Muslims in Spain, 1492-1814: Living and Negotiating in the Land of the Infidel

Abstract

state and, later, by the expansionist imperial interests of the Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid Caliphates. To bolster his argument, Demichelis notes in Chapter 4 that the earliest non-Islamic chronicles that mention significant numbers of ‘an early kind of mujāhidīn’ (94) do not appear until the twelfth century and are absent from earlier non-Islamic sources as well as from earlier ninthand tenth-century Islamic sources, including the history of al-Ṭabarī. This calls into question the common assumption that Islam has from its founding been closely linked to a belief in sanctified forms of violence. Violence in Early Islam includes extensive textual analysis of both historical documents and qur’anic verses dealing with Muslim conceptions of violence and warfare. Demichelis also interacts deeply with the scholarship on early Islam, Islamic origins and Islam and violence. The book’s written style is dense and the author often presents an avalanche of information, making the reader’s task of following the different lines of thought and argumentation needlessly difficult. Despite these issues, this volume is a welcome addition to the historiographical literature on early Islam, its evolution and the development of Islamic thought on violence, conflict and war.