Exploring the fraught processes of Spaniards' efforts to formulate a national identity - from the Enlightenment to the present - this book focuses on the nation's Islamic-African legacy, disputing the received wisdom that Spain has consistently rejected its historical relationship to Muslims and Africans.

The Religious Polemics of the Muslