Guardians of Islam: Religious Authority and Muslim Communities of Late Medieval Spain.

• Author: Stewart, Devin J.
• Position: Book review

Guardians of Islam: Religious Authority and Muslim Communities of Late Medieval Spain. By KATHRYN A. MILLER. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008. Pp. xv + 276. :05, [pounds sterling]38.

Guardians of Islam examines the activities of Muslim faqihs--local religious officials who served as judges, prayer-leaders, preachers, notaries, and legal advisors--in the Mudejar communities along the Ebro river valley in fifteenth-century Aragon. The work succeeds admirably in bringing to life the history of Mudejar communities, that is, communities of Muslims living in Iberia as subject peoples after the reconquest by Christian powers. The result is a carefully constructed understanding of the backgrounds, ideas, concerns, and operations of Muslim notaries, prayer-leaders, and related officials in the Mudejar communities of Aragon. Miller has made an effort to do this using sources that allow a glimpse at the Mudejars' own views and aspirations, and she succeeds in providing a picture of the relationships, strictures, and aspirations that defined their world. The work brings to bear evidence from a variety of sources, usually treated either in isolation or in a discussion that glosses over wide temporal and geographical gaps, in order to portray a particular social group in a particular region during a particular period. Its main merit from the perspective of the historiography of late medieval Iberia is that it draws primarily on documents in Arabic and Aljamiado (Spanish dialect written in Arabic script), including letters, sermons, contracts, legal responsa, and manuscript colopha, a daunting task not only because of the technical knowledge reading such documents demands but also because of their scattered nature and the challenges of figuring out their context.

The work is divided into an introduction, seven chapters, and an epilogue. The introduction (pp. 1-19) presents the communities that are the focus of the work, aptly describing them as Muslim exclaves. Chapter one (pp. 20-43) describes the problematic nature of these Muslim exclaves from the Islamic legal point of view: it was believed that one could not live as a dutiful Muslim while under the direct political domination of Christian powers. Chapter two (pp. 44-58) describes the various types of Muslim communities that existed in Mudejar Spain, roughly between the reconquest of Toledo in 1085 and the forced conversion of Valencian Muslims in 1525-6. Chapter three (pp. 59-80) describes the transmission of Islamic religious knowledge and the networks through which it traveled, both within Mudejar territory and between that territory and outside centers of learning. Chapter four (pp. 81-106) discusses the commitment of local Muslim jurists to record transactions and documents of all kinds, suggesting that this was due, in part at least, to the obsession of the Christian government with documentation. Chapter five (pp. 106-27) discusses their...