Welcome to Part Ten of the project “Interviewing Religion,” where I interview scholars of Middle Eastern religions about their research, discuss how their work connects to broader public issues, and ask for suggestions for further reading. [You can read the other interviews here!] A huge thank you to the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Luce Foundation, who supported my work with one of their Advancing Public Scholarship Grants. I couldn’t have launched this project without their assistance.
For my tenth interview, I’m excited to introduce Dr. Jocelyn Hendrickson. Hendrickson is an associate professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta in Canada. Her research focuses on Islamic legal history in medieval and early modern North Africa (the Maghrib) and al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) as well as colonial Mauritania. Her first book, Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa, won the Canadian Law and Society Association’s 2022 W. Wesley Pue Prize, the Canadian Association of Hispanists’ 2022 Best Book Prize, and the Middle East Medievalists Book Prize for 2023. I love the depth and breadth of her research, and how her work bridges the fields of Islamic law and social history.
I recently spoke to Hendrickson, who graciously answered a few questions about her research and publications. I encourage you to read her book and articles, and check out the many resources she mentions here.
1) How did you first get interested in studying Islamic legal history?
Hendrickson: Each of these three things – Islam, law, and history, unfolded gradually. As an undergraduate at the University of Washington, I majored in Comparative Religion. They were very clear about the importance of studying a “scriptural” language. I chose to study Arabic, which meant I was choosing Islamic Studies. I added a second major in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and pretty soon I headed off to Cairo for my first full year of intensive Arabic.
I loved Arabic but Cairo was a lot to handle as a young foreign woman in the late 1990s, and after two year-long stints there it occurred to me that maybe I could study Islam in the United States. I read an excellent book by Kathleen Moore on the impact of American law on Muslim practice and identity in the United States. That was the kind of research I imagined myself doing when I applied to the joint JD-PhD program in Law and Religion at Emory University.
But some other seeds were planted, too – I still remember where I was in the University of Washington library when I pulled Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas off the shelf. Fatwas are a question-and-answer legal genre in which any Muslim poses a question, usually a practical matter that has arisen, and a Muslim jurist responds with a non-binding expert opinion. I was fascinated by these short legal texts and the stories they told – what they revealed about the questioners as well as the jurists.
Once at Emory, I shifted from an ethnographic project focused on contemporary American Muslims to a historical, textual project focused on fatwas (and I “just” did the PhD). Once the hallmark of Emory’s program in West and South Asian Religions was the flexibility to focus on text, ethnography, or both. I am so grateful for the training I received there.
2) You’ve been asked to present your work at a local community center. How would you describe your research on medieval and early modern North Africa and al-Andulus?
Hendrickson: I usually explain my research in one of three ways.
First, non-Muslim Westerners have often been interested in the status of Christians and Jews in Islamic lands. A ton of research has been done on the Islamic legal doctrines associated with dhimmis, the term for Christians and Jews living as “protected peoples” under Muslim rule. My research focuses on the opposite scenario, Muslims living under non-Muslim rule. What is their legal status, according to Muslim jurists?
Second, the phenomenon of Muslims living under Christian rule has been interesting because so many contemporary Muslims live in non-Muslim majority countries today. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of Muslims worldwide live as members of minority religious communities. These communities face all kinds of questions unique to their geographic, political, and legal contexts, from determining what time to break the daily fast during the month of Ramadan in northern regions where the sun does not set, to the problem of buying a house without interest-based loans, to the real discrepancies between Islamic and national laws pertaining to family law (marriage, divorce, custody, and inheritance).
In the last few decades, Muslim jurists developed a largely fatwa-based body of law responsive to the needs of minority Muslims. This was not uncontroversial – while some religious authorities justified departures from traditional Islamic laws as necessary adaptations, others claimed that to live a fully Muslim life, one must live in a Muslim country.
As part of this debate about the extent to which Islamic law can be adapted to different contexts, people started wondering about historical precedents. When and where did Muslims first come to live under non-Muslim rule? How did they respond? This is the question that led me to al-Andalus. Muslims ruled parts of the Iberian Peninsula for nearly eight centuries, from 711 to the fall of Granada in 1492. This period of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian coexistence is fascinating in its own right, as a period of interreligious coexistence and cultural, scientific and artistic flourishing. But what happened after Muslim rule is also really interesting, because the Christian “reconquest” of Iberia is considered a turning point for Islamic civilization. For the first time, a substantial, well-established population of Muslims found themselves permanently under Christian rule.
