This book includes the whole transcription of the trial of a converted Muslim (Morisco) from Toledo, condemned to die at the stake at the beginning of the 17th century. In their study of the trial, the authors address the question of how and to what extent Inquisition documents can be used as an historical source by contextualizing and analysing its multifaceted aspects as well as its protagonists and participants, victim, witnesses, and inquisitors. The authors elucidate the beliefs and practices of the culprit, situating his ordeal in the framework of Morisco life and its connections with North African Islam. By so doing they shed light on questions of Inquisitorial procedure, witnessing and testimony, the extent of confession, the effects of life in prison, the relations of trust between inmates and the consequences of isolation.

This book deals with the religious and ideological consequences of mass conversion in Iberia - where Jews and Muslims were forcibly converted or expelled at the end of the XVth century and beginning of the XVIth- and most specially with the relationship between origins and faith. It also deals with the consequences of coercion on intellectual debates and on the production of knowledge and addresses questions such as dissimulation, dissidence, religious doubt and unbelief.

The expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain (1609-1614) represents an important episode of ethnic, political and religious cleansing which affected about 300,000 persons. The controversial measure was legimitized by an ideology of religious and political unity that served to defend the expulsion of them all, crypto-Muslims and sincere converts to Christianity alike. The first part focuses on the decision to expel the Moriscos, its historical context and the role of such institutions as the Vatican and the religious orders, and nations such as France, Italy, the Dutch Republic, Morocco and the Ottoman Empire. The second part studies the aftermath of the expulsion, the forced migrations, settlement and Diaspora of the Moriscos, comparing their vicissitudes with that of the Jewish conversos. Contributors are Youssef El Alaoui, Rafael Benitez Sanchez Blanco, Luis Fernando Bernabe Pons, Paulo Broggio, Miguel Angel de Bunes Ibarra, Antonio Feros, Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, Jorge Gil Herrera,Tijana Krstic, Sakina Missoum, Natalia Muchnik, Stefania Pastore, Juan Ignacio Pulido Serrano, James B. Tueller, Olatz Villanueva Zubizarreta, Bernard Vincent, and Gerard Wiegers.

Due to the long presence of Muslims in Islamic territories (Al-Andalus and Granada) and of Muslims minorities in the Christians parts, the Iberian Peninsula provides a fertile soil for the study of the Qur'an and Qur'an translations made by both Muslims and Christians. From the mid-twelfth century to at least the end of the seventeenth, the efforts undertaken by Christian scholars and churchmen, by converts, by Muslims (both Mudejars and Moriscos) to transmit, interpret and translate the Holy Book are of the utmost importance for the understanding of Islam in Europe. This book reflects on a context where Arabic books and Arabic speakers who were familiar with the Qur'an and its exegesis coexisted with Christian scholars. The latter not only intended to convert Muslims, and polemize with them but also to adquire solid knowledge about them and about Islam. Qur'ans were seized during battle, bought, copied, translated, transmitted, recited, and studied. The different features and uses of the Qur'an on Iberian soil, its circulation as well as the lives and works of those who wrote about it and the responses of their audiences, are the object of this book.

In the late fifteenth century, many of the Jews expelled from Spain made their way to Morocco and established a dynamic community in Fez. A number of Jewish families became prominent in commerce and public life there. Among the Jews of Fez of Hispanic origin was Samuel Pallache, who served the Moroccan sultan as a commercial and diplomatic agent in Holland until Pallache's death in 1616. Before that, he had tried to return with his family to Spain, and to this end he tried to convert to Catholicism and worked as an informer, intermediary, and spy in Moroccan affairs for the Spanish court. Later he became a privateer against Spanish ships and was tried in London for that reason. His religious identity proved to be as mutable as his political allegiances: when in Amsterdam, he was devoutly Jewish; when in Spain, a loyal converso (a baptized Jew).

In A Man of Three Worlds, Mercedes GarcA-a-Arenal and Gerard Wiegers view Samuel Pallache's world as a microcosm of early modern society, one far more interconnected, cosmopolitan, and fluid than is often portrayed. Pallache's missions and misadventures took him from Islamic Fez and Catholic Spain to Protestant England and Holland. Through these travels, the authors explore the workings of the Moroccan sultanate and the Spanish court, the Jewish communities of Fez and Amsterdam, and details of the Atlantic-Mediterranean trade. At once a sweeping view of two continents, three faiths, and five nation-states and an intimate story of one man's remarkable life, A Man of Three Worlds is history at its most compelling.

