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Contact

University of Amsterdam

Mònica Colominas Aparicio has defended her PhD thesis titled:

"The religious polemics of the Muslims of Late Medieval Christian Iberia: Identity and religious authority in Mudejar Islam,"

Gerard A. Wiegers, Mercedes García-Arenal and R.L.A. van Leeuwen have been the supervisors of her PhD thesis.

The defense took place in the Auditorium of the University of Amsterdam.

This dissertation investigates the politics of identity of the Muslims in Late Medieval Christian Iberia (Mudejars). Mudejars had to endure the pressure exerted by the Christian majority society and also the criticism from their co-religionists in Muslim lands who contested their exceptional subjugation to Christian rulers and occasionally asked them to emigrate to the Islamic territories. In addition, Mudejars were in direct competition with the Jewish minorities for the favours of their Christian lords.

The central question addressed in this study is how Mudejars articulated notions of identity and religious authority in relation to the Christians and the Jews, and importantly also to other Muslims, in their literature of religious polemics against the Christians and the Jews preserved in Arabic and in Aljamiado (Spanish in Arabic characters) codices. She argue that alongside the primary aim of the polemics, which was to refute the views of their religious opponents, the discourses against the Christians and the Jews in Mudejar treatises were also a tool to advance Islamic knowledge and to strengthen the government and social cohesion of their communities. Her analysis of this literature takes an interdisciplinary approach whose purpose is to counterbalance the often biased outsider views found in the contemporary Christian sources which disregard the agency of the members of these Muslim minority communities in constructing their self-image and their share in the shaping of interreligious Iberian narratives.

You can read the Table of contents here.

She is currently at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science as Research Scholar.

(See here the CV)

Publications:

2014

  • M. Colominas Aparicio (2014). “Disputes about Purity in Late Medieval Iberia. Interreligious Contacts and the Polemical Language of the Mudejars”. Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies 1 (1): 117-141.
  • M. Colominas Aparicio, W.A. Flinterman, I. Krasniuk & A. Post (2014). "Talismanic Use of Sūra 59. A Probable Case from the Indonesian Archipelago." Bibliotheca Orientalis, 71(1-2), 53-64.

2013

  • M. Colominas Aparicio (2013). [Review of the book Al-Andalus rediscovered: Iberia's new Muslims]. Journal of Muslims in Europe, 2(1), 96-97.

2011:

  • M. Colominas Aparicio (2011). ʿUmar ibn Abī Rabīʿa and Turayya in "Rawdat al-qulūb wa-nuzhat al-muhibb wa-al-mahbūb". Quaderni di Studi Arabi, n.s. 5-6, 187-198.

Forthcoming:

M. Colominas Aparicio (2014). “Disputa con los cristanos [MS BNE 4944, Aljamiado XVI (or XVII) century]”. In: Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History 1500-1900. Vol. 6. Leiden: Brill (forthcoming October).

M. Colominas Aparicio (2015). [Review of the book Neigboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today] Journal of Transcultural Medieval Studies.

M. Colominas Aparicio, G.A. Wiegers (2016). “Los mudéjares de Castilla”. Monográfico Islam en minoría en la Edad Media in Edad Media. Revista de Historia 17 (2016).

 

Contributions in conferences:

2013
Ruhr-Universität Bochum Workshop "Convivencia and Religious Language: Dialogue of Religions on the Iberian Peninsula", 4-5 Juni 2013

Masterclass Mediterranean Worlds with Prof. D. Abulafia (University of Cambridge), Center for Medieval Studies, University of Amsterdam, 25 October 2013

2014
128th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association. Panel “Religious Diversity in the Medieval Mediterranean: Inter-communal Disputation and Discussion”. Washington, 2-5 January 2014

International Conference. "Polemical Encounters. Polemics between Christians, Jews and Muslims in Iberia and Beyond". Madrid, 29 Sept.- 1 Oct. 2014, with the paper: "Mudéjar Polemics against the Jews: Ta'yīd al-milla and the Christian Anti-Jewish Discourse."

Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. Panel “Medieval Muslim Engagement with the Qur’an and Bible”. San Diego 22-25 November 2014

2015
Workshop in St. Catherine’s College. Minorities in Contact. Cambridge 23-24 April 2015.