Two Friars Who Went Among the Muslims and

the Realms of their( Memory: Francis of Assisi and

Anselm Turmeda/ Abdullah al-Tarjuman

Jason Welle O.F.M.

The Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies

Qui en est m on va simplement,

certes va fiancosament.
Deus ha lhom en avorriment,
de dues cares.1

F
rancis of Assisi was the first founder of a Catholic religious order to include a chap-
ter on mission in the communitys rule of life and many early friars shared his
adventurous spirit and heeded a call to go to the missions. But while Francis
famously described two different ways that friars could go among the Muslims,2 he prob-
ably never envisioned that chosen by Anselm Turmeda. This young Mallorcan friar took
the road less traveled by, moving to Tunis and in the presence of the local ruler, publicly
converting to Islam. The arc of his life took a stranger turn when he composed several
writings which were ostensibly Christian in his native Catalan before penning his final
work, a searing anti-Christian polemical treatise, in Arabic. Conveniently, neither the
Muslims nor the Christians knew about the texts he wrote for the other community, so
this contradiction went unnoticed and he achieved the most sublime apotheosis to
which a person could aspire,3 as both communities, in different ways, ended up rever-
ing him as a saint.4 To paraphrase a great scholar of Catalan literature, if any medieval

1 (
Anselm Turmeda/ Abdullah al-Tarjuman, Llibre de bons amonestaments, in Turmeda and Bernat
Metge, Obres menors. (Barcelona: Editorial Barcino, 1987), 152.
2
Francis Earlier Rule, which did not receive papal approval, suggests that friars may go among the
Muslims either by not engaging in arguments or disputes but being subject to others for Gods sake, or
by announcing the Word of God, when they see it pleases the Lord, and calling others to baptism. Many
contemporary practitioners of interreligious dialogue see Francis openness to the possibility of non-
proselytizing mission as a beacon of light amid the darkness of the crusades, especially because Francis
likely composed the text after his travel to Egypt and encounter with the sultan. Francis of Assisi, Regula
non bullata, in Francis of Assisi: Early Documents. Volume 1: The Saint, eds. R.J. Armstrong et al.
(Hyde Park: New City, 1999), 6386: 74 (chapter 16); for the most extensive discussion of this key chap-
ter, see J. Hoeberichts, Francis and Islam (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1997); for one of the many
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DOI: 10.1111/muwo.12197
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 T WO F RIARS W HO W ENT A MONG THE M USLIMS

Catalan writer were destined to play games with the field of literary criticism, it is this
friar-adventurer.5 This article revisits the legends about that mysterious friar-cum-
Muslim, drawing upon the historical method and the argument of John Tolans Saint
Francis and the Sultan. First, the essay recalls Tolans work, including the crucial
notion of lieux de m e moire. Second follows a sketch of Turmedas life and the inter-
nal contradiction in his writings. The third and longest section examines the develop-
ment of the Turmeda legend, noting stages in the evolution of that legend which
parallel Tolans observations about the memory of Francis of Assisi. Fourth and
finally, the essay revisits the matter of historical method and suggests some ways in
which the life and work of Turmeda provides helpful guidance for Muslim-Christian
dialogue today, both in Muslim-majority lands and in the West.

A Curious Encounter
Tolans provocative book on Francis of Assisi draws upon the concept of lieux de
memoire (sg. lieu), developed by French historian Pierre Nora.6 Nora confronts the
acceleration of history, the phenomenon that divides social memory from history, real
memory from well-sorted traces of evidence. The chasm between the two, this uprooting
of memory, has had the effect of a revelation, breaking the bonds of identity with the
past.7 Nora thus focuses on the untranslatable notion of lieux de m emoire, places in
which memory is crystallized and finds refuge. Because there no longer exist milieux de
memoire, settings in which the memory is a real part of everyday experience,8 the
human spirit calls out for portals of connection with a past threatened by a deritualized
world.9 Realms of memory have special status because they reshape collective

more recent reflections on this text, see L. Gallant, Francis of Assisi, Forerunner of Interreligious
Dialogue: Chapter 16 of the Earlier Rule Revisited, Franciscan Studies 64 (2006), 5382.
3
M. Asn Palacios, El original arabe de la Disputa del asno contra fray Anselmo Turmeda, in Huellas
del Islam (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1941), 115160: 160; originally published in Revista de filologa
~
espanola 1 (1914), 151; republished in Obras escogidas II y III: De historia y filologa arabe (Madrid-

Granada: Escuelas de Estudios Arabes, 1948), 563616.
4
For a helpful theoretical discussion of the notion of sainthood in Islam, see V. J. Cornell, Realm of the
Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (Austin: University of Texas, 1998).
5
M. de Montoliu, Les grans personalitats de la literatura catalana. Vol. 4: Eiximenis, Turmeda i linici
de lhumanisme a Catalunya: Bernat Metge (Barcelona: Editorial Alpha, 1960), 63.
6
P. Nora, ed., Les lieux de m emoire, 7 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-); portions translated by
A. Goldhammer as The Realms of Memory, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996-); portions
translated by M. Trouille as Rethinking France, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001-).
7
Nora, The Realms of Memory, vol. 1, 2; for M. Roudebushs earlier translation of this material, probably
the most influential of Noras essays in the English-speaking world, see Between Memory and History:
Les Lieux de M emoire, Representations 26 (1989), 724. Citations refer to Goldhammers translation.
8
Nora, The Realms of Memory, vol. 1, 1.
9
This theme in Noras work has led to the criticism that his project depends upon an undercurrent of
sentimentalism and nostalgia: he combines a reflective, postmodern impetus to deconstruct with a
restorative yearning that seeks continuity with the past. Stephen Legg puts the criticism pointedly:
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memory: these publications, sites, or events stand as foci of transition and identity, as
boundary moments in common memory.10
Tolan casts the encounter between Francis of Assisi and the Ayyubid Sultan Malik al-
Kamil as just such a lieu de m emoire, leveraging the gravitas this term has garnered
among historians as well as in French popular discourse.11 Little reliable historical data
remains of the fateful day in Damietta in 1219 when Francis crossed the battle lines dur-
ing a brief period of truce to request an audience with the Muslim leader. Tolan sees that
Europeans through the centuries have invested the encounter between Francis and al-
Kamil with profound meaning, so he identifies stages of development in the ways in
which hagiographers, sculptors, painters, pamphleteers, and others have depicted it. He
observes that these interpreters read their own preoccupations into the story, and that
their subsequent descriptions of the encounter illustrate the evolving fears and hopes
inspired by the encounter between Christian Europe and the Muslim East.12 In sum,
these range from Francis the seeker of martyrdom, to Francis the crusader, to Francis the
colonizer, to Francis the apostle of peace. Whether the memory of Francis serves to jus-
tify nineteenth century French attempts to civilize the barbarous Arabs or attempts
today to promote interreligious understanding, the meeting of Francis and al-Kamil has
provided supple clay which, as Tolan shows, can be molded into many different, often
irreconcilable, forms. Due to the paucity of probable facts, Tolan considers questions
about what provoked Francis to depart the crusader camp, what the two men said to
each other, or how their meeting influenced the lives of the two men difficult or impos-
sible to answer, since the sources are both incomplete and partisan.13 Tolan thus
eschews any attempt to establish the historical truth of what happened and instead offers
a narrative of the changing portrayals of the event. At his most caustic, Tolan suggests

Nora operates within a Foucault-inspired framework, but one that collapses under the full weight of a
Foucaldian understanding of power. S. Legg, Contesting and Surviving Memory: Space, Nation, and
Nostalgia in Les Lieux de M emoire, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 23 (2005), 481
504: 495.
10
Noras work builds upon the seminal insights of Maurice Halbwachs, the first modern theorist explic-
itly associated with the notion of collective memory. For discussion, see N. Russell, Collective Memory
before and after Halbwachs, The French Review 79, no. 4 (2006), 792804; W. Kansteiner, Finding
Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies, History and Theory 41
(2002), 179197.
11
This lieu is not, of course, a physical place, but Nora himself applies the notion much more broadly
than material sites. Symbolic events like pilgrimages and anniversaries and functional objects like dic-
tionaries or textbooks also can be lieux de m emoire; indeed, Nora has acknowledged that his multi-
volume project on lieux de m emoire may itself have become such a monument. J. Tolan, Saint Francis
and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009), originally published as Le Saint chez le Sultan: la rencontre de Francois dAssise et de
lislam (Paris: Seuil, 2007); for a shorter summary of the book, see The Friar and the Sultan: Francis of
Assisis Mission to Egypt, European Review 16, no. 1 (2008), 115126; Nora, End of commemoration,
in Realms of Memory, vol. 3, 609637.
12
Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan, 12.
13
Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan, 4.
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that these portrayals reflect, above all, a darkened and distorted image of our own wor-
ries and aspirations.14 One must conclude that devotees of Francis through the centuries
amount to a degraded version of the scholars George Tyrrell criticized more than a century
ago for claiming to determine what really happened in the life of Jesus of Nazareth while
they in fact gazed down into the still water of a well.15 He looks just like me, a mirror.