My work asks a specific question of this period: what did Muslim jurists, especially jurists in North Africa, have to say about the legal status of Muslims who remained in Iberia under Christian rule – that is, how should they practice Islam and how should they relate to their Christian overlords? Was it even permissible or thinkable for Muslims to be a subordinate population? These were tricky questions, because prior to this point the Islamic empire had always been expanding. During the formative period of Islamic law, Muslims were simply assumed to live under Muslim rule. Jurists were expected to rely on doctrines elaborated by past authorities, but they had precious little legal heritage to rely on in this case. I wanted to know not only what positions Muslim jurists developed in response to Christian conquest, but how they came up with answers to these vital questions.
Third, I sometimes start with Portugal, which is often credited with creating the first global empire. Portugal’s first stop in the eventual creation of that global empire was the conquest of Ceuta, a port city on Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, in 1415. This was followed by the Portuguese conquests of two more port cities, Tangier and Asilah, in 1471. For nearly a century, Portugal occupied most of Morocco’s Mediterranean and Atlantic ports, and therefore controlled much of the region’s trade.
One of my main discoveries in doing my research is that an important set of legal responses to Christian conquest survive from this era, that they are not about al-Andalus as everyone expected. They are responses to Muslim collaboration with Portuguese occupiers in Morocco itself. What this means is that these fatwas represent some of our earliest written records of indigenous resistance to European empire. We should be really interested in what these texts have to say – but this whole period of Portuguese occupation in Morocco is so little known. That in itself is an interesting question –why do we know so very little about this period?
3) Tell me about your recent projects and publications. Which works are your favorites and why?
Hendrickson: The work I am most proud of is my book, Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa. The book tackles this issue I have mentioned, of how Muslim jurists responded to Christian conquest in both Iberia and North Africa. Other scholars had certainly looked at this question before me, but they focused overwhelmingly on Iberian Muslims, as though this legal issue were the exclusive product of conditions unique to Iberia. This scholarship was also focused on the opinions of two jurists, al-Wansharisi – who in 1491 obligated conquered Muslims to emigrate – and al-Wahrani, who in 1504 advised Moriscos on the clandestine practice of Islam.
As noted above, my big discovery was that Portuguese conquests in North Africa generated a group of legal opinions condemning Muslim cooperation with Christian occupiers. In Leaving Iberia I introduce, analyze, and translate these texts for the first time. These fatwas not only shed light on a little-known period of Luso-Maghribi history, but they also completely change the way we should understand the better-known texts composed by al-Wansharisi and al-Wahrani.
Using evidence from these neglected texts, I dramatically reinterpret al-Wansharisi’s legal opinions as a veiled commentary on the Portuguese occupation of Morocco. Working a bit against the grain for Islamic legal studies, I advance a literary, allegorical reading of these texts. My argument is that al-Wansharisi’s most famous legal opinion is like the movie Don’t Look Up, a political allegory that is ostensibly about a comet on a collision course with Earth. The movie is also, or really, about climate change. In the book I argue that al-Wansharisi’s opinions are ostensibly about the obligation of Iberian Muslims to emigrate, but are also, or really, about the critical threat posed by Portuguese occupation.
I will mention two other publications. My most recent article, published in al-Usur al-Wusta in October 2023, includes the first Arabic critical edition of these fatwas about Portuguese occupation in North Africa. An earlier article, published in Islamic Law and Society in 2016, presents a unique series of fatwas in which North African jurists discouraged or prohibited the pilgrimage to Mecca for Muslims from the Islamic West. I offer translations of many of these texts – one of my primary goals is to make Arabic primary texts much more accessible to English-speaking audiences.
4) Your neighbor wants to know more about your field. What books, websites, videos, or other resources would you recommend to them? (why?)
Hendrickson: This is a great question. There are so many ways to answer it. Let me just mention a few things.
