in medieval Iberia

Abstract

Scholarship on purity in Islam has tended to focus on texts from the Middle East or, within modern contexts, on anthropological data. Little attention has been paid to Western Islam and al-Andalus, and even less to purity concerns of Muslims living under medieval Christian rule in Europe. Focusing on issues of women’s purity, this article sketches the development of purity laws relating to women within early Islam generally, and then turns to the Iberian case, first in al-Andalus, and then to Mudejars in Christian Iberia. While both men and women incurred pollution, which affected their ability to pray, they were not blamed for it, although menstruation constituted the basis for some thinkers arguing that women were deficient in religion because they could not pray as often as men. The intersection of medical theories, and influence of Jewish and Christian medical and religious views as well as practices, affected Iberian Muslim philosophical and religious discussions of women’s purity and their concomitant access to religious spaces and education. Thus, while women had access to both, they were often separated from those of men. Fifteenth-century Muslims under Christian rule drew from earlier Maliki thinkers, and from the Sunni Brevary, by ‘Īsā ibn Jābir, also known as Yça Gidelli of Segovia, designed to summarize Muslim law in Spanish vernacular. This text shows considerable influence from medical texts, and seems to privilege motherhood, possibly because of the potential freedom to pray in the absence of menstrual impurity, and as a way of demarcating Muslim mores, which accepted sexuality and considered procreation meritorious, from those of Christians, where the ideal of abstinence was abundantly evidenced by female monastic houses in the region.