This book discusses the "long fifteenth century" in Iberian history, between the 1391 pogroms and the forced conversions of Aragonese Muslims in 1526, a period characterized by persecutions, conversions and social violence, on the one hand, and cultural exchange, on the other. It was a historical moment of unstable religious ideas and identities, before the rigid turn taken by Spanish Catholicism by the middle of the sixteenth century; a period in which the physical and symbolic borders separating the three religions were transformed and redefined but still remained extraordinarily porous. The collection argues that the aggressive tone of many polemical texts has until now blinded historiography to the interconnected nature of social and cultural intimacy, above all in dialogue and cultural transfer in later medieval Iberia. Contributors are Ana Echevarria, Gad Freudenthal, Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, Maria Laura Giordano, Yonatan Glazer-Eytan, Eleazar Gutwirth, Felipe Pereda, Rosa M. Rodriguez Porto, Katarzyna K. Starczewska, John Tolan, Gerard Wiegers, and Yosi Yisraeli.

This is a book about revolutionary movements of a messianic and millenarian character, led by a "mahdi," in Islamic terms, a charismatic messianic leader. It also addresses the question of mediation between God and men and the political repercussions of this question in the history of the pre-Modern Muslim West. Mahdism is considered in relation to sufi ideas, terminology and symbols which shape notions of authority and of legitimate power when claiming direct, intimate contact between the holy and the divine. The relationship between mahdism and the legitimacy of power, the process by which the messianic paradigm becomes inseparable from the claim to the caliphate are amply discussed. The contents of the book range from the times of the Muslim conquest of North Africa and Iberia, to the first part of the XVIIth century with the end of Muslim Iberia and the beginnings of European intervention in Morocco.

This interdisciplinary collection explores how the early modern pursuit of knowledge in very different spheres - from Inquisitional investigations to biblical polemics to popular healing - was conditioned by a shared desire for certainty, and how epistemological crises produced by the religious upheavals of early modern Europe were also linked to the development of new scientific methods. Questions of representation became newly fraught as the production of knowledge increasingly challenged established orthodoxies. The volume focuses on the social and institutional dimensions of inquiry in light of political and cultural challenges, while also foregrounding the Hispanic world, which has often been left out of histories of scepticism and modernity. Featuring essays by historians and literary scholars from Europe and the United States, The Quest for Certainty in Early Modern Europe reconstructs the complexity of early modern epistemological debates across the disciplines, in a variety of cultural, social, and intellectual locales.

Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur (1578-1603) was one of the most important rulers in the history of Morocco, which to this day bears the mark of his twenty-five year rule in the sixteenth century. Though famed for his cunning diplomacy in the power struggle over the Mediterranean, and his allegiance with Britain against Spain in the conquest for the newly discovered Americas, he was more than a political and military tactician. A descendent of the Prophet Muhammad himself, al-Mansur was a charismatic religious authority with ambitions to become Caliph and ruler of all Muslims. Spanning four continents, Dr. Garcia-Arenal places this fascinating figure in a context of political intrigue, discovery and military conquest. With insightful analysis, a glossary and a guide to further reading, this book is the ideal introduction to a multifaceted figure who fully deserves the epithet "Maker of the Muslim World".

This collection takes a new approach to understanding religious plurality in the Iberian Peninsula and its Mediterranean and northern European contexts. Focusing on polemics-works that attack or refute the beliefs of religious Others-this volume aims to challenge the problematic characterization of Iberian Jews, Muslims, and Christians as homogeneous groups. From the high Middle Ages to the end of the seventeenth century, Christian efforts to convert groups of Jews and Muslims, Muslim efforts to convert Christians and Jews, and the defensive efforts of these communities to keep their members within the faiths led to the production of numerous polemics. This volume brings together a wide variety of case studies that expose how the current historiographical focus on the three religious communities as allegedly homogeneous groups obscures the diversity within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities as well as the growing ranks of skeptics and outright unbelievers. Featuring contributions from a range of academic disciplines, this paradigm-shifting book sheds new light on the cultural and intellectual dynamics of the conflicts that marked relations among these religious communities in the Iberian Peninsula and beyond. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Antoni Biosca i Bas, Thomas E. Burman, Monica Colominas Aparicio, John Dagenais, Oscar de la Cruz, Borja Franco Llopis, Linda G. Jones, Daniel J. Lasker, Davide Scotto, Teresa Soto, Ryan Szpiech, Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld, and Carsten Wilke.