The Most Noble of People: Religious, Ethnic, and Gender Identity in Muslim Spain, by Jessica A. Coope

Abstract

As Jessica A. Coope highlights in the introduction to this, her second book, it is only relatively recently that scholarship on Umayyad al-Andalus (711–1031)—long centred on institutional and political history—has begun to explore social and cultural history. In part, this is a function of our evidence, which (at least for those of us who work with textual sources) is not especially helpful for getting at life as it was lived, rather than life as it was envisaged by elite writers and users of normative legal manuals. Valuable work has certainly been done: that of Manuela Marín on women, for example, or that of numerous archaeologists on domestic spaces and practices. But much more remains to be explored. Coope’s contribution to the field is an exploration of Andalusī identity in the ninth and tenth centuries, and in particular of how group identities shaped the lives of individuals. Following in the footsteps of the usual cultural history touchstones, such as Clifford Geertz, she examines the value systems of the textual sources to reconstruct how people in this time and place understood themselves, their society and their world. Identity in al-Andalus, she argues—whether religious, ethnic or gendered—was ‘varied, fluid and contentious’ (p. 2), for all that the texts often imagine it as fixed and distinct. The religious group to which someone belonged, for example, determined much about that individual’s legal status and life prospects. Within the still-developing body of Islamic law, Jews and Christians (the ‘Peoples of the Book’, those who shared a core scriptural tradition, albeit in an earlier and less perfect form) were classed as dhimmīs, people subject to some legal restrictions (dhimmī men could not, at least in theory, marry Muslim women) in return for religious autonomy. Nevertheless, identity could change; it was possible to move between religious groups through conversion, or to offset some of the disadvantages of difference by shifting cultural identity while remaining within one’s religious tradition. Both Andalusī Jews and Arabicised Christians (often termed ‘Mozarabs’) have been quite extensively studied in the past, but, as Coope explains in Chapter Three, we still know a great deal more about the theory of their lives than the practice. Law regarding dhimmīs, while enticingly extensive, was ‘a statement of Muslim society’s ideals rather than a reflection of its realities’ (p. 74), and for this early period other types of sources are frustratingly limited; in comparison with later medieval centuries, for example, we have very few surviving fatāwa (expert commentaries deriving from actual legal cases). We can learn a certain amount about Christians collectively in the ninth century, in the context of the martyrs of Cordoba crisis, and about (prominent) Jews individually in the tenth and eleventh, because of the role of Jewish scholars and viziers in the later caliphate and in certain taifa states; but glimpses beyond these are few and far between. Coope distinguishes very usefully between the different types of evidence, and what we can actually learn.