The Keeping it 101: A Killjoy’s Introduction to Religion podcast is so, so good. It is produced by two scholars of religion, Ilyse Morganstein Fuerst and Megan Goodwin. Their podcasts are accessible, informative, funny, and timely. They even come with links (on the website) to references and further resources. This is a fantastic introduction to the study of religion, the very real shaping influence religion has on the world around us, and the importance of religious literacy.
For al-Andalus, I recommend two books: Maria Rosa Menocal’s Ornament of the World is a really good readable and thought-provoking introduction to medieval Iberia. Ornament offers a series of beautiful historical vignettes that showcase the integral contributions of Muslims and Jews to Iberian culture, knowledge, and identity. Menocal argued that Muslims, Jews, and Christians “nourished a complex culture of tolerance,” during nearly eight centuries of Muslim rule and for a time under subsequent Christian rule. Menocal’s message was a hopeful challenge to a modern world struggling with interfaith relations in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It presents a rosy picture of Iberia, but that is not hard to see and critique.
The other book is Olivia Remie Constable’s anthology Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources. It’s an immense collection of short, readable primary texts translated primarily from Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin. It is the perfect collection of texts to introduce voices from this period, and the short editorial introductions to each text are great.
One film I would recommend is Journey to Mecca: In the Footsteps of Ibn Battuta. It’s a 40-minute IMAX film that begins with the famous global traveler Ibn Battuta leaving his home in Morocco as a young man in the early fourteenth century. The film tells the story of his first travels, across North Africa and into the Arabian Peninsula to perform the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The visuals are stunning. The film offers a great sense of the connectedness of a vast Muslim world in the medieval period. The final sequences shift between the past and present, allowing viewers to see what the hajj looks like now.
For North Africa, the best (and one of the only) books on the fifteenth century and the period of Portuguese occupation if still Vincent Cornell’s masterful Realm of the Saint.
The Program in Islamic Law at the Harvard Law School maintains a lot of great resources related to Islamic Law. For this one, my neighbor needs to be interested in Islamic law specifically, but I have to mention the Islamic Law Blog. They have a “guest editor” each month who contributes four posts on scholarship, pedagogy, or current events. I have especially enjoyed the pedagogy posts, in which professors share how they present legal concepts and history in their courses.
Finally, I recommend the New Books Network, especially the Islamic Studies channel, and Islamicate Book Reviews. These forums both introduce new scholarly books in an accessible format. The first one is a podcast in which an expert host interviews the author, while the second one is a YouTube channel with two hosts discussing the book.
5) How does your research connect to broader public issues? What overlap do you see between the topics you study and contemporary issues around the world today?
Hendrickson: There are a lot of ways to answer that question! I have been gratified to see that contemporary Muslims have found my historical work relevant. My article on the periodic prohibition of the hajj was cited in an op-ed urging Saudi Arabia to cancel the pilgrimage in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, for example. But as a non-Muslim, I do not see it as my place to speak to how the insights gained from my work can or should be applied to contemporary Muslim life or thought. Only Muslims can do that.
So what about that question of whether or not the fall of al-Andalus produced a useful precedent for contemporary Muslims who live as religious minorities? What I can say is that these situations are really different. The legal responses to Christian conquest that I have studied were produced primarily as a form of resistance to colonial occupation. Those premodern jurists discouraged collaboration with an enemy, and did so in order to protect both religious identity and territorial sovereignty. The fatwas we have from medieval Iberia and North Africa do not get into the intricacies of living a Muslim life in a modern nation-state or multicultural liberal democracy.
What I do think is relevant to modern times is what we can learn from the long arc of these legal conversations over time. There is a misconception that Islamic law is a single, unchanging set of rigid rules, and that where we see different interpretations of law, the strictest ones must be the most authentic. It is more accurate to see Islamic legal doctrines and precedents as a set of resources, a legal heritage that developed over time and that Muslims have continually adapted and reimagined.
For example, Leaving Iberia shows that Algerian and Mauritanian jurists selectively adapted precedents from medieval Iberia and North Africa when they faced French colonial occupation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My earlier project on pilgrimage also shows that certain legal precedents related to the hajj were carried forward from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries, but were applied in new ways. Islamic legal opinions are produced in, and shaped by, their particular historical contexts. There is not one timeless and rigid doctrine that is the “right” one that is applied in each situation.