An Improbable Life (
An examination of the legends surrounding Turmeda/ Abdullah shows that the
stages of development Tolan describes in recollections of Francis and al-Kamil can also
(
be observed in Turmeda/ Abdullah, mutatis mutandis. The probable facts about the life
(
of Turmeda/ Abdullah are few. Most historians build their sketch of his life on his lone
(
surviving Arabic text and vicious anti-Christian polemic, Tuhfat : al-arb f l-radd ala ahl
al-s: alb (The Clever Mans Gift as a Reply to the People of the Cross).16 This work begins
with an autobiographical section which describes the authors upbringing, education,
conversion, and life in Islam.17 Externally, several documents from the period broadly
confirm the narrative of the Tuhfa, : even though scholars reject some episodes of that

14
Tolan, The Friar and the Sultan, 126.
15
G. Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-roads (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910), 44.
16
Some editions render the title as Tuhfat
: al-adb (The Learned Mans Gift). Mkel de Epalza, the great-
est scholar of this text, considers adb the most primitive form but acknowledges that most manuscript
catalogs retain arb. He thus adopts a hybrid solution, usually favoring the Arabic title Tuhfat : al-arb
but translating the unsure word as Letrado (Sp.)/Lletrat (Cat.), a translation of adb. M. de Epalza, Fray
(
Anselm Turmeda ( Abdallah al-Taryuman) y su pol emica islamo-cristiana. Edici on, traduccion y
nd
: 2 Edition (Madrid: Libros Hiperi
estudio de la Tuhfa. on, 1994), 169; for a fuller discussion, see Epalza,
Nuevas aportaciones a la biografia de Fray Anselmo Turmeda, Analecta sacra tarraconensia: Revista
de ciencias historico-eclesiasticas 38 (1965), 87158: 1405.
17
For a full English translation of this autobiographical section, see R. Boase, Autobiography of a Mus-
lim Convert: Anselm Turmeda (c. 1353-c. 1430), al-Masaq 9 (199697), 5979. Several English versions
of the key portion of this autobiography exist and seem to have been produced completely independ-
ently of each other; they each refer to Epalzas study as their source and do not acknowledge each
others existence. J.-M. Gaudeul, Encounters & Clashes: Islam and Christianity in History. II: Texts
(Rome: Pontificio Istituto di Studi Arabi e dIslamistica, 2000), 8590; M. Garca-Arenal, Dreams and
Reason: Autobiographies of Converts in Religious Polemics, in Conversions islamiques: Identit es reli-
gieuses en Islam m editerraneen, ed. M. Garca-Arenal (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2001), 89118:
111115; D. F. Reynolds, ed., Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 194201; excerpts also occur in a doctoral dissertation,
Z.I. Giraldo, Anselm Turmeda: An Intellectual Biography of a Medieval Apostate, Including a Transla-
tion of the Debate between the Friar and the Ass (Ph.D., City University of New York, 1975), 10160.
For the full Arabic text of the Tuhfa: with a facing page Spanish translation, see Epalza, Fray Anselm
Turmeda, 190497; for the full Catalan translation by Epalza and Ignasi Riera, see Autobiografia i atac
als partidaris de la creu (Barcelona: Curial, 1978). Robert Beier prepared a facing page German-Arabic
translation of the autobiographical section. Anselm Turmeda: eine Studie zur interkulturellen Literatur
(Bonn: Romanistischer Verlag, 1996), 163180.
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autobiographical section as either wild embellishments or outright fabrications.18 Tur-

meda was born in Mallorca around 1354. He was an educated youth and probably
entered the Franciscan order at the age of fourteen, when he began study at the Univer-
sity of Lerida. He completed his bachelors degree there in 1374, and four years later
began studies at the University of Bologna, where he stayed for ten years. Early in 1388
he returned to Mallorca for a few months, spent some time in Sicily, and later that year
moved to Tunis, where he passed some months with Christian hosts before publicly con-
( (
verting to Islam before Abu l- Abbas Ahmad.
: He adopted the Arabic name Abdullah,
(
later receiving the moniker al-Tarjuman, or, the translator.19 Abdullah married and
fathered children, living out the rest of his years in Tunis primarily as a government serv-
ant in the customs bureau and as a translator. Christian rulers provide independent evi-
(
dence for Abdullahs work in maritime customs under the next Muslim ruler, Abu Faris
( (
Abd al- Azz, with several chilly promises of safe conduct that continue to address Tur-
meda as a friar. Indeed, Turmeda continued to refer to himself as a friar in his Catalan
texts, which acknowledge his residence in Tunis. He wrote both poetry and prose in his
native language, including the Llibre de bons amonestaments (The Book of Good Coun-
sels, 1398?),20 Cobles a la divisi
o del regne de Mallorques (Songs about the Division of the
Kingdom of Mallorca, 1398), Profecies (Prophecies, 1407),22 and the Debate between
21

18
Giraldo offers a fine outline of Turmedas life, although one which trusts data from the Tuhfa
: more
than other scholars. Epalza confirms the basic chronology of the autobiographical section of the Tuhfa,:
although some of the dates cannot be fixed with precision. Giraldo, Anselm Turmeda, 1098; Epalza,
Fray Anselm Turmeda, 1125.
19
The decision about how to name this man bears directly on the questions at hand. Referring to him
solely as Turmeda, while still common in Western scholarly literature, can subtly reinforce the pre-
sumption that his Christian identity is his primary identity and determines the criteria by which one
judges him authentic or duplicitous, virtuous or vicious. However, consistently referring to him as
( (
Abdullah or Turmeda/ Abdullah misrepresents the way that later biographers understood the
mans primary identity and would skew the discussion of that literature in the development of his
legend. In this essay, I use Turmeda when referring to events in his life before his conversion, to the
writings of biographers who used the name Turmeda for him, and to Catalan texts he penned under
(
the name Turmeda. I use Abdullah when referring to his own self-understanding in the Tuhfa, : a
(
text he penned under the name Abdullah, and to Muslim recollections of the man. In the context of
modern scholarly debates about him, I generally use both names. The relative dominance of the name
Turmeda throughout this essay should not be taken as an indication of his primary identity; this is pre-
cisely the issue in question. Beyond the question of whether one should use his Arabic or his Catalan
name, Epalza has also questioned the Mallorcans original first name, hypothesizing that he was origi-
nally known as Telmo (En Telm in Mallorcan Catalan) and adopted Anselm at some point in his
ecclesiastical career. Epalza, Vivencies (meves) mallorquines relacionades amb Francesc de B. Moll,
in Homenatge de la Universitat dAlacant a Francesc de Borja Moll (Alicante: Universitat dAlacant,
2003), 335.
20
For one of the many editions of this text, see Turmeda and Metge, Obres menors, 144159.
21
Turmeda and Metge, Obres menors, 103143; for a recent study of the political thought of Turmeda/
(
Abdullah with an astute analysis of the Cobles, see M. Pedretti, Letture politiche delle opere catalane
di Anselm Turmeda, Studi ispanici 36 (2011), 1150.
22
Turmeda, Les Profecies den Turmeda, Revue hispanique 24 (1911), 480496.
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 T WO F RIARS W HO W ENT A MONG THE M USLIMS

