Introduction

Al-Andalus was the term used by Muslims to refer to the Iberian Peninsula, and from it comes the name Andalucía, the southern region of Spain where Muslim rule lasted the longest. The Visigothic kingdom that succeeded Roman rule in the region of Hispania collapsed with the Muslim conquest of 711, led by Arab and Berber troops. Direct Muslim control was established over the majority of the Iberian Peninsula, except for the mountainous areas in the north and northwest, where Christian kingdoms were eventually formed. A process of Arabisation and Islamisation ensued, such that by the eleventh century the majority of the population were Arabic-speaking Muslims. The number of Christians living in al-Andalus diminished through emigration, deportation and conversion, while the Jewish communities flourished, except during the early Almohad period when forced conversion to Islam took place. In 756, following the Umayyads’ defeat at the hands of the Abbasids, an Umayyad prince from Syria arrived in the Iberian Peninsula. His arrival signalled the beginning of autonomous Muslim rule in al-Andalus, with Cordoba as the capital, first of the Umayyad emirate (756–929) and then of the Umayyad caliphate (929–1031). Cordoba became then the largest, most populated and richest city in Latin Europe due to the flourishing of agriculture and trade that went together with cultural splendour, epitomised by the rich caliphal library.

By the end of the tenth century, internal tensions caused by the legacy of the powerful chamberlain al-Manṣūr b. Abī ʿĀmir, who had become the de facto ruler, erupted in civil wars that led to the abolishment of the Umayyad caliphate in 1031 and the appearance of the short-lived caliphate of the Ḥammūdids, descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad. Al-Andalus was then divided into a number of petty (Taifa) kingdoms ruled by local notables from different backgrounds. Because of their military weakness, they eventually had to pay tribute to the Christian kingdoms to stop the latter's territorial advance. The fall of Toledo to the Christians in 1085 led the Taifa kings to seek the military aid of the Almoravids, Berber camel-drivers from the Sahara who had conquered the far Maghreb (present-day Morocco) and founded Marrakech.

The Almoravids defeated the Christians at the battle of Zallāqa in 1086 and eventually banished or killed the Taifa kings in order to incorporate al-Andalus into their empire.

THIS CHAPTER LOOKS at a Muslim polymath, Ibn Ḥazm (384–556 AH/994–1064 CE), in the period after the abolition of the Umayyad caliphate of Córdoba and the formation of many competing polities in the first Taifa period. In spite of his loyalty to the Cordoban Umayyad caliphate, Ibn Ḥazm abandoned Mālikism, the legal school favoured by the Umayyads. Instead, he attached himself to Ẓāhirism, a legal trend based on a literalist approach to the sources of Revelation. I propose in this chapter a new explanation for this move, one that highlights how Ḥāhirism fitted into Ibn Ḥazm's attempt to preserve the court culture in which he had grown up, with its emphasis on reason and diffidence towards charisma.

Ibn Ḥazm: Political Problems, Legal Solutions

In the medieval Islamic West, in the fourth (AH) through the tenth (CE) centuries, Andalusi society was characterized by a strong, long-established state and the support of a powerful network of specialists in religious learning, principally jurists. The collective memory engendered by these specialists provided continuity in religious knowledge (ʽilm) beginning with the arrival of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula in the second through the seventh century up to their own time. This continuity was related to how they managed the knowledge of the Revelation and the prophetic legacy as a means of assuring salvation in the afterlife, for both ruler and the ruled, by leading them along the straight path during this life.1 A different kind of society or societies could be found throughout most of the far western Maghreb (present-day Morocco), where there was no similar network of religious scholars until the Almoravid period and especially during the Almohad period (sixth through the seventh (AH)–twelfth through the thirteenth (CE) centuries) and where it was relatively common to find messianic or saintly figures charged with managing both the sacred sphere and conflicts among tribes. In some cases, these figures were able to provide the initial impetus for the creation of states.

In al-Andalus, however, these charismatic figures rarely succeeded in forming lasting political structures. The reasons for their relative failure are many, among which we may mention the difficulty in recruiting an army in al-Andalus—a task facilitated in North Africa by the tribal context—as well as the existence of a deep anti-charismatic tendency among Andalusi religious scholars.

Episodes of violence in historical writings may reflect the use of topoi – an area of study that has considerably advanced our understanding of both Islamic historiography and history. For example, the attribution of unusually cruel behaviour to a particular ruler – notwithstanding the possibility that such behaviour may have a historical basis – is used to justify his deposition, especially when it coincides with dynastic change. Narratives of violence against women in medieval writings – still a much unexplored topic, especially as regards the Islamic world – appear, as indicated by Manuela Marín, in contexts dealing with the relationships linking women in a hierarchy of power to their husbands or masters, and also in those of social disorder (wars and armed conflicts). These last narratives may serve a function similar to that of other cases of violence in such contexts, the de-legitimisation of those who perpetrated it. But their significance is wider, as demonstrated by studies dealing with the non-Muslim world, since these narratives – apart from foremost reflecting concrete and widespread war practices – also involve metaphors of power and domination affecting both physical bodies and the body politic, the creation of identities and the establishment of the social order.