One more point that I think is central to my work that resonates today is that the legal framework that surrounds us shapes our possibilities for religious expression. People tend to think that in a modern secular country like the United States, everyone is equally free to practice their religion. Last year, for example, Easter, Passover, and Eid al-Fitr (the celebration at the end of Ramadan) all overlapped. I saw a few expressions of appreciation, and perhaps pride, that adherents from three major religious traditions were all observing these important holidays side by side. But it is important to acknowledge that the legal environment in places like the US or Canada makes observance of these traditions a quite different experience for Muslims, Christians, and Jews.
At my institution in Canada, for example, we had a four-day closure for Easter weekend, just before final exams. Good Friday is a federal holiday, so not only do Christians have a protected right to worship on that day, but our campus closure meant that Muslim students could not hold Friday prayer on campus that day. Nor could Muslims study in the library or use the labs for four days leading into exams. When Eid arrived the next weekend, the ritual prayers were held on a Saturday morning – normally not a conflict, except during exam week, when final exams are indeed scheduled for Saturdays. Any Muslim wanting to observe those prayers or join in community celebrations that morning would have to ask for an individual exception from a major final exam, and would have to use religious identity as the explicit reason for that request.
As Megan Goodwin and Ilyse Morganstein Fuerst have pointed out in their excellent podcast, “spiritual but not religious” is an identity primarily available to cultural Christians, who can have their holidays without having to identify as Christians. That’s not the case for Jewish student or worker asking to observe Yom Kippur or a Muslim asking to observe one of the two major Eid festivals.
6) What other scholars/writers do you think are doing the most interesting work on religion in the Middle East?
Hendrickson: Maybe this is typical of academics, but my mind goes immediately to books I want to read (but have not yet): Reyhan Durmaz’s Stories between Christianity and Islam: Saints, Memory, and Cultural Exchange in Late Antiquity and Beyond, and Oumelbanine Zhiri’s Beyond Orientalism: Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari between Europe and North Africa. Two authors whose past work has influenced my own a great deal also have new books out, that I am excited by: Eric Calderwood (On Earth or in Poems: The Many Lives of al-Andalus; his previous book Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture was excellent) and Abigail Krasner Balbale (The Wolf King: Ibn Mardanish and the Construction of Power in al-Andalus; her co-authored book Arts of Intimacy is also incredible).
For North Africa, I highly recommend Justin Stearns’s Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Seventeenth-Century Morocco. Stearns explores the interrelationships between religious, natural, and occult sciences in early modern Morocco. Importantly, his book demonstrates the intellectual vibrancy of the region in this period.
There are a few scholars whose work I’ve been reading, whose first books should appear in the next few years and are worth watching for. Ari Schriber is working on Islamic court practice in Morocco during and after the French protectorate, based on a treasure trove of previously unexamined records. Caitlyn Olson is one of the few people working on theology and creed in early modern North Africa (as opposed to Sufism or law), so her work has been really eye-opening for me. Manuela Ceballos is examining (and telling beautifully) the stories of parallel saints from the Arabic Muslim and Latin Christian traditions in the early modern Mediterranean. Finally, Amanda Rogers brings the training of an artist and art historian to the analysis of visual culture and propaganda used to promote and counter-terrorism; her perspectives are incredibly unique and insightful.
7) How can people find out more about you and follow your work?
Hendrickson: I post my published work on my Academia.edu profile, and I try to publish in open-access venues. My article on pilgrimage is open access with Islamic Law and Society here, and my article with al-Usur al-Wusta is open access here. Eventually Leaving Iberia is meant to be fully open-access and have an Online Companion to accompany with the book on the Program in Islamic Law’s ShariaSource website.
Thanks so much to Dr. Jocelyn Hendrickson for speaking with me and sharing these details about her studies of Islamic legal history in medieval North Africa and al-Andalus. I really encourage you to check out her books and articles and consult the many great resources she mentioned here. For a complete list of the books, websites, and articles listed in this interview, you can also visit Interviewing Religion’s Books and Resources page.
And look for more interviews like this in the Interviewing Religion series! You can also subscribe to my blog here to get new posts directly by email.
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