(
Figure 1. The Tomb of Abdullah al-Tarjuman24

the Friar and the Ass (1418).23 He penned his final text, the polemical Tuhfa,
: in 1420.
His date of death is uncertain. He presumably survived beyond 1423 due to a bill of safe
conduct issued then, but most scholars assume that he didnt survive long afterwards, as
(
he was about seventy years old at that time. A grave traditionally ascribed to Abdullah,
marked as Sd Tuhfa,
: still stands in the market in Tunis.
The most significant historical embellishments in his biography surround Turmedas
(
conversion to Islam and the events that follow. These begin with Abdullahs own
account, which provides an autobiographical narrative of a shift from Christianity to
(
Islam with a level of detail that would not be repeated until modern times.25 Abdullah
attributes the seed of his conversion to an elderly friar Nicolau who taught him in
Bologna. The young Turmeda struggled to understand the passages about the Paraclete
in Johns Gospel, and when pressed, his teacher informed him that Jesus prophesied the
coming of Muhammad.
: This elderly friar thus repeats a standard trope in Muslim
apologetics, encourages his young student to convert to Islam, and cites his advanced
age and frailty as the sole reason he had not converted himself. Some modern scholars

23
This work does not survive in its Catalan original, primarily due to its inclusion on the Index of For-
bidden Books. Modern translations draw on the French translation published in Lyons in 1544,
reprinted in Revue hispanique 24 (1911), 358479; for a full English translation, see Giraldo, Anselm
Turmeda, 165288; portions translated in N. Kenny, Anselm Turmeda, in Cambridge Translations of
Renaissance Philosophical Texts. Volume 1: Moral Philosophy, ed. J. Kraye (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 316.
24
Photo courtesy of Diego Sarri
o Cucarella.
25
Epalza, Fray Anselm Turmeda, 26.
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acknowledge that Turmedas studies may have left him unsatisfied with certain points of
Christian theology, but beyond this concession, they do not take the historicity of this
exchange seriously26 and occasionally go so far as to dismiss the exchange as a bizarre
fable invented to give solemnity to the authors apostasy and glorify his Muslim
fanaticism.27

The Evolution of the Turmeda Legend

Because Turmeda stands alone among medieval writers by authoring texts in Arabic
and in a European language, his corpus invites the careful study of literary historians.28
However, the real challenge for scholars of Turmeda is to account for the psychic unity
of a man who seems a Christian on one side of his pen and a Muslim on the other, with
neither side acknowledging the tension.29 This challenge makes Turmedas corpus both
attractive and torturous at the same time.30 Scholars of literature speak about Turmedas
linguistic duplicity,31 his intercultural Dasein,32 his double-dealing,33 his double

26 (
Giraldo offers an exception in this regard, beginning with the assumption that Abdullahs account of
his fateful interview with his elderly master is essentially true, but her explanation is not the slightest
bit convincing. Epalzas discussion is much more balanced and reasonable. More recently, Mercedes
(
Garca-Arenal speculated in a discussion of this passage that Abdullah likely knew the polemic of
Muhammad
: al-Qays, who writes of the Knights Templar as a group of secret Muslims who preserved
the true teachings of Jesus but vowed secrecy about this while living among other Christians. The liter-
(
ary dependence of Abdullah on al-Qays is possible but not necessary; al-Qayss text also contains a
much longer dispute between the author and a monk who steadfastly but unsuccessfully argues the
truth of the Christian faith. Giraldo, Anselm Turmeda, 1836, esp. 23; Epalza, Fray Anselm Turmeda,
31; Garca-Arenal, Dreams and Reason, 100; see also P. S. van Koningsveld and G. A. Wiegers, The
Polemical Works of Muhammad : al-Qays (fl. 1309) and their Circulation in Arabic and Aljamiado
among Mudejars in the Fourteenth Century, Al-Qantara 15 (1994), 163199.
27
Montoliu, Les grans personalitats, 75.
28
Epalza, Symbiose arabo-hispanique: Lecrivain Anselm Turmeda / Abdallah At-Tardjuman et son
rayonnement, in 1492: Lheritage culturel arabe en Europe, ed. M. Barbot (Strasbourg: Universite des
Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg, 1994), 5160: 51.
29
Montoliu, Les grans personalitats, 95ff. Whence Ryan Szpiechs tentative speculation about a psycho-
(
analysis of Turmeda/ Abdullah, that self-narratives like his reveal a failed attempt to fully sublimate the
converts own doubt and irresolution. R. Szpiech, Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious
Authority in Medieval Polemic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2013), 217.
30
A. Calvet, Fray Anselmo Turmeda: Heterodoxo Espanol ~ (13521423-32?) (Barcelona: Libreria Royo,
1914), 6.
31
Beier, Anselm Turmeda, 57.
32
Beier, Anselm Turmeda, 144. Beiers thesis depends upon a theoretical distinction between bicultur-
ality and interculturality. The former implicitly suggests a psychological divide, or bifurcation; the latter
integrates the two sides of an authors identity as essential and mutually necessary elements of an
authors textual voice.
33
Armand Llinares refers to the Mallorcans double jeu and uses lhomme aux deux visages as the
overarching image for his introduction to the Debate between the Friar and the Ass. Anselm Turmeda,
^ ed. A. Llinares (Paris: J. Vrin, 1984), 1, 8.
Dispute de lane,
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personality,34 his double fidelity,35 his double liminality,36 or posit in him a duplicity
unique in the history of thought.37 Rarely since the Council of Chalcedon has one
encountered the intense and desperate attempt to articulate someones two-ness that
(
one finds in the scholarly literature concerning Turmeda/ Abdullah. While modern schol-
ars struggle to find the balance or integration in this man, those who developed legends
about him did not. They took a path of lesser resistance and did not allow probable facts
to impede the stories they wanted, or felt they needed, to tell.38 The progression of fears,
hopes, and preoccupations in the stages of development in that legend are familiar from
Tolans work.
The Turmeda legend initially flowered in response to the great popularity of his short
work Llibre de bons amonestaments, published in at least thirty-eight editions between 1594
and 1842 and referring to the author as Father or Reverend Father.39 It was usually the
first book given to children after their primer and their practice of memorizing the maxims
in it continued into the nineteenth century.40 Questions about the personal morality of the
author of such an influential book of moral teachings could not be allowed to stand, so Tur-
medas story began an evolution into hagiography in the early sixteenth century. Clerics in
the seventeenth and eighteenth century then solidified the gap between legend and life,
especially regarding the authors conversion, and cemented his reputation as a Christian
moral exemplar.41 When the Llibre was brought before the Inquisition, the fact of Turmedas
conversion to Islam was still a matter of record.42 Biographers dealt with this fact by intro-
ducing the figure of Fray Pedro Marginet, a Cistercian monk who had fled his monastery of
Poblet as a renegade before later repenting, returning, and leading a life of penance. To be
sure, Turmeda almost certainly never met Marginet, as Turmedas move to Tunis preceded

