The Mercenary Mediterranean_ Sovereignty, Religion, and Violence in the Medieval Crown of Aragon - Hussein Fancy

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The Skeletonization of Fact

From the beginning of Islamic history, the meaning of jihād has been

contested.^42 Political leaders, jurists, and soldiers drew upon a variety

sources — the Qur’ān, the Ḥadīth (the sayings of Muḥammad), and histor-

ical narratives of the early Islamic conquests — and developed competing

and contradictory understandings of the term, which ranged from seeing

jihād as an inward spiritual struggle to a code of conduct in war. The ques-

tion of who defined jihād was as fraught as the question of against whom

could jihād be directed. Did frontier warriors, jurists, or rulers lead these

wars? Was jihād an individual or a collective responsibility? Could Mus-

lims also be legitimate targets of jihād? Such questions highlight the fact

that jihād was not a rigid and abstract ideology but rather a terrain of

shifting ideals and practices. It cut to the very heart of struggles within in

the Islamic world to define the relationship of divine to human authority.

More particularly, in the context of thirteenth- century North Africa and

al- Andalus, as Abigail Krasner Balbale has argued, jihād was central to

the struggle to define and claim authority after the collapse of the Almo-

had Caliphate.^43 Indeed, both the Naṣrids and Marīnids employed the

Ghuzāh to assert their power over their Muslim and Christian rivals.

If the Ghuzāh were therefore a normative expression of jihād in this

period, then can one say the same of the jenets? Surveying the opinions

of Mālikī jurists — that is, jurists from the school of Islamic law that domi-

nated Spain and North Africa in this period — one might quickly conclude

that these soldiers’ actions were beyond the boundary. According to the

Tunisian jurist Saḥnūn (d. 854 ), Mālik (d. 796 ), who founded this school of

law, disapproved of Muslims even traveling to non- Muslim territory (dār

al- ḥarb).^44 Thus, it is not surprising that after the twelfth century, when

greater numbers of Muslims found themselves under Christian rule in the

Iberian Peninsula, a general consensus emerged among Mālikī scholars

that emigration (hijra) was obligatory for all able- bodied Muslims in con-

quered territory. This was the legal opinion ( fatwā) of the highly influ-

ential chief muftī (one who is authorized to issue legal opinions) of Fez,

Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā al- Wansharīsī (d. 1508 ).^45 Al- Wansharīsī’s al- Mi‘yār al-

mu‘rib wa’l- jāmi‘ al- mughrib ‘an fatāwā ‘ulamā’ ahl Ifrīqiya wa’l- Andalus

wa’l- Maghrib (The Clear Standard and Extraordinary Collection of the

Legal Opinions of the Scholars of North Africa and al- Andalus) was a vast

compilation of legal opinions from the year 1000 to around 1491. It was a