The Most Noble of People presents a nuanced look at questions of identity in Muslim Spain under the Umayyads, an Arab dynasty that ruled from 756 to 1031. With a social historical emphasis on ...relations among different religious and ethnic groups, and between men and women, Jessica A. Coope considers the ways in which personal and cultural identity in al-Andalus could be alternately fluid and contentious.
The opening chapters define Arab and Muslim identity as those categories were understood in Muslim Spain, highlighting the unique aspects of this society as well as its similarities with other parts of the medieval Islamic world. The book goes on to discuss what it meant to be a Jew or Christian in Spain under Islamic rule, and the degree to which non-Muslims were full participants in society. Following this is a consideration of gender identity as defined by Islamic law and by less normative sources like literature and mystical texts. It concludes by focusing on internal rebellions against the government of Muslim Spain, particularly the conflicts between Muslims who were ethnically Arab and those who were Berber or native Iberian, pointing to the limits of Muslim solidarity.
Drawn from an unusually broad array of sources—including legal texts, religious polemic, chronicles, mystical texts, prose literature, and poetry, in both Arabic and Latin—many of Coope’s illustrations of life in al-Andalus also reflect something of the larger medieval world. Further, some key questions about gender, ethnicity, and religious identity that concerned people in Muslim Spain—for example, women’s status under Islamic law, or what it means to be a Muslim in different contexts and societies around the world—remain relevant today.
In his important book on society in Islamic Spain, Al-Ándalus, Pierre Guichard theorises that until the late fourth/tenth century Arabs and Berbers followed what he calls an Eastern family pattern, ...meaning that they married within the extended family, disinherited women, and calculated kinship through the male line. The subject population, whether they converted to Islam or not, maintained a Western pattern of marrying out, allowing women to inherit, and recognising kinship through the male and female lines. Recently published collections of rulings from Islamic courts, however, complicate the picture Guichard presents. They suggest that Islamic law, which neither favours nor discourages close kin marriage, allows women to inherit property, and recognizes bilateral kinship, was influential well before the late tenth century. Its influence challenged the Eastern kinship model Guichard documents, particularly in the area of women's property rights.
The following two chapters will exam the status of women—primarily Muslim women—in al-Andalus, in terms of the society’s norms for women as they were laid out in Shari‘ah, the very different ideals ...depicted in literary and mystical sources, and the actual treatment of women in Shari‘ ah courts. Unlike some of the ethnic and religious tensions this book analyzes, the ambiguities of women’s position in society were not resolved with the end of the Umayyad period. Women’s status, however, did change under the Umayyads, because of the large-scale conversion of Christians to Islam, and with the establishment of
At its most ambitious, the revolt of Ibn Ḥafṣūn and his family and allies threatened the Guadalquivir Valley and the heartland of Umayyad power. It developed in areas over which the Umayyads expected ...to have at least some direct control. Those participating in the revolt also seem to have accepted the social norms that were current in Córdoba: Ibn Ḥafṣūn recognized a difference between muwallads and Arabs and between Christians and Muslims, and he used those differences to defy Umayyad authority. Farther from the geographic center of the Arab Muslim elite, though (however imperfectly that elite was defined), such categories
Christians and Jews Coope, Jessica
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Odprti dostop
By the time the caliphate was established in the tenth century, an elite had emerged in al-Andalus made up of Arab Muslims. The “Arab” part of that identity was fluid, however, and could be extended ...to those who were not Arab in a strictly biological sense. That status of almost-Arabs included those who were from families of longstanding Umayyad clients and muwallads and Berbers who were civil servants, ‘ulama’ connected to the court, or adibs of Arabic literature and culture. Other groups had an ambiguous and sometimes troubled relationship with that elite. Because conversion to Islam happened over a period
The Umayyads Coope, Jessica
The Most Noble of People,
04/2017
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The quotation above, from Hugh Kennedy, highlights how important Arab culture was during the period of Umayyad rule in the Middle East, and how closely being Arab and being Muslim were linked. Before ...we ex amine the specifics of ethnic and religious conflict in al-Andalus, it will be useful to get an overview of Umayyad governance. Although there is much in the Umayyads’ history in al-Andalus that is different from their history in the Middle East, the dynasty faced many of the same challenges in both areas. Those challenges included the tensions between Arab ethnic identity and Islamic values, including
Conclusion Coope, Jessica
The Most Noble of People,
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Odprti dostop
The Muslim elite in the Umayyad period, in both al-Andalus and in the Middle East, connected being Arab with being Muslim and believed that Arab Muslims deserved a higher social status than either ...non-Arab Muslims or dhimmis. In al-Andalus, however, the Umayyad ideal of a “unitary state dominated by Arabs,” to use Thomas Glick’s phrase,¹ was always a shaky one, given the relatively small number of Arabs attempting to rule over a large non-Arab subject population. The ideal became even less viable as time went on, for several reasons.
Membership in the army had traditionally been an important source of
Arabs Coope, Jessica
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Arabic chronicles of al-Andalus all emphasize the role of Arabs in the region’s conquest and subsequent history.¹ The original invasion and settlement in 711, however, was in fact headed up by the ...Berber governor of Tangier, Ṭariq ibn Ziyad, with a predominantly Berber army.² Ṭāriq was the mawla of the Arab governor of Qayrawan, Musa ibn Nuṣayr, and probably carried out the invasion without orders from Mūsā. In 712 Mūsā arrived in al-Andalus with the Arab jund or army division that he commanded in Ifriqiyah (central North Africa), which included prominent members of various Arab tribes, among them the Quraysh
I began this book by naming five distinct social groups in Umayyad al-Andalus: Arab Muslims, Berber Muslims and muwallads who through clientage or education became honorary Arabs, muwallads who did ...not have elite status, nonelite Muslim Berbers, and dhimmis. In fact, though, the most important division was between a small ruling group and everyone else. That elite, or khāṣṣah, was made up of prominent Arab Muslims who could trace their ancestry back to the early days of Islamic rule in al-Andalus, Muslims of Iberian or Berber origin who had become honorary Arabs through ties of wala’ (clientage) or the study