34
J. Samso, Turmediana, Boletn de la Real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 34 (197172),
5185: 53; M. Salvat, Un franciscain atypique du XVIe si ecle: Anselme Turmeda. Etudes de Langue et
Litt
e rature francaises de lUniversite de Hiroshima 24 (2005), 240256: 251.
35
G. Frontera, Anselm Abd allah, la doble fidelitat (Palma: Institut dEstudis Balearics, 2006).
36
Alain Guy sees Turmeda as a liminal figure in a double sense: he lives between Christianity and
Islam, but also between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance. A. Guy,
Lcumenisme critique de Turmeda (Abdallah le Drogman) dans la Tuhfa, : Sprache und Erkenntnis
im Mittelalter, vol. 2 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981), 10201025: 1021.
37
Montoliu, Les grans personalitats, 92.
38
Written over a century ago, the best survey of the development of the Turmeda legend remains
Calvets, though Giraldo incorporates some more recent discoveries. Calvet, Fray Anselmo Turmeda,
956; Giraldo, Anselm Turmeda, 6798.
39
Giraldo, Anselm Turmeda, 72.
40
L. M. Alvarez, Anselm Turmeda: The Visionary Humanism of a Muslim Convert and Catalan Proph-
et, in Meeting the Foreign in the Middle Ages, ed. A. Classen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 172191:
178.
41
Giraldo believes that the Turmeda legend began to develop when a Castilian translator of the LLibre
misinterpreted Turmedas own words in the preface to that book. Giraldo, Anselm Turmeda, 6770.
42
The Llibre was not placed on the 1583 Index of Prohibited Books, although Turmedas Debate was.
Giraldo, Anselm Turmeda, 71.
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Marginets escape by more than twenty years,43 but the two mens stories offered later
chroniclers the chance to paint parallel images of a lapse into sin followed by perfect repent-
ance. In the earliest legend, Marginet experienced such sorrow at Turmedas conversion to
Islam that angels carried Marginet to Tunis, where he confronted Turmeda during a sermon
to his fellow Muslims. Turmeda then called himself another David and repented, saying, I
have sinned. . .Lord, have mercy! Predictably, Turmeda was promptly martyred; Marginet
returned to his monastery in Mallorca, again on the wings of angels. A later biography
reverses the influence, painting the pernicious Marginet as the cause of Turmedas sins,
including Turmedas desire to leave the Franciscan order when Turmeda yet remained in
Mallorca. Turmeda then felt remorse for this temptation, set sail for Rome to beg pardon,
and fell into capture and slavery at the hands of Muslims sailors who forced him into apos-
tasy in Tunis.44 The legend here actually parallels the Tuhfa,
: a text that would be unknown
to Christians for two more centuries, by describing Turmedas conversion to Islam as a
splendid public act before the Muslim king. This conversion set the stage for the always the-
atrical Turmedas public reversion to Christianity, which the crowd greeted with shocked
silence followed by a savage beating. Turmeda survived this beating to refuse the kings
offer of riches and honor and the king promptly beheaded him.
Several characteristics mark this first stage of the Turmeda legend: a collective remem-
brance of the facts of Turmedas life that was vague at best, the thoroughgoing antagonism
toward Muslims common among Christians after the Reconquista, and the need to sanctify
the author of a very popular book used to teach morals to children. No evidence exists of a
liturgical cult of Turmeda, but Christians familiar with his writings universally considered him
a martyr even though they had no positive evidence for it. This assumption is understand-
able: they knew he had moved to Tunis and become a Muslim, and they possessed ostensi-
bly Christian books that, based on the contents of the works themselves, he wrote after his
conversion. The legends fit an established pattern: the hero commits a moral misstep, con-
verts out of his own tradition, repents, converts back, and is martyred.45 Such stories emerge
naturally from the group-think of a community that could not imagine the possibility that a
learned Christian would freely and consciously become a Muslim and live out his days as a
Muslim. These legends spread widely but later gave way to the more critical spirit of the

43
Due to Turmedas travels for his work in the customs bureau, the two may have met, though the pos-
sibility seems unlikely. Even if they did meet, Marginet certainly did not influence Turmedas conver-
sion, and the likelihood that years later, Turmeda could have been so influenced by a monk from a
different order who was more than forty years his junior seems unlikely.
44
For a description of the conditions of Christians taken captive by Muslim pirates during the period in
which this legend developed, see S. C. Stachera, Franciscanos y sultanes en Marruecos: Relaciones entre
el poder (al-sult: an) y la obra religiosa y humanitaria de los Frailes Menores (Granada: BTG, 2013),
157169. European Christians were aware of public, solemn rites through which Christians abjured the
Christian faith and converted; some of these converts became zealous proponents of Islamic doctrine.
45
Among other archetypal patterns in hagiography, Beier suggests a parallel with the life of Br. Stephen
of Hungary, a friar-martyr who predated Turmeda by a century and whose story was known in Spain in
Turmedas time and after. Beier, Anselm Turmeda, 3337.
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 T WO F RIARS W HO W ENT A MONG THE M USLIMS

nineteenth century when scholars gained access to other texts from the Turmeda corpus.46
Biographers discovered the chronological discrepancy and dismissed the relationship
between Turmeda and Marginet and the miraculous journey involved. Strikingly, some of
these nineteenth century historians actually denied that Turmeda had ever apostatized,
because they remained ignorant of the Arabic Tuhfa. : They assumed that he lived in Tunis as
a Christian, perhaps because he was captured and dragged there.47 In this stage of the Tur-
meda legend, scholars claim to see Turmeda in the context of the philosophical spirit of his
day, which curiously parallels the philosophical spirit of their own. They locate Turmedas
personality primarily in the Debate between the Friar and the Ass, and find Averroeist, skepti-
cal influences in it which supposedly dominated Turmedas personality from the days of his
northern Italian education. Agustn Calvet exemplifies this approach to Turmeda, painting
him as a radical skeptic. Turmedas true conversion was not from Christianity to Islam, but
from belief to unbelief. When he lost his faith, he had the choice to continue vegetating in
his order or to confess his incredulity and face the consequences. Islam offered him a tertium
quid in which he could go through some ritual motions and enjoy material prosperity while
leading a good life of rationalism and firm skepticism.48 On this account, Turmeda was a
man born too early, a model for the children of the Renaissance and later skeptics.49 Flickers

46
Whence Giraldos apt comment, Actually the astonishing fact about Turmeda was not that he
became a legend but, that after having endured for centuries as a myth, he returned once again as a his-
torically authenticated figure. Giraldo, Anselm Turmeda, 81.
47
Europeans first encountered the Tuhfa : in 1885 when Jean Spiro translated it into French, although
(
Spiro didnt make the connection between Turmeda and the authors Arabic name, Abdullah al-
Tarjuman. Le present de lhomme lettre pour r
e futer les partisans de la croix, Revue de lhistoire des reli-
gions 12 (1885), 6889, 179205, 278301.
48
Calvet, Fray Anselmo Turmeda, 2167. Epalza argues that rationalist idiosyncrasies in Spiros transla-
tion of the Tuhfa,
: in a free-thinking style characteristic of nineteenth century France, contributed to this
vision of the skeptical Turmeda. Epalza, Fray Anselm Turmeda, 32.
49
Calvet, Fray Anselmo Turmeda, 220. Pace Giraldo, who asserts that this version of Turmeda/
(
Abdullah has been allowed to die a merciful death and no serious student of the matter has taken up
(
this approach after Calvet, this approach to Turmeda/ Abdullah survives well beyond the nineteenth
century, particularly among philosophers enamored of skepticism. Joan-Llus Marfany strangely asserts
(
that the Tuhfa
: manifests the same skepticism with regard to Islam that Turmeda/ Abdullah manifests
there and elsewhere with regard to Christianity, making him one of the rare examples of such universal
skepticism in Western literature prior to Rousseau. The opening comments of Alain Guys essay permit
(
the possibility that Turmeda/ Abdullah was a complete skeptic in the school of Paduan Averroeism,
though Guy later argues that most passages in the Debate considered examples of skepticism fail to
exceed a sincere anticlericalism and desire for moral reform. That is, one must distinguish between
Turmedas sarcasm and irony on the one hand and a loss of faith on the other; the latter is not demon-
strable from the Debate. Based on his more realistic rhetoric of exemplarity, Lourdes Mara Alvarez casts
Turmeda as a precursor to the Renaissance. However, she focuses not on the skepticism which consti-
tutes the heart of Giraldos objection. These essays demonstrate the difficulty in defining skepticism.
Paul L. Heck sheds light on that matter in his recent book on the subject, parts of which deal directly
with the Ikhwan al-Safa
: (the Brethren of Purity), a group whose texts influenced Turmeda. Giraldo,
Anselm Turmeda, 91; J.-L. Marfany, Ideari dAnselm Turmeda (Barcelona, Ediciones 62, 1965), 7; A.
Guy, La pensee ambigue de Turmeda, lIslamise, in Philosophes ib eriques et ib
ero-americains en exil
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of this image of a doubting Turmeda endure in more recent scholars who see him as a pre-
cursor to postmodernism, framing his skeptical spirit as an intentional effort to destabilize
meaning.50
Chronologically, these attempts to paint Turmeda as a precursor of the Renaissance
accompanied a Catalan literary revival, a swell of Catalan nationalistic pride exploited by
persons everywhere on the political spectrum. This Renaixenca included the recovery
of medieval Catalan literature, the memory of a cosmopolitan literary culture which prag-
matically engaged the rich languages and cultures in the region. Catalans contrasted their
ethos with the Castilian preference for uniformity, lionizing the Catalans acceptance of
the porousness of the religious and cultural boundaries surrounding them.51 Turmeda, a
man who navigated the complexities and contradictions of life amid these permeable
boundaries, thus became a hero of the distinctive genius and creativity of his country-
men.52 The great Spanish Arabist Miguel Asn Palacios dealt a major blow to that revival
movement when he ushered in the next phase of the Turmeda legend with his crushing
dismissal of Turmeda as a fraudulent plagiarist.53 Asn asserted that Turmeda had stolen
an Arabic text from the the Ikhwan al-Safa
: (the Brethren of Purity) and used it as the
basis of his Catalan Debate between the Friar and the Ass.54 This assault on Turmedas
originality has provoked a response from all subsequent scholars.55 They do not

