Autobiography of a Muslim Convert: Anselm Turmeda (c. 1353-c. 1430)

Journal of the American Oriental Society, 2016

This article explores Muslim conversion to Christianity using a body of hagio-graphical sources in Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, and Latin. Through these lives of Christian martyrs, the article seeks to understand why Muslims undertook the surprising journey from " mosque to church " in the early centuries after the conquests. Many studies of Islamization are teleological, aiming to explain the large-scale conversion of the Middle East by the end of the Crusades. In contrast, this article aims to show why Islamization—especially in the Umayyad and early ʿAbbāsid periods—could be highly contingent, even fragile, at a time when Mus-lims formed a numerical minority in many regions under their control.

Conversion and Islam in the Early Modern Mediterranean, 2017

This chapter analyses the works in Catalan and Arabic of the Catalan friar and Muslim convert Anselm Turmda / ‘Abdallāh al-Turjumān (1355–1423) in order to discuss the problematic reception of the idea of mobility and conversion in the early modern Mediterranean. I shall argue that before the era of the confessionalisation of empires, the porous space of the Mediterranean offered to travelling scholars and translators like Anselm Turmeda/‘Abdallāh al-Turjumān opportunities for the transgression of borders and the multiplication of identities. This multiplication was facilitated by their familiarity with many languages and by the act of translation as variously understood. The story of Anselm Turmeda or ‘Abdallāh al-Turjumān takes place in the fluid space of the travelling of texts and ideas, notably in the space of the circulation of languages and translations of the early modern Mediterranean.14 The tendency of modern and contemporary scholars to look at only one side of this intrinsically “double” story, accusations of a lack of integrity that were made against him and a mistrust in the sincerity of his conversion will be discussed in light of an alternative paradigm which sees conversion as an act of self-translation and as a multiplication of the languages of the self.

The goal of this article is to show, through a case study of a convert from Islam to Catholicism in the seventeenth century, how multi-faceted and complex the phenomenon of conversion is, where political, social, and religious factors are intertwined. The article recounts the conversion story of Mohammed el-Attaz, later known as Baldassarre Loyola (1631-1667). Son of the king of Fez (Morocco) of the Saʿadian dynasty, Mohammed was captured on his way to Mecca by the Knights of Malta; he converted to Christianity, went to Italy, became a Jesuit, and spent some years of his life converting Muslims in Italian port cities. The story of Baldassarre Loyola is unique for many reasons. First, this is the only known case of a Muslim prince joining the Society of Jesus. Second, we have an extraordinary range of sources: more than 200 letters written by Baldassarre, Christian and Muslim firsthand sources, an unpublished Autobiography, and a 600-page unpublished Life written by Baldassarre's spiritual director, the Jesuit Domenico Brunacci. Additionally, a sacred drama on Baldassarre's story (El gran principe de Fez) was composed by Calderón de la Barca and performed in Jesuit colleges in Europe as well as overseas. This case study of a man between two worlds-struggling for a new identity but always linked to his ancient rootsilluminates, through the phenomenon of conversion, the tormented, rich, and fascinating relationship between Islam and Christianity on the eve of modernity.

2009

In 1604, a charismatic Sufi sheikh from Tunis commissioned the translation into Ottoman Turkish of Abdallāh b. Abdallāh al Tarjumān’s polemical text entitled Tuḥfat al-Adīb fī al-radd ʿalā ahl al-ṣalīb (1420), with the intention of presenting it to Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I. Soon after, this text became one of the most widely known and disseminated anti-Christian polemical texts in the Islamic world, and by the late nineteenth century, in Europe as well. The article examines the circumstances of Tuḥfa’s translation from Arabic into Ottoman Turkish, the actors involved, the narrative’s trajectory from Tunis to Istanbul, its reception by the Ottoman reading public, as well as impact on the development of an Ottoman polemical genre of self-narrative of conversion to Islam. Transcription and translation of such an Ottoman narrative, which appears to have been directly influenced by Tuḥfa, is fea- tured in the article’s appendix. By focusing on the trajectory of a single text belonging to the genre of religious polemics, the article bridges the traditionally disconnected academic discussions pertaining to the early modern Iberian, North African and Ottoman history and demonstrates their inherent connectivity in the age of confessional polarization (16th-17th centuries). Key words : Polemics; conversion; narrative; intertextuality; Ottoman Empire; Tunis; Translation.