120 r Juliette Hassine
whose execution should have taken place before sunset immediately after
the tuba period.
Rey’s book describes the ridda process in detail, and he researched the
subject in depth, seemingly with the help of Muslim legal experts. How-
ever, there are lacunae in the treatment of the laws of evidence in his book.
The rabbis showed little knowledge or understanding of the workings of
ridda. None of the poets or the authors of the q#sās at any time indicate
that Sol converted to Islam; on the contrary, they say that she remained
loyal to her religion. According to Yedidiah Monsoniego, the judges de-
cided to torture her:
Perhaps she would convert when
She cried out in sufferingפן ואולי תמיר את דתה
תזעק בחבליהMonsoniego became a member of the rabbinical court in Fez in 1840.^31 He
claimed that the judges forced Sol to convert to Islam. The ̔ulamā’ and the
sultan, however, knew that forced conversion was illegal. It went against
the very notion of dhimma status, which governed the relations between
Muslims and other “People of the Book.” Therefore, they made certain
that the question of Sol’s Judaism was not raised during the trial or during
the tuba persuasion and torture period. In their opinion, these methods
were employed to ensure that she remained a Muslim, whereas the Jew-
ish poets saw them as an attempt to coerce her into converting to Islam.
Was this paragraph found in the Pact of Omar known to the Jewish
poets? If they had known it was illegal to force a Jewess to convert, would
they not have used this information to attack the sultan and the judges
for their lack of compliance with the laws of Islam’s founding fathers? This
claim would have strengthened the protests against the Muslim authori-
ties in Fez.
This argument, which does not appear in any of the poetry, proves
that the laws of dhimma prohibiting the forced conversion of a Jew to
Islam were not clear to the Jewish authors or even to the community
leaders, who claimed only that Sol was forced to convert without men-
tion of Islamic laws against such activity. This ignorance of Islamic law
in the events surrounding Sol shows how deep the abyss was between
the Jewish and Muslim communities. We are talking about two separate,