(Toulouse: Universite de Toulouse-Le Mirail, 1977), 1156: 12, 29; L. M. Alvarez, Beastly Colloquies: Of
Plagiarism and Pluralism in Two Medieval Disputations between Animals and Men, Comparative
Literature Studies 39, no. 3 (2002), 1945; P. L. Heck, Skepticism in Classical Islam: Moments of
Confusion (New York: Routledge, 2014), 521, 8186.
50
Neither Alvarez nor Szpiech seize on the term postmodernism, but both emphasize the Mallorcans
constant intent to destabilize meaning and his powerlessness in the hands of extra-textual forces
beyond his own control. Alvarez, Visionary Humanism, 183; R. Szpiech, The Original is Unfaithful to
the Translation: Conversion and Authenticity in Abner of Burgos and Anselm Turmeda, eHumanista
14 (2010), 146177: 170.
51
Alvarez, Visionary Humanism, 1857.
52
Contemporary discourse about Catalan nationalism generally does not include Mallorca or the other
Balearic Islands as part of Catalonia; for some recent synthetic reflections on Mallorcan images of
(
Turmeda/ Abdullah, see Frontera, Anselm Abdallah,  la doble fidelitat.
53
It cannot be believed that the identity of the proofs [used by the Ihkwan al-Safa
: and Turmeda] is lim-
ited to the ideas in them. This is not the case of a simple adaptation made with some creative license; the
plagiarism is completely shameless. . . Asns conclusion ratchets up his rhetoric, referring to Turmedas
audacious sophistries and the stupendous farce of his life. Asn, El original arabe, 147, 160. On the
consequence of Asns work for the Catalan Renaixenca, see Alvarez, Beastly Colloquies, 179.
54
The numbering of the treatises of the Brethren of Purity is not consistent; different scholars refer to
the text in question as the twenty-first or the twenty-second, depending on which edition they use. For
the most recent, see Ikhwan al-Safa,
: The Case of the Animals Versus Man before the King of the Jinn:
an Arabic Critical Edition and English Translation of Epistle 22, ed. and trans. L. E. Goodman and
R. McGregor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
55 
Another example of a scholar who echoes Asns assessment is Angel Gonzalez Palencia, who refers
to Turmedas stupendous plagiarism. Among recent scholars who have debated the assignation of
plagiarism, see Alvarez, Szpiech, and Everette E. Larson. A.  Gonzalez Palencia, Islam and the
Occident, Hispania 18, no. 3 (1935), 261; Alvarez, Beastly Colloquies; Szpiech, The Original; E. E.
582 C 2017 Hartford Seminary.
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 T WO F RIARS W HO W ENT A MONG THE M USLIMS

question Asns textual workthe dependence of the Debate on the Brethren of Purity is
beyond dispute56but question the underlying presumptions active in Asns moral con-
demnation.57 Asn could not accept the sincerity of Turmedas conversion to Islam.58
Critics who resist the possibility that a person converted out of inner convictions often
attribute the conversion to worldly considerations;59 such a response is not new and
(
Abdullah himself anticipates it in the autobiographical section of the Tuhfa.: The novel
stroke in Asns criticism is that rather than locate Turmedas apostasy in temptations like
lust or greed, as prior Christian authors had done, Asn paints Turmeda as a fundamen-
tally dishonest man.60 The virulence of the campaign against Turmedas moral integrity,

Larson, The Disputa of Anselmo, Translation, Plagiarism, or Embellishment? in eds. A. Torres-Alcala,

V. Ag uera and N. B. Smith, Josep Maria Sol e : Homage, homenaje, homenatge (Barcelona: Puvill
a-Sol
Libros S.A., 1984), 285296.
56
Calvet provides several counter-examples in an attempt to demonstrate the creativity of Turmedas
text, a work Calvet considers a plagiarism with regard to its form but a parody with regard to its spirit.
Marinela Garca and Ll ucia Martin likewise note the different spirit of Turmedas text and identify natu-
ralistic elements in the Debate from the European encyclopaedic tradition Turmeda studied in his
youth, including Bartholomew of Glanvilles Liber de proprietatibus rerum, Brunetto Latinis Llibre del
tresor, and the Catalan text Fiore di virtu.  Michel Salvat, apparently without knowing Garca and
Martns work, argues the same regarding Bartholomews Liber, but none of these three scholars dem-
onstrates a serious examination of the treatise of the Brethren of Purity. They provide a plausible
hypothesis that Turmeda depends upon European (Christian) sources here without examining the text
Turmeda has been accused of plagiarizing, itself an encyclopaedic text! Thus, while contradictory Tur-
(
meda/ Abdullah legends once thrived when Muslims and Christians could not read the texts he penned
in the other language, scholarship about the man still suffers from the same linguistic shortcoming. The
three scholars just mentioned have searched for ways to posit Turmedas originalityor at least, his
partial dependence on non-Islamic sourcesbut others have searched for further examples of plagia-
rism. Beier finds this in three passages of Arabic rhymed prose in the Tuhfa : which parallel similar pas-
sages in the same treatise of the Brethren of Purity; Beier further hypothesizes that additional examples
of dependence on the Brethren of Purity have gone heretofore unnoticed. Calvet, Fray Anselmo Tur-
meda, 2234; M. Garca and L. Martn, Algunes fonts occidentals de lobra dAnselm Turmeda, Disputa
de ase, Revista de Filologa Rom anica 13 (1996), 181214; M. Salvat, La Disputaci o de lasne de fra
Anselm Turmeda et ses sources encyclopediques, Reinardus 18, no. 1 (2005), 105116; R. Beier, Una
(
coincidencia textual entre la Tuhfa
: dAnselm Turmeda/ Abdallah al-Tarjuman i el tractac n um. 21 dels
Germans de la Puresa. Nova aportaci o a la q
uestio de lautenticitat de la Tuhfa,
: Sharq al-Andalus 9
(1992), 8388: 87; see also Sams o, Turmediana, 7276.
57
Calvet lauds Asn for his discovery but condemns the harsh moral judgment which pervades Asns
rhetoric about Turmeda. Calvet, Fray Anselmo Turmeda, 2216.
58
Other scholars who have doubted this sincerity have looked to the number of bills of safe passage
given to the former friar by Christian leaders and wondered whether, in addition to his customs duties,
he searched for a way to return to his homeland. For an example, see Salvat, Un franciscain atypique,
2459, 252, esp. 249.
59
For some other examples of medieval converts whose motivations do not fit neatly into the catego-
ries of personal conviction or worldly considerations, see A.J. Forey, Western Converts to Islam
(Later Eleventh to Later Fifteenth Centuries), Traditio 68 (2013), 153231.
60
Medieval polemical texts written by converts often relied on the insider knowledge of the convert to
bolster the argument rhetorically, as does the Tuhfa.
: Members of the converts original community usu-
ally responded by maligning his sincerity, because visible material advantages often had accrued to
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by Asn and others, is an unusual case in literary history. For many, the possibility that
Turmeda converted out of sincere conviction remains incomprehensible and constitutes
the major psychological hurdle to a renewed understanding of Turmeda.61
The final chapter of Tolans book describes St. Francis of Assisi as an apostle of
peace, a spiritual forebear to modern pacifists.62 Tolan observes that we have forged
a new Francis in our own image, a saint capable of dialogue, ecumenism, and the joy-
ful embrace of religious and cultural pluralism. Perhaps predictably, attempts have
(
come to frame Turmeda/ Abdullah the same way. The seeds for this dialogical
(
Turmeda/ Abdullah began a century ago but have gathered steam in recent years.
Jean-Henri Probst first hypothesized that Turmeda never truly converted, but
remained Christian to the end. His Franciscan spirit revealed itself in the love for ani-
mals seen in the Debate, the zeal for ecclesial reform seen in his Catalan writings, and
other theological and philosophical themes influenced by Raymond Llull.63 Probst
wonders aloud whether Turmeda may have seen himself as reforming Christianity
through the addition of Islamic elements, the founder of a new Christian sect in rap-
(
prochement with Islam. A later writer paints Turmeda/ Abdullah as a figure of sensi-
ble finesse and moderation, someone associated with a spirit of tolerance, a
representative of a hybrid culture. Intellectually enchanted by Islam, Turmeda/
(
Abdullah touched the mystical face of the East and it injected him with a doctrinal
pluralism that bore no shadow of sectarianism.64 Such an approach can more easily
accommodate the Mallorcans Catalan writings than it can the Tuhfa. : That text as it
stands is an unabashedly divisive polemic and can hardly be construed as the work
of an ecumenical mind, even by fifteenth century standards. Hypotheses have
(
emerged regarding the redaction of the Tuhfa : from Abdullahs original work, assert-
ing that a later Morisco editor modified and breathed new life into a work which had

