Historians of Europe often declare that Spain is “different.” This distinctiveness of the Iberian peninsula has many faces and is frequently seen as rooted in its Islamic past. In the field of Islamic history, too, al-Andalus is somewhat different. It has its own specialists, research traditions, controversies, and trends. One of the salient features of historical studies of al-Andalus as well as of its popular image is the great interest in its interreligious dimension. In 2002, María Rosa Menocal published The Ornament of the World, one of the rare books on Islamic history written by an academic that enjoyed and still enjoys a tremendous popularity among nonspecialist readers.Footnote ¹ The book surveys intersections of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian elite culture, mostly in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin literature and in architecture, from the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492. Menocal presents the religious diversity commonly referred to as convivencia as one of the defining features of Andalusi intellectual and artistic productivity. She also argues that the narrow-minded forces that brought about its end were external, pointing to the Almoravids and Almohads from North Africa and Christians from north of the peninsula as responsible. The book's subtitle, How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, conjures the community of Abrahamic faiths. It reflects the optimism of those who identify in Andalusi history a model for a constructive relationship between “Islam” and “the West” that in the age of the “war on terror” many are desperate to find.

The reactions of specialists, however, not only revealed the familiar discrepancy between public appeal and critical academic reception but also were sometimes unusually harsh. Although the hyperbolic style of the book may not cater to the taste of those who look for more sober writing, scholars of the medieval Iberian peninsula dismissed The Ornament of the World mainly because it perpetuates the historical utopia that Giles Tremlett has called “Moorishland” (see below). In addition to being an ideal model of interfaith harmony, this medieval society is envisioned by Western liberals to have distinguished itself through its intellectual progressiveness, artistic splendor, refined material culture, and greater freedom for women compared to other regions of the medieval world, both Islamic and Western. All these claims are deeply controversial.Footnote ² Likewise, one could challenge Menocal's dichotomy between Andalusis as embodiments of tolerant religious culture and North African Berbers as fanatic fundamentalists who, because of their “obtuseness,” “never quite understood the Andalusian application of the dhimma” (p. 267).

In The Ornament of the World, as well as in the responses to it, matters of interreligious interactions in the Middle Ages are often inextricably mixed with modern views regarding the position of Islam and Muslims in Western societies. It is as if, without a historical antecedent, peaceful interactions could have neither present nor future. Menocal should probably not be read as advocating any reenactment of medieval al-Andalus with its hierarchical society or as abandoning the notion of the free and rational human being associated with the Enlightenment and secular modernism. The presentation of religiously diverse Andalusi culture as a model for today is rather implicit in her praise of historical figures and a bit more explicit in her references to 20th-century history in the epilogue. Yet, her portrayal of the tolerant society of medieval Muslim Spain may be said to rest upon a tendentious selection of historical material and perspectives. By delving, for example, into the Umayyad ʿAbd al-Rahman's (731–88) homesickness rather than his treatment of enemies, the ruler is described in psychological and emotional categories and presented as a victim. The book also fails to address the methodological difficulties involved in “translating” medieval social ethics into modern ones. Indeed, one conclusion often drawn from controversies about the extent and nature of religious “tolerance” on the Iberian peninsula is that the term itself can be misleading.Footnote ³ Although in practice religious policies on the Iberian peninsula may resemble what we associate with “tolerance,” the term remains conceptually and historically undefined in Menocal's book, and there is virtually no evidence to support her description of tolerance as a value in Muslim Spain. Equally undertheorized are the underlying assumptions regarding the category of “religion,” in particular its role for collective and individual identities in the public sphere.

There are numerous problems with using history in political debates. One of them is that history is open to interpretation and the object of ongoing research. Although there has been a long-standing interest in interreligious life in the medieval Iberian peninsula, historians who present themselves as concerned with the past for its own sake have shed new light on convivencia in recent research. A study that deserves mention in this context is David Nirenberg's groundbreaking monograph, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁴ The author sets out to analyze the social and cultural implications of the violence to which religious minorities in 14th-century Aragon were exposed. One reason this study became so influential is that Nirenberg redresses the balance between what had been frequently regarded as two mutually exclusive and opposed forms of interreligious interaction—collaboration and confrontation—by identifying precisely those social spheres in which religious identity mattered more and those in which it mattered less. He examines, for instance, cases of communal eating, dress, and interfaith sex as well as the role of nonreligious marginal groups such as lepers in these situations.