As regards the Islamic context, is violence against women in medieval historical writings represented as always illegitimate? Which kinds of representation are more common? In what follows, I shall review four thematic cases involving situations of conflict (the early Cordoban Umayyads’ efforts at imposing their rule, the late third/ninth century rebellion of Ibn Ḥafṣūn, the Cordoban fitna that led to the abolishment of the Umayyad caliphate and the fights among Berbers and between them and other groups), looking for information about the treatment of women, in order to analyse its characteristics and functions in historical sources.

THE TREATMENT OF WOMEN IN SITUATIONS OF CONFLICT IN ANDALUSI HISTORICAL WRITINGS

The early Cordoban Umayyads

The first Umayyad emir of al-Andalus, Abd al-Raḥmān I (r. 138/756–172/788), was the son of a captive woman from the Berber Nafza. He entered the Iberian Peninsula after escaping from the Abbāsid massacre of his relatives and found refuge among his Berber relatives in North Africa, accompanied by his loyal mawlā Badr, but with no women. Two local Andalusi military leaders – Yūsuf al-Fihrī and al-Sumayl – tried to establish links with him by offering Yūsuf's daughter in marriage.

Could al-Andalus be Saved from the Christians?

Fear and Hope in Eschatological Traditions

The Malagan jurist al-Fakhkhar (d. 723/1323) compiled a number of eschatological traditions that addressed the dangers that Muslims had to face in al-Andalus. His was an age – the Nasrid period (seventh/thirteenth–ninth/fifteenth centuries) – when Muslim rule was reduced to a small area around the city of Granada, after the loss of a major part of the territory where formerly the Arabic language and Islam had predominated. Al-Fakhkhar's eschatological traditions could be understood as having been fabricated ad hoc to help the Andalusis face their predicament. However, they can be proven to be old traditions, some of which had been circulating since very early times.

What do the geographical areas included in this volume have in common over a period reaching from the fifth/eleventh to the twelfth/eighteenth century that would give meaning to both the periodisation and the geographical subdivisions used here? As noted in their introduction by the editors of volume 3 of the New Cambridge history of Islam (The eastern Islamic world, fifth/eleventh to twelfth/eighteenth centuries), a certain degree of arbitrariness always accompanies the need to make temporal and territorial divisions. The obvious Mediterranean articulation of the political and commercial trends dealt with in this volume should not obscure the deep connections that linked the western and eastern Islamic worlds – their populations, their religious and political concepts and practices, and their economies. It is also obvious that the encounter, not to say clash, with the two great civilisations of India and China mostly affected the eastern regions of the Islamic world, while the encounter and clash with Christendom had a deeper impact on the western Islamic regions. But here again things were not as simple as may appear. The westward diffusion of tea from China can be used to exemplify the often convoluted paths through which links between different areas were established. Having been used in the Chinese empire for centuries, tea was not introduced into Iran until the eleventh/seventeenth century; yet it was not from there that it crossed into the Ottoman lands.

The Almohad caliphate

The mahdī Ibn Tūmart and the Almohad movement

Ibn Yāsīn, the founder of the Almoravid movement, is depicted as a Mālikī jurist engaged in transforming the Lamtūna Berbers into good Mālikī Muslims, a mission he accomplished by resorting often to physical punishments. His teachings were transmitted for some time, but eventually forgotten. Despite both his relevance and the prominence of the Mālikī school under the Almoravids, Ibn Yāsīn did not come to play a central role either in western Mālikism or in Almoravid political legitimisation.

Ibn Tūmart, the founder of the Almohad movement, also aimed at a moral and religious reform. Accounts of Ibn Tūmart’s life more detailed than those of Ibn Yāsīn, as well as the ‘Book’ (Kitāb) attributed to him, are extant. The Almohad numismatic formula Allāhu rabbunā wa-Muḥammad rasūlunā wa’l-mahdī imāmunā (God is our Lord, Muḥammad is our Prophet, the mahdī [i.e. Ibn Tūmart] is our imām) bears witness to the central role he was accorded in the new polity. However, our understanding of how and when those accounts of his life were written down is still faulty, apart from the obvious fact that they moulded Ibn Tūmart’s life according to the Prophet’s biography. Much of the portrayal of Ibn Tūmart comes from the ‘Memoirs’ of al-Baydhaq, whose aim is nevertheless chiefly to establish ʿAbd al-Muʾmin’s right to lead the Almohads as caliph.