him as a result of his conversion, an argument the Tuhfa : anticipates and preempts. Alvarez, Visionary
Humanism, 1723; see also Szpiech, The Original, 159.
61
Beier, Anselm Turmeda, 412. Epalza identifies two distinct planes in the robust interest in Turmeda:
first, the conversion of a person from Christianity to Islam; and second, the theological arguments of
Islam against Christian teaching. Apart from Louis Massignons detailed response to the theological
arguments of the Tuhfa, : arguments which are not novel in the tradition of anti-Christian polemics in
Islam, most interest in Turmeda has focused on questions of his personal and psychological integrity.
Turmeda himself seems to invite this reflection on his person because he makes himself a centralif
not the centralcharacter in his own works, relying on his experience as a source of authority. Epalza,
Die Actualitat von Anselm Turmeda in der islamisch-christlichen Polemik in Frankreich und
Katalonien, in Hoffnungszeichen globaler Gemeinschaft (Religionen im Gespr ach 6), ed. R. Kirste,
P. Schwarzenau, and U. Tworuschka (Balve: Zimmermann Druck 1 Verlag, 2000), 189; Alvarez,
Visionary Humanism, 175; L. Massignon, Examen du Pr esent de lhomme lettre par Abdallah ibn al-
Torjoman (Rome: Pontificio Istituto di Studi Arabi e dIslamistica, 1992).
62
Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan, 294324.
63
Beier reports Probsts hypothesis but considers it utterly fantastic. J.-H. Probst, Fra Anselm Turmeda
et sa conversion a lislamisme, Revue hispanique 38 (1916), 464496: 4745; Guy, Pensee, 42; Beier,
Anselm Turmeda, 45.
64
Guy, Pensee, 5056; see also Epalza, Actualitat, 1901.
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 T WO F RIARS W HO W ENT A MONG THE M USLIMS

lain essentially dormant and unread for two centuries. This editor supposedly
inserted phrases or whole passages which misconstrue Christian doctrine and prac-
tice in a way that a well-educated former priest never could have or which amplify
the anti-Christian critique in ways that an author who retained some sense of appreci-
ation for his original Christian heritage never would have.65 Scholars have reached a
consensus that some redaction occurred, with debates about its extent.66 The ques-
(
tions for proponents of the ecumenical, dialogical Turmeda/ Abdullah nonetheless
become these: does one posit this redaction because the evidence suggests it? Or,
does one posit this redaction because our world needs heroes who can help Muslims,
Christians, and Jews deal with their struggles, prompting our refusal to allow
(
Abdullah to be a polemicist? Or, as another author suggests, should we simply accept
(
our inability to know Turmeda/ Abdullahs true intentions and embrace him for what
he can be, a bridge between Christianity and Islam whose global message tends
toward not only the unity of all sincere believers, but the unity of all persons of
good will longing for the integral awakening of conscience?67
Before addressing these questions arising from the development of this legend in the
Christian-majority world, this survey must step back and consider the shifting narrative
(
of Abdullah al-Tarjuman among Muslims. That process evolved more simply and
depended on the diffusion of the Tuhfa,
: whose contents provide the basic narrative for
68
the legend. The Tuhfa : eventually became one of the most important polemical texts in
the entire Islamic world, but it did not go viral immediately.69 For almost two hundred
years, it seems that no one read the Tuhfa
: at all. Arab chroniclers of the period did not
(
consider Abdullah a person who merited mention, and no manuscript of the Tuhfa : prior
to the seventeenth century survives. Only one author, the Malik jurist and quranic
( (
scholar Abd al-Rahman
: ibn Muhammad
: al-Tha alib (d. 1468), provides documentary

65
Giraldo offers this approach. While I cannot accept her argument for this historical facticity of Turme-
das discussion of the Paraclete with his teacher, her brief explanation of the redaction of the Tuhfa
: por-
trays convincingly a sincere convert who yet retained a respect for the Christian tradition in his later
years, the sort of man who could have penned Turmedas Catalan corpus yet written a clear apology
for his departure from the Christian faith. Giraldo, Anselm Turmeda, 1836, 140146.
66
In his numerous writings on this text, Epalza presents the arguments for and against the integral
authenticity of the Tuhfa
: in greater detail than any other scholar. In the end, he attributes this redaction
to a group of bilingual Moriscos in Tunis who had begun living in Tunis prior to the general expulsion
of Moriscos from the Iberian Peninsula in 160910. For his summary of the debate on this matter, see
Nota sobre un nuevo falso en arabe.
67
Guy, Lcumenisme, 1025.
68
For a description of this diffusion, see Epalza, Fray Anselm Turmeda, 4360, and the recent contribu-
tion by T. Krstic, Reading Abdallah b. Abdallah al-Tarjumans Tuhfa
: (1420) in the Ottoman Empire:
Muslim-Christian Polemics and Intertextuality in the Age of Confessionalization, Al-Qant: ara 36, no.
2 (2015), 341401.
69
Among texts written in the fifteenth century, it can be considered the most important. Epalza, Fray
Anselm Turmeda, 73; Beier, Anselm Turmeda, 16.
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(
Figure 2. 1909 Map of the Tunisian Suq Containing Abdullahs Tomb72

(
proof of Abdullahs life or conversion.70 In 1604, a Suf
: shaykh named Abu l-Ghayth ibn
Muhammad
: al-Qashshash (d. 1621) presented to the young Sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603
(
1617) a translation he had commissioned from Muhammad : ibn al-Sha ban. The text was
recopied many times and scholars began to cite it, but the diffusion of the work was
uneven. It was available in Istanbul and in Egypt, but the presence of the text was
uneven throughout the remainder of the Mediterranean basin. The Tuhfas : greatest influ-
ence in Muslim-majority lands lay in the way it shaped conversion narratives. The seven-
teenth century was an age of what Tijana Krstic calls confessionalization in the
Ottoman Empire, a period of tighter politico-religious integration as a basis for commu-
nity and state building.71 Narratives of Christians becoming Muslims in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries show that the Tuhfa : provided the archetype for self-narratives
of conversion in a time when this act of political allegiance to the sultan and to the reli-
gion his reign protected became increasingly ritualized. This does not suggest that the
authors of these self-narratives knew the Tuhfa : directly, either in Arabic or in Turkish;
(
the origins of the cult of Abdullah the Muslim saint remain obscure. The first reference
to his tomb in Tunis comes in the second half of the 19th century, by which time
believers refer to him as Sd Tuhfa.
:

70 (
Epalza considers it probable that in addition, a chronicle written in 1525 by Abu Abdullah
Muhammad
: ibn Ibrahm al-Lulu al-Zarkash also depended on the Tuhfa.
: Epalza, Fray Anselm
Turmeda, 467.
71
Krstics article focuses on a previously unnoticed seventeenth century conversion narrative manifest-
ing the influence of the Tuhfa.: Krstic, Reading Abdullah, 3612.
72
Joaquim Miret y Sans, Una visita a la tomba del escriptor catala Fra Anselm Turmeda en la cuitat de
Tunic, Butlleti del centre excursionista de Catalunya 20, no. 180 (1910), 116: 9.
586 C 2017 Hartford Seminary.
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 T WO F RIARS W HO W ENT A MONG THE M USLIMS