Although a study such as Nirenberg's has yet to be conducted for the part of the peninsula under Muslim rule, recent publications in this area too allow us to reassess the nature of interreligious interactions. In what follows, I highlight some of the salient features of this scholarship, particularly insofar as they relate to references to the past in contemporary public controversies.Footnote ⁵ All of the publications under study emphasize that the history of interreligious Iberia is often told in too simplistic and one dimensional a manner. This criticism, which is related to the politicized alternatives of violent or peaceful religious diversity, seems to be a trope of historical scholarship. Because nobody in academia today appears to maintain what is now considered simplistic claims regarding historical causality and cultural identity, the 1950s debate between Américo Castro and Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz is invoked again and again as paradigmatic.Footnote ⁶ Popular attitudes still reveal a simplistic general picture, but debates among historians are now much more nuanced. Yet the need for further differentiation remains.

Ann Rosemary Christys, for example, in her Christians in al-Andalus 711–1000, criticizes simplifications regarding Christian life under Muslim rule in Iberia as the “ruthless application of Occam's razor to disparate pieces of evidence” (p. 108). In an effort to make the “variety and complexity of the Christian experience” (p. vi) visible, Christys “places special emphasis on [Christians'] own words” (p. 7). Sources reflecting Christian life are scarce, especially in the early period, she reminds us, and have too often be taken as representative. A case in point is the monk Eulogius' celebration of the “Cordoba martyrs”—forty-eight Christians, many of them children of one Christian and one Muslim parent, who were executed between 850 and 857 for apostasy and blasphemy. (Eulogius himself died as a martyr in 859.) Modern authors frequently stress that these martyrs deliberately provoked their execution and stood at the margins of the Christian community, which mostly pursued a less confrontational strategy vis-à-vis the Muslims. Christys' doubts regarding the phenomenon are even more substantial. She not only argues that it is not representative of the Christian experience of Muslim rule but also demonstrates the extent to which Eulogius exaggerated the size of the movement in order to defend his promartyrdom position vis-à-vis his coreligionists.

Christys provides other examples in which individuals' or groups' actions have been interpreted in an interreligious context, but where intrafaith rivalry was much more crucial. Such was the case in Toledo under Muslim rule, where Christian clerics were concerned with establishing the city's historical preeminence as an ecclesiastical seat in order to maintain their authority over Christians in other parts of al-Andalus. Claiming historical space was thus sometimes not primarily a matter of defending the historical presence of Christianity against Islam but rather that of one group of Christians against another. Even more significant, however, is Christys' claim, which is in line with what other scholars have argued, that the religious identities of medieval men and women are not always obvious from their names. The example Christys cites for such “onomastic indifference” (p. 91) are men with Arabic names in 10th-century Leonese charters who have been assumed to be Christians fleeing from Islamic persecution. Nothing, however, indicates that they actually were Christians. They may rather have been Jews or even Muslims. It is also puzzling that some individuals with “Christian” names gave “Muslim” names to their children. The widespread impression of deteriorating conditions for Christian life under Muslim rule in older scholarship and more popular statements has to be reexamined insofar as it has been based on onomastic evidence.

Richard Hitchcock, a teacher of Christys, advises caution on similar issues in his Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Identities and Influences, which brings together decades of his scholarship and covers the period up to the 16th century. Hitchcock too is concerned with matters of identity, here as reflected in terminological issues. The term “Mozarab,” which is commonly used to refer to Christians who became Arabized under Muslim rule, first appeared in Latin documents in Leon in the first half of the 11th century. The Arabic mustaʿrib, whence Mozarab, was used only slightly earlier to refer to non-Arabs in the East. The circumstances of Mozarabic life differed greatly over the course of centuries of Andalusi history, as Hitchcock demonstrates. He refers to “Mozarabism” as a “phenomenon” with “chameleon-like properties” (p. xi) in which language, ethnicity, and religion constitute parameters of identity of varying significance. Hitchcock emphasizes how little we know about religious belief and religiosity in Iberia's rural areas. Although the region on the eve of the Muslim conquest is often depicted as overwhelmingly Christian—with the consequence that later events are described as a continuous religious conflict between Islam and Christianity eventually ending in a Christian “reconquest”—Hitchcock argues that the Christian presence was confined to the cities and that religious indifference in rural areas continued well into the 11th century. In these regions, labels suggesting confessional affiliations would be misleading. In the north of the peninsula, it then became increasingly convenient for individuals in search of patrons to present themselves as Christians. Like Christys, Hitchcock points out a lack of interest in Islam on the part of Christians in the aftermath of the Muslim conquest. Similar to their brothers in faith in the East, they remained ignorant for some time of the nature of the Islamic religion, its origins, and its relationship to other religions. In his analysis of the episodes around the previously mentioned Christian martyrs, Hitchcock detects hostility toward Islam early on but sees its expression as limited to writings. Both he and Christys remind us that the documents at our disposal open only a small window on to the vast and changing social realities of medieval Spain. They warn us against imposing coherence on traces of the past that survive merely by chance.

Because of its geographical and historical extension, al-Andalus was the most significant medieval Islamic province in what is now considered Europe. However, a case that invites comparison is that of Sicily and southern Italy. The linguistic shifts in the region—associated with religious, political, and demographic/social change—during the Muslim invasion of 827 (completed only in 965) and the Norman invasion in 1061 are the subject of Alex Metcalfe's Muslims and Christians in Norman Sicily: Arabic Speakers and the End of Islam. Metcalfe mainly examines “chancery registers of villeins [i.e., a certain type of serf] written in Arabic and Greek or Arabic and Latin and the complex questions that arise from these” (p. xvi). The documents provide insights into the spread of feudalism after the Norman invasionFootnote ⁷ and also allow the reevaluation of methods of establishing religious identities and their significance. Metcalfe presents a picture of even greater linguistic and religious ambiguity in Sicily than Christys and Hitchcock do for the Iberian peninsula. The most suggestive cases include “Islamic” names retained within Christian families, including Christians bearing the name Muhammad and Muslims with Greek names in the villein registers (pp. 94–96). Unlike Hitchcock's examples for 11th-century Iberia, religious ambiguity in Norman Sicily seems to have been a good career move. This should not be too surprising, given that Sicily's Christian kings looked for models of kingship in Byzantium, North Africa, and Fatimid Egypt. Having said that, religious identities were politically significant and Metcalfe wonders “[q]uite how a kingship as self-reflexive as Roger II's that appeared to proclaim the ideal of linguistic, artistic and cultural diversity within the setting of a harmonious Christian kingdom could ever have been compatible with a society through which a religious fault line ran, will remain unknown, and even unknowable” (p. 45). Just as in the Iberian peninsula, it is difficult to identify which cultural elements (e.g., language) were associated with religious traditions and what exactly their adoption by members of a community of a different faith implied. Such things changed and depended on broader circumstances. A crucial question that applies to all the studies under consideration here, independent of the determinateness of religious identities, is to what extent, if any, we can assume the existence or shape of cultural consciousness on the basis of onomastic and linguistic evidence. Even though we may be able to tell whether someone was a Christian or Muslim, we may not understand what that meant for him or her.

There are further aspects of Christian–Muslim interactions in Sicily that deserve a more detailed comparison with the Iberian peninsula as well as with more eastern regions. While Hitchcock emphasizes the religious indeterminateness of rural Iberia in 711, Metcalfe suggests both that Christians in rural Sicily from 827 to 965 were not much exposed to Muslim presence and that the arrival of Islam may have actually strengthened Christianity. Religious otherness should thus not be understood exclusively in terms of religious doctrines but also insofar as it fulfilled social and political functions. As in medieval Spain, the evidence for a Christian exodus to the north is problematic because it comes from religious (here hagiographic) sources. Just as Christys and Hitchcock offer evidence for a blossoming of Christian culture in 10th-century Cordoba, Metcalfe shows that Islamic culture flourished under Norman rule. Following the Christian conquests, Muslims in Spain and Sicily were allowed to continue practicing their religion, and in Sicily they were sometimes not even permitted to convert to Christianity. This situation is reminiscent of the Middle East in the Umayyad period and illustrates that in many respects interreligious interactions in al-Andalus were very similar to other regions of the Islamic world.

Encounters between Muslims and Christians in Spain and Sicily took place against the background of a military conflict, though that may not always have affected their relations or at least not always in the same way. The Jews who lived in those places were in a position different from that of the Christians. Here, too, and perhaps even more than in the Christian–Muslim case, it is difficult to determine which interactions between Jews and Muslims should be classified as interreligious encounters. Some historians have approached the history of the Jews in al-Andalus in similar political–social–religious terms as Christys, Hitchcock, and Nirenberg have done for Christians. At the same time, a group of experts in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, and Romance literatures have contributed their own insights into the ambiguities of such “encounters.” In the following examples, the focus on literature is reflected not only in the choices of sources but also in the methods. Selections of texts, set against their respective social and political contexts, are subjects for close readings, in which the authors pay attention to the rhetoric of the genres, or what Esperanza Alfonso calls the “substratum within which identity is constructed” (p. 6).

Ross Brann in his Power in the Portrayal: Representations of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain examines literary “representations of imagined and historical figures as the key to a new understanding of several well-known texts of Andalusi provenance” (p. ix). Considering the attention paid to this subject by modern scholars, it may be surprising to read that Judaism and Jews were never very important for Muslim authors. In specific cases, however, Jews “could be perceived by Muslims as a nuisance, an obstacle, a social, economic, or political threat to the prerogatives of the majority in Muslim society on account of their religious otherness” (pp. 4–5). Matters of political and religious authority within the Islamic community determined the way Jews were depicted, serving as a screen upon which Muslim concerns, in particular the conflict between religious scholars and political rulers, were projected. An example is a verse of a Muslim pietist cited by Ibn Rushd in his Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics, in which Hasdai ibn Shaprut is accused of blasphemy against Muhammad. The criticism extends not only to this 10th-century Jewish physician and courtier but also concerns the “political and religious legitimacy” of the Umayyad caliph at whose court Hasdai was active (p. 35). On the Jewish side, Brann notices “a rare willingness to represent trenchant Muslim foes in a negative light but without reference to their religious identity” (p. 8). Brann's focus on the literary side of Muslim–Jewish relations manifests itself, among other ways, in the attention he pays to the genres of his sources, for example, the religious themes in Abraham ibn Ezra's lament following Almohad persecutions. However, he does not read the texts exclusively on their own terms but takes into consideration the socioeconomic, intellectual, religious, and political background of writers and readers. A case in point is the scholar Ibn Hazm, who in his al-Fisal directed vitriolic attacks against non-Muslims that combine social, religious, and intellectual concerns. These criticisms have to be seen as one of several onslaughts, others being directed against fellow Muslims, and against the backdrop of Ibn Hazm's fate. During the turbulent end of the Umayyad caliphate in the second and third decades of the 11th century, Ibn Hazm's family lost their influence and home, and he spent years as a refugee and prisoner.

The literary approach also bears interesting fruit when Brann reconstructs images of historical Jews in Islamic literature. For example, he contrasts Ibn Hayyan's 11th-century portrayal of Ismaʿil ibn Naghrila (993–1055/56) as “an idealized dhimmī who is a Muslim in all but a name” (p. 39) with Ibn ʿIdhari's more critical 13th-century attitude toward Jews who have political authority. In the 11th century, “where circumstances direct Muslim sensibilities to call for textual ire and outrage directed against Ibn Naghrila, these sentiments are reserved for or displaced entirely onto [his son] Yusuf” (p. 52). In Ibn Bassam's (d. 1147) Dhakhira, which is characterized by an interest in poetic literature rather than historiography, Ismaʿil and Yusuf are conflated (p. 91).

Alfonso adopts a methodology similar to Brann's in her Islamic Culture through Jewish Eyes: Al-Andalus from the Tenth to Twelfth Century but focuses on how constructions of identity by Andalusi Jews manifested themselves in attitudes toward Muslims and Islamic culture. Her case studies are situated in the domains of language (Andalusi Jewish attitudes to Arabic), learning (Andalusi Jewish opposition to Arabic-Islamic “imports”), exile (the relationship between the theological notion of exile and the perception of al-Andalus as home), and the expectation of redemption (the role of Muslims and Christians on the eve of the world's end). Like the social and political historians discussed previously, Alfonso emphasizes the social functions that religious identity and otherness had—at least as suggested by this literary material.

Another approach to the history of the Iberian peninsula via its literature is Michelle Hamilton's Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature. Here, the motif of the go-between—frequently an elderly woman who facilitates the encounter between lovers—is traced from Ibn Hazm's The Dove's Neck Ring onward. Hamilton recognizes in this figure not only a unique feature in the Arabic poetic tradition cherished by Andalusi rulers that was not part of the considerable common ground it shared with classical Arabic poetry in the East; she also sees a quintessentially Andalusi notion—the idea of the person in between cultures, religions, languages, social spheres, and even genders. Although such a position clearly has advantages for the person (as Metcalfe suggests for the Sicilian court), it also puts the go-between in a vulnerable position because s/he may at times present a danger to both groups. Seeing their respective identities threatened and a need to establish clear boundaries, these groups may persecute the individuals “in between.” The great appeal of Hamilton's interpretation lies in her combination of literary and political history as much as in her endeavor to pinpoint features of an Andalusi culture that transcend religious and linguistic boundaries. What emerges here is a regional identity often neglected by scholars who focus on membership in faith communities. Although close readings of literary texts may allow us to better understand which elements medieval writers considered significant for their religious and/or cultural identities, it is also important to keep in mind that the source material examined by scholars of literary history such as Brann, Alfonso, and Hamilton was produced by a very narrow group of people. It remains unclear to what extent these examples of elite culture are representative of Andalusi civilization. This is particularly true in the case of Hamilton, who presents the go-between as a synecdoche of the cultural, political, social, and religious dynamics of al-Andalus.

Apart from offering more nuanced views of interactions between members of different faith communities, none of the publications examined previously—with the exception of The Ornament of the World—clearly betrays the marks of a political agenda nor do the authors explicitly concern themselves with such agendas. A different approach to the fraught relationship between personal views, political or otherwise, and the ideal of disinterested scholarship is chosen by the contributors of In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past, edited by Simon R. Doubleday and David Coleman. The ways in which the past may or may not be relevant are much more diverse than one might expect, if one takes the debates about the “saccharine” versus “neo-lachrymose” views of interreligious Iberia as a yardstick—that is, those in which historical peaceful interactions support an optimistic view of present and future, whereas past violence is adduced to confirm pessimistic views.Footnote ⁸ Giles Tremlett, in his piece on “Moorishland,” offers a brief overview of the different ways the Islamic past of the Iberian peninsula has been handled in Spanish history as part of negotiations about the present and future, one of which is to represent the heterogeneity of Spain. These debates have created a shadow that medievalists find difficult to escape. Simon Doubleday raises more fundamental questions in his critique of objectivity as an aim of historical scholarship. The “denial of the inescapably political function of history” (p. 4), in his view, may lead to perpetuating past repression by silencing the voices of those who suffered and thereby suppressing our moral conscience. Doubleday makes a plea for confronting, in a therapeutic manner, the trauma of history as “a psychological inheritance from the past” (p. 10). For him, asking the question of historical relevance is thus not an intellectually undignified effort to sell scholarship but rather the specific social and political responsibility of the historian.

Although none of the other contributors makes an effort to confront the “ghosts from the past” in the sense of tackling traumas and lending a therapeutic dimension to their scholarship, they discuss cases in which historical phenomena are adduced to serve the present. For example, in his article on the new mosque in the Albaicín, Coleman explores “the potential contribution of a theoretically informed and self-consciously eclectic empiricism to the question of ‘historical relevance’” (p. 159). Anne Marie Wolf presents Juan de Segovia (d. 1458) not so much as exemplifying the notion that proximity leads to understanding but rather as illustrating the significance of “the intellectual dispositions we bring to questions of religious and cultural differences” (p. 37). These include the warning not to assume that a person has completely internalized a hostile discourse on the grounds that s/he is part of it. Most of the lessons echo common-sense principles, for instance, that unidimensional presentations of history distort the rich complexity of human interactions. Among the authors addressing medieval history, Leyla Rouhi sees in Don Quijote a work that promotes diversity and a reader-based multivalency; Mary Elizabeth Perry discovers in the idealized Islamic past of the collective memory of the Moriscos after the expulsion of 1609–14 a lesson to be learned concerning the fabrication of memory and the particular significance of violence in this process; and Denise Filios undermines Menocal's interpretation of ʿAbd al-Rahman, the already mentioned founder of the Umayyad dynasty in Spain, by reversing the perspective and adopting the voice of the Christians who lost social status under Muslim rule.

While nostalgic visions of Muslim Spain see this multifaith utopia as unambiguously located in the past, the Spanish converts to Islam discussed by Lisa Abend in Doubleday and Coleman's volume deny the end of al-Andalus. They see themselves as the heirs of a now marginalized al-Andalus, with practical implications such as the demand to grant Spanish citizenship to the descendents of Andalusi émigrés in North Africa. In the same volume, the literary scholar Gil Anidjar addresses the end of al-Andalus in a very different fashion, along the lines of his monograph “Our Place in al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in Arab Jewish Letters.Footnote ⁹ For Anidjar, this end is intrinsically connected with our idea of al-Andalus; we do not think about al-Andalus without thinking of it as a phenomenon that has come to an end. We are thus confronting a paradox: the entire notion of al-Andalus is not only predicated upon its discontinuity but is also the ongoing result of people thinking and writing about it.

Participants in the debate about convivencia who want to draw a certain general picture of interreligious life in medieval Spain—whether especially peaceful or violent—often focus on periods, geographical areas, and fields of interaction that are instances of these respective tendencies. Although developments in architecture and literature in the Umayyad and Taifa periods (in particular the “Golden Age” of Jewish Spain) support the harmonious view, the violent scenario can easily be substantiated if one adduces the religious policies of the Almoravids and Almohads or the hierarchical principles of the dhimma in general.

To qualify such select impressions, several reminders are in order. What recent scholarship emphasizes is that, although interpretations of the quality of interreligious interactions differ, the knowledge upon which many of these interpretations rest is far from certain. Some authors emphasize the paucity of sources produced by one religious community regarding another. Naturally, texts also need to be read in context. Muslim attitudes toward non-Muslims reflected the self-image of Muslims. The more keenly they felt the disintegration of their polity and the progress of the reconquista, the more they subjected non-Muslims to repressive measures that mirrored their own anxieties. Specifications in terms of these contexts are a common feature of the studies under consideration here and essential for putting more general claims into perspective.

Another important conclusion is that Muslim attitudes to non-Muslims frequently reflect intra-faith concerns. In periods of weakness, earlier Muslim rulers were blamed for later political instability and vulnerability. At the same time, the historical relationships between Muslims and their Abrahamic “cousins” predating the encounters in the Iberian peninsula deserve attention. Brann describes the Jew as “a figure critical to the delineation of social, political, and religious boundaries in Islam and a potential source of political sedition and/or religious subversion” (p. 67). The same, with appropriate qualifications, can be said about the Christian. However, Brann advises caution about essentializing Islamic attitudes toward other religious groups, because it is uncertain to what extent anti-Jewish sentiments in the 11th century, for example, continued tendencies that already existed when Islam emerged.

Another note of caution concerns the categories we use. In her introduction, Alfonso reminds us of the changing and dynamic concepts and shapes of identity, otherness, and culture. Likewise, the notion of religion in the premodern period deserves to be critically reexamined. To what extent is our understanding of religious interactions in medieval Spain misled by the application of a modern concept? We may not only be interested in religious identities because they are important for us today, which involves the risk of overestimating their significance in earlier periods, but we may also misunderstand how and why belonging to a religious community was expressed. The “onomastic indifference” and the doubts concerning religious backgrounds brought out by several scholars suggest that it was under certain circumstances that people saw advantages in declaring openly that they belonged to a certain faith community, whether they had been previously silent about their religious identity or simply indifferent. What all the publications discussed here indicate, in one way or another, is that although our terminology of “Muslims, Jews, and Christians” privileges religious identity, this was only one aspect of the complex ways belonging was established. Language, intellectual culture, and ethnicity are further aspects frequently highlighted, but others—such as gender, social status, or age—could be added.

The politicization of the historical example of interreligious al-Andalus has become so prevalent that it is taken for granted that this is the “natural” approach to the subject. Even though the authors presented here challenge a fixed notion of religious identities, the question of these religious identities still dominates their research. It does not prevail to the same extent in the study of other mixed areas in the Middle East (such as Syria or Egypt), even though—as medieval historiographical works dealing with Byzantium and discussed by Christys suggest—Christians in al-Andalus occasionally expressed the view that they were in the same situation and fighting a common enemy. Broadening the geographical perspective may thus help us to redress the exceptional character attributed to al-Andalus in political debates.

Most historians, even those of a “conservative” ilk, accept to a certain degree the empirical uncertainties that critical theory has pointed out: that academic paradigms change and, with them, analytical categories as well as the questions that come with them; that the voices we “hear” are partly our own and often unrepresentative of past societies; that, by deconstructing, we always construct ourselves. Still, most members of the guild strive toward something approaching objectivity, not least because it allows an advance of knowledge and places history closer to science than to poetry. One thus wonders to what extent the kind of truth claim that Menocal makes in her more poetic and politically and morally engaged book follows the same rules as the kind of truth claim that other authors make. Curiously, it is the promise of predictability—here based on historical precedents—associated with the authority of science that makes her book so appealing in political debates.

Doubleday praises The Ornament of the World as “a fine instance of this rethinking [of religious and cultural difference], through its proactive humanization of the Other, its rehabilitation of the term ‘medieval’ . . . and its poetic evocation of the full possibilities of cultural symbiosis” (p. 19). Much of this praise can be easily applied to many other examples of scholarship. One can probably take for granted that the vast majority of medievalists do not share what Doubleday presents as a popular understanding of the Middle Ages: the “dark ages” shaped by intellectual stagnation, religious persecution, and general misery. Likewise, the publications under consideration here are examples of “rethinking” religious and cultural difference. The observation of “onomastic indifference” is probably a more significant way of rethinking difference than Menocal's emphasis on the porous boundaries of cultural identity as manifested in architecture or literature.

If we practice “politically aware” or “morally involved” forms of scholarship, one lesson to be learned not so much from history (which changes with the way it is told by historians and others) but from the way it is presented is just how much negotiating the past is part of negotiating the present. Ideally, our concerns should not prefigure our accounts of history and, likewise, if we wish to interrogate the past for its own sake, whatever we establish as “historical realities” do not necessarily bode ill for the present. While Doubleday highlights the “humanization of the Other” in Menocal's book, various contributors in the same volume caution us not to idealize that medieval, Muslim Other. Humanization, here, should rather mean to deal with the mistakes and limitations of past human beings, including cultural, religious, and ethnic prejudices and hostility, exactly because we would like to solve the problems connected with them.