Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus

Professor Safran titles her study Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus. In case other readers are as uncertain as I was as to how that title should be interpreted, let me say she tells us very clearly that this is, ‘a book about Islamic rule over Christians and Jews in medieval Iberia’ (p. 4), and at its heart is ‘an experiment in interpretation of Islamic legal texts’. Not, then, a study of geographical or military frontier demarcation, except incidentally, but one based firmly in largely contemporary legal texts and concerned above all with the limits that the Islamic society of this piece of western Europe set in place for itself, thus maintaining and continuing its status as an integral part of dār al-Islām. Of course the major mechanism tying al-Andalus into the rest of the Islamic world was the Pilgrimage, but that is a subject that arises here only incidentally, and in any case in the nature of things its impact was not continuous. What operated continuously, day by day, were the ties studied here: the legal ones created by the immense corpus of Islamic scholarship. Those functioned without interruption and at all levels of society. Moreover the scholars (ulema) of al-Andalus read the same standard texts as were being studied in the ancient heartlands of Islam, and they participated and contributed fully in the literature of fiqh and associated subjects. Nor should we see this as a link sustained only by the written word. There was a human dimension to the law: its individual practitioners. That is well brought out in this study. Many of the legists in the west came originally from the east, or had at some stage gone there for study, and such links were constantly being reforged. Scholars from the east might well decide to make a career in the west, students in the west would often complete part of their training in the east

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