(
Abdullahs polemic reached its widest audience when the first printed Arabic
edition of the Tuhfa: was published in London in 1873. A new Turkish translation
was made from it the following year, and a Persian translation shortly after-
wards.73 With subsequent editions in the decades that followed, the text became
widely diffused.74 By comparison with the Christian Turmeda legend, the Muslim
(
Abdullah legend underwent minimal evolution. Some claimed that he died at sea
fighting beside fellow Muslims, but the invasion in question postdated the Mallor-
(
cans life by quite some time.75 This story clearly attempted to cast Abdullah as a
mujahid with both the pen and the sword. Also, some authors speculate that
(
Abdullah met Ibn Khaldun, which is possible, but not significant enough for the
latter to merit mention in his many writings. Still, Muslims had little need for
invention in the legend because the Tuhfa : itself provides the key elements, with
(
Abdullah describing himself as one of the most learned men in Christendom
who saw the light and embraced the straight path of Islam.

A Search for Stability in

(
a Vacillating Man?
These stages of the Turmeda/ Abdullah legend, among both Muslims and Christians,
are not as cleanly divisible as those Tolan describes in Saint Francis and the Sultan. The
legacy of this Mallorcan has prompted groups of persons to cloak his life and writings
with the beliefs and concerns of their own religious or intellectual milieu, portraying Tur-
meda alternately as a Christian martyr saint, as a rationalist skeptic, as an icon of Catalan
nationalism, as a fraudulent plagiarist, as one whose powerful intellect freed him to
preach the truth of Islam and demolish Christian falsehoods, and most recently, as a
model of cultural or religious symbiosis who proffers hope for the ecumenical and inter-
religious future. These various portrayals, while sharing some overlap, each in their own
way rub against the facts of Turmedas life, whatever those facts, in fact, are. Here, one
has the opportunity to revisit the value of Tolans contribution. As helpful as it is for Tolan
to illustrate how the preoccupations of various writers, preachers, and artists shaped their
portrayal of the encounter between Francis and Malik al-Kamil, those who find Francis a
personality that beckons an attempt to comprehend himto say nothing of believers
who revere him as a saint and a modelcome away frustrated by a book that in the final
analysis casts a plague on all previous houses. Tolan admits that this encounter was a
key moment in Francis life, essential for those who wish to understand Francis and the
attitude of his new mendicant order towards Islam.76 However, Tolan suggests little

73
Epalza, Traduccions persa, turca, alemanya i catalana de la Tuhfa
: de Turmeda, Randa 11 (1981),
141144: 142.
74
Epalza comments, for example, on how quickly German scholars were prompted to react to the use
of a 1970 modern Turkish edition of the Tuhfa: for apologetics among Turks in Germany. Epalza,
Traduccions, 142.
75
Beier, Anselm Turmeda, 367.
76
Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan, 11.
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about what Francis attitude was. Tolan does not reflect on the meaning of that encounter
itself beyond a deconstruction of the deforming lenses which extant sources provide.
One could rightly argue that the paucity of probable facts about the encounter foreclo-
ses confident conclusions about Francis attitude, and Tolan must be credited for his
humility here, but this paucity of fact does not seem to be the primary cause for Tolans
reluctance.77 Rather, Tolan falls back on the notion that any lieu de m emoire will con-
stantly change in meaning as one tacks onto it the preoccupations of ones day.78
If Tolans assignation of lieu de m e moire to the encounter between Francis and al-
Kamil is to be considered appropriate, one now sees that the assignation functions to
divorce twenty-first century persons from Damietta of 1219, not to facilitate memory of that
time. Nora developed the concept of lieux de m e moire in response to the deeply human
need to retain a connection to the past in an age when the demise of memory seems immi-
nent and threatening. Nora criticizes the rift in human consciousness that occurs because
[t]he thrust of history, the ambition of the historian, is not to exalt what actually happened
but to annihilate it. A generalized critical history. . .would drain [these realms] of what
makes them, for us, lieux de m e moire.79 Tolans decision to frame the encounter between
Francis and al-Kamil as a lieu de memoire illustrates Tolans acknowledgement that Francis
leaves no one indifferent, a fact that Tolan does not seem to lament.80 And thus, someone
compelled to respond to Francis with a drive to understand finds herself rightly disap-
pointed that Tolan offers little more than a counsel of historical modesty regarding the
claims which can be made about Francis own attitude and the meaning of this encounter.
If Noras instincts about contemporary anxiety regarding the rift between history and mem-
ory are correct, then one need not be a believer to find Tolans reticence insufficient.81 A
study of others efforts to maintain their own ties to the pastby projecting their own fears
and hopes onto itdoes little to foster the connection for which the human spirit longs.
Even less does such an approach suffice for a believer with the conviction that in some
dimly comprehensible fashion God is at work in human history.82 If, then, some historians

77
Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan, 45, 3257.
78
Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan, 16.
79
Nora, Realms of Memory, vol. 1, 3. To be clear, pitting Tolan against Nora would oversimply the pur-
pose of Noras complex and subtle multi-volume project: he himself has been criticized for doing more
to analyze the history of recollections than to actually recollect the past. See, for example, P. H. Hutton,
History as an Art of Memory (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993); see also D. Gordons
helpful and critical review of Hutton, in History and Theory 34, no. 4 (1995), 340354.
80
Tolan, Saint Francis and the Sultan, 327.
81
One finds a similar, albeit undeveloped, criticism of Tolans approach in the strongest recent biogra-
phy of Francis. A. Vauchez, Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2012), 357, endnote 105.
82
On this point, Paul Routs theological reading of the encounter between Francis and al-Kamil strikes
a division between theology and history that is both too clean and improperly located. Rout nods to
crusading, colonizing, and romanticizing visions of the encounter, only to move from these historical
interpretations of an event to a matter of theological significance: the effects of the experience upon
Francis himself. Are not these effects themselves a matter of historical interpretation? P. Rout, St.
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insist upon a historical method which exiles to the realm of theology the task of searching
for meaning in the Damietta encounter, non-believers who nonetheless find themselves
compelled to understand Francis might well respond, So be it. One could frame the
evolving interpretations of the encounter between Francis and the Sultan within David
Tracys definition of theology as the search for mutually critical correlations between an
interpretation of ones religious tradition and an interpretation of the contemporary situa-
tion.83 This approach yet serves to indict past interpreters of Francis for engaging in eisege-
sis, a correlation that is not mutually critical. They often failed to allow the encounter to
criticize their interpretation of the contemporary situation by imposing their preoccupa-
tions onto the encounter. Indeed, Tolan essentially suggests that this is what has happened.
However, this assessment does not delegitimize the search for those mutually critically cor-
relations, so long as the search occurs with scholarly legitimacy, rigor, and authenticity.
Indeed, if Francis leaves no one indifferent, the search is a laudable and necessary task.
(
To return, then, to the primary enigma of this essay, Turmeda/ Abdullah, what sort of
reflective response does the obscure life and vexing literary corpus of this meandering
Mallorcan invite? Two discrepancies immediately assault any easy analogy between Tur-
(
meda/ Abdullah and Francis of Assisi. First, the paucity of probable facts is even more
(
severe in the case of Turmeda/ Abdullah. The only significant account of the mans life
historians possess is his own. For reasons already discussed, one must doubt the accu-
racy of significant aspects of that autobiographical account. Second, while some Christi-
ans have honored Turmeda as a martyr saint and a great teacher of practical wisdom, he
was never canonized, nor did he inspire a significant liturgical cult, nor did he found a
religious order. From the standpoint of a believer, the drive to discover sound conclu-
sions about his beliefs and the meaning of his actions for believers today is far less
urgent, if necessary at all, by comparison with a figure like Francis. Yes, later Muslims
(
and Christians have foisted their preoccupations onto Turmeda/ Abdullah, but this alone
does not a lieu de m emoire make. Still, the ongoing conversations about Turmeda/
(
Abdullah among scholars interested in hybridity and interculturality, to say nothing of
the continuing use of the Tuhfa : as an anti-Christian polemic in bookstores across the
Arabic- and Turkish-speaking worlds, beckon some new reflection upon what his life
and works might suggest for Christians and Muslims today, particularly those engaged in
interreligious dialogue. I here offer three.
(
First, the case of Turmeda/ Abdullah calls believers to consistency and authenticity in
the expression of their religious convictions, regardless of to whom they speak and in
what language. This Mallorcans deepest religious convictions are a mystery and barring

Francis of Assisi and Islam: A Theological Perspective on a Christian-Muslim Encounter, Al-Masaq 23,
no. 3 (2011), 205215: 209.
83
R. M. Grant with D. Tracy, A Short History of the Interpretation of the Bible. Rev. Ed. (Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1984), 70; for fuller discussion, see Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theol-
ogy (New York: Seabury, 1978), 3263; Tracy, The Task of Fundamental Theology, Journal of Religion
54, no. 1 (1974), 1334.
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new data, will remain so. However, one does not need to know the details of those con-
victions to acknowledge that his literary corpus functioned with lamentable duplicity.
Whence the (intentional?) irony of Turmedas words in the epigraph to the present essay,
that the person who walks simply walks with confidence, but that God hates the person
with two faces.84 The dual and contradictory legends of Sd Tuhfa: the Muslim saint and
Turmeda the Christian saint could simultaneously flourish in a world in which translation
and the dissemination of texts occurred much more slowly. We do not live in that world.
Yet examples abound of believers ostensibly committed to interreligious dialogue who
speak in one manner to their coreligionists and an inconsistent manner to their dialogue
partners. Condemning such duplicity does not mandate that insider speech and outsider
speech take exactly the same formto a certain extent, religions operate with an internal
grammar that outsiders struggle to penetrate, and a believer must modify her rhetoric
when speaking to an outsider unfamiliar with that internal grammar.85 However, in a
world of Youtube, Wikileaks, and social media, a Christian today must expect that her
Muslim interlocutors will have access to her speech to Christians, just as a Muslim must
expect that her Christian interlocutors will have access to her speech to Muslims. Pro-
tected speech is rare. This reality must color the way a believer speaks to her coreligion-
ists. In a much more immediate fashion than centuries past, believers across religious
boundaries read each others texts, listen to each others preaching, see each others art,
and thus a Christian must speak to her coreligionists in a way that does not cast doubt
into her Muslim dialogue partner about her motivations for engagement and the sincerity
of her desire to persist in it. The rhetoric one uses to describe those motivations may be
different when one speaks to ones dialogue partner than when one speaks to ones
coreligionists, but these different forms of rhetoric must be, at the very least, reconcila-
(
ble. The continued interest in Turmeda/ Abdullah results in no small part from the fact
that these tensions in his corpus are irreconcilable barring elaborate hypotheses of tex-
tual redaction or complex postmodern theories of intercultural identity which, quite
frankly, possess less explanatory power than past assumptions that the man practiced
willful dissimulation and deception.
(
Second, the literary corpus of Turmeda/ Abdullah speaks to the practice of apolo-
getics and interreligious polemical literature, a practice that continues apace on both
Muslim and Christian keyboards. Some Christian theologians have called for a morato-
rium on apologetics, if not an outright ban, arguing that the modern apologetic enter-
prise tends toward unchristian forms of witness and cannot attest truthfully to Christ in
todays postmodern context.86 Without suggesting that Christians should abandon the
scriptural injunction to give an explanation to anyone who asks for a reason for the hope

84
Turmeda, Llibre de bons amonestaments, 152.
85
On the concept of doctrine as grammar, see G. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theol-
ogy in a Postliberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984).
86
For a recent example, see M. B. Penner, The End of Apologetics: Christian Witness in a Postmodern
Context (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013).
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(
they bear (1 Pt 3:15), Turmeda/ Abdullah should prompt the apologist to probe what
notion of reason is at work in her apologetic. One can find evidence for a postmodern
reading of Turmeda in which all meaning is destabilized. Anyone reading the Debate
between the Friar and the Ass judges the ass the victor in the debate, yet the friar hands
himself a pyrrhic victory on the final page to which the animals inexplicably bow. On a
complementary note, the Tuhfa : presents itself as commending( the proper use of reason,
but its argument is far more anti-Christian than pro-Muslim. Abdullah uses arguments
that later scholars casually classify as rational to demolish Christian data which he does
not accept, just as Christian polemicists use rational arguments to assail Muslim data
they do not accept; such argument does not make the polemicist a rationalist.87 He
merely uses reason as a tool for a particular purpose, to defend convictions that properly
lie elsewhere and were reached by other means.88 Here, the fact that modern polemicists
continue to recycle the anti-Christian arguments of the Tuhfa : manifests not merely a fail-
ure to acknowledge that many of these arguments depend on incorrect presumptions
and were successfully countered long ago, but also a failure to inquire seriously what
counts as a compelling argument in todays intellectual climate.89 In this regard, perhaps
(
the primary reason Turmeda/ Abdullah provokes such persistent interest is the omnipre-
sence of the author in his works. Modern apologists should notice this, as well as the
vacuum of authority which ensues when that authors personal integrity dissolves.
(
Third, and finally, the case of Turmeda/ Abdullah commends Tolans counsels of his-
torical humility and modesty, notwithstanding the methodological criticisms already
noted. The modesty which this case demands is twofold. First, the facts regarding the life
(
of Turmeda/ Abdullah are so ambiguous that responsible modesty must deter any
attempt to lionize him or excoriate him solely based upon his personal virtues or vices.

87
The fraught battles about the proper scope of ray in early Islamic debates about law-finding and the
(
relationship between aql and naql in Islamic intellectual history generally are well-known. One should
not properly speak about rationalism in general, but about what kind of rationalism. For two works
helpful in framing this discussion regarding theology and ethics, see B. Abrahamov, Islamic Theology:
Tradition and Rationalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); G. Hourani, Reason and
Tradition in Islamic Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), esp. 270275.
88
Against earlier scholars who found in Turmeda the spirit of a nineteenth century free-thinking ration-
alist, Epalza thus characterizes the Tuhfa
: as an entirely Muslim work, without a streak of rationalism
in it. Epalza, Fray Anselm Turmeda, 323.
89
One can note also here Massignons summary of the different styles of argumentation at work in
Christian polemics against Islam and Muslim polemics against Christianity, although Massignon deals
primarily with premodern texts. He argues that Muslim polemics attacking Christianity do so in a man-
ner that is critique et tranchante, by comparison with Christian attacks against Islam which are con-
structive et gradu e e. Massignon further distinguishes Muslim defenses against attacks from non-
Muslims as litt erale et destructrice, while Christian apologetics tend to be r
e elle et vivifiante. Whether
or not these descriptions effectively characterize these two traditions of polemics and apologetics,
Massignon here describes precisely the dynamics of the Tuhfa. : Massignon, Examen, 389; for further
discussion, see C.S. Krokus, Faith Seeking Understanding: Louis Massignons (18831962) Catholic
Conversation with Islam, (Ph.D., Boston College, 2009), 55125; see also Szpiech, Conversion and
Narrative, 212213.
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Second, the use of the Mallorcans texts offers believers a strong tonic of humility regard-
ing the effectiveness of the message they attempt to spread. The attempt to witness to
ones religious convictions carries far more ambiguity than the agent in question would
often like to admit. Perhaps the author of the present
( article thinks he has made a clear
and coherent argument, and perhaps Turmeda/ Abdullah believed he made a clear and
coherent argument in any number of his texts, but once he put the pen down, these texts
took on a life of their own. In the case of the Tuhfa,
: that life was two centuries of hiber-
nation, followed by some significant redaction which may have warped the authors
intent. If believers accept the assumption that such ambiguity adheres to their attempts
to witness to their convictions, the form of that witness will be one of greater modesty.
Perhaps it might even look like Francis of Assisis suggestion that a friar among unbe-
lievers can avoid arguments and disputes and be subject to those among whom he
lives.90 This style of witness, while still ambiguous, is at least less verbally and physically
violent and the world could benefit from that.

90
Francis of Assisi, Regula non bullata, 16.
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