Abstract
Discussion of a proposal for identifying converts to Islam in al-Andalus through their onomastics using the huge databases constituted by the medieval Arabic biographical dictionaries. The proposal is shown to be unworkable in practice. It is suggested in consequence that it may not be possible to identify converts in ways that are susceptible of statistical analysis.
Highlights
Este trabajo discute una reciente propuesta para identificar a conversos al Islam en alAndalus basada en su onomástica tal y como ésta se conserva en los diccionarios biográficos árabes del medievo
Wasserstein a man’s heart, and cannot know why people in the middle ages changed their religious affiliations. He thought that it might be possible to answer other questions, which concern not the individual but the mass in society: how fast did those populations, or those groups within populations, who converted to Islam do so? Was the speed standard throughout, or did it change? Did it vary from place to place, or among different groups within overall populations? And he sought to do so by quantitative means. He married old-fashioned sources ‒biographical dictionaries‒ with modern, social scientific techniques ‒essentially those of elementary statistics‒ in order to produce a theory of conversion to Islam in the medieval period that went far beyond the mere construction of rates of progress to explain much else in the field of Islamic history
If its findings were not always accepted, and if certain elements, carefully explained, failed, and still fail, to be understood by many readers, much in its basic thesis remains central to our understanding of how the conversion of the peoples from Spain to the borders of India progressed between the conquest and the end of the middle ages
Summary
Este trabajo discute una reciente propuesta para identificar a conversos al Islam en alAndalus basada en su onomástica tal y como ésta se conserva en los diccionarios biográficos árabes del medievo. 9 ‘Abd Allāh, in this case, if it is an authentic record of a genuine ancestry, even if he was a convert to Islam, is not relevant for us, as he was almost certainly an Arab in the Arabian peninsula.
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