Crueldad y compasión en la literatura árabe e islámica is the result of an international seminar organized at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) in Madrid in 2008 and published in co-edition with Universidad de Córdoba in the series of Arab and Islamic studies (Estudios Árabes e Islámicos) of the main Spanish research institution of the CSIC.

In the editor's introduction, which is more an authentic review article of the state of the art than a preface, CSIC researcher Delfina Serrano recalls that the book is also the result of larger research projects undertaken in recent years, the aim of which was the study of emotions in Arab and Islamic societies. As she explains, despite its growing importance for a complete understanding of human societies, the study of the history of emotions – traditionally consigned to the realm of the irrational and the feminine – has not yet received much attention in relation to Arab and Islamic societies. She also states that the approach to emotions is “philological”, that is, it looks at how emotions are reflected in written texts, underlying the missing link between the history of mentalities and emotions. The book contains thirteen articles, not all of which pertain to the “emotionology” genre, but which deal in different ways with the topic of cruelty and compassion in Arab and Islamic societies, and encompassing texts from pre-Islamic times to the modern, and ranging also from literary to historical, theological, journalistic and web site texts. Through this very varied (geographically, chronologically and thematically) corpus of texts the authors seek to show how Arab and Islamic societies have reflected and reflect these emotions. The editor seems conscious of the risk of putting together such a diverse group of texts and approaches, but she is also aware that it provides a way to gain representativeness in exploring the features of some kind of Islamic emotional community.

In her article, Linda Jones explores emotion as a political strategy in Junnat al-riḍā by Ibn ʿAṣim, an adab text of the fifteenth century, while María Jesús Viguera focuses on exemplary violence exerted by power as represented in medieval historical chronicles such as the Muqtabis-V of Ibn Ḥayyān. Rebeca Fuentes investigates the battle narratives in the Ta'rīkh of al-Ṭabarī, paying special attention to the Badr battle. Christian Lange tackles al-Ghazālī's views on justice, cruelty, punishment and mercy with the background of absolutist and sacred conceptions of power. Marc Saurina deals with love and compassion in the Fethullah Güllen movement through the analysis of the press and internet pages in Turkey. Cristina de la Puente examines violence and mercy in relation to slaves according to the regulation of rights and duties in the mālikī doctrine. Juan Pedro Monferrer plunges into narrative frame and lexical features of the story of the martyrdom of Rawḥ al-Qurashī, that Arab Christian traditions place around the eve of the ninth century. Ana Echevarría explores the violence against the dhimmīs in Arabic and Latin texts during the first centuries of the Islamic conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Delfina Serrano explores the expression of cruelty and compassion around Ibn Wafīd according to some of his biographers, and the further creation by historians of a model of dignity and resistance against the injustice of the sovereign. Marta García examines several episodes of violence in the history of al-Andalus according to the biographical dictionary of Ibn al-ʿAbbār known as Takmilah. Nieves Paradela plunges into modern Arabic literature, exploring prison narratives and poetics of martyrdom from the revolutionary mysticism of secular leftists to texts of Islamists such as Ayyām min ḥayātī of the Egyptian Zaynab al-Ghazzālī. Vardit Rispler-Chaim deals with compassion in the Islamic laws of qiṣaṣ and ḥudūd and the legitimacy of the replantation of an amputated limb. José Ramírez explores the first examples of compassion in Arabic literature through the pre-Islamic collection of violent war narratives of Ayyām al-ʿarab. And Dolores Serrano-Niza deals with the lexical fields of violence, beating and wounding in medieval lexicographical works of lughah.

After tackling issues of the translatability/untranslatability of the vocabulary of emotions, the economy of cruelty and compassion by sovereigns or a possible specific Arab or Islamic representation of cruelty and compassion, the editor concludes that, like all emotions, cruelty and compassion are not fixed states but states that depend on socio-historical contexts and many other factors such as their role and capitalization in power relations.

The fact that the book analyses texts written in Arabic, Syriac, Turkish, Latin, English and Spanish, gives rise to the issue of the pertinence of the use of categories such as “literatura árabe e islámica” (Arabic and Islamic literatures) chosen for the title or others such as “Arab-Islamic” literature used inside, taking also into account that the book includes texts written in Arabic and other languages by Muslims, as well as texts that refer to Muslims written by non-Muslims in Arabic and other languages. The category “literatura islámica” in particular is referentially problematic, even old-fashioned, although it is an old paradigm emerging anew, a category for analysing texts and understanding reality that we inevitably have to cope with. In any case, the book is an excellent contribution to the field and offers many new possibilities for re-reading all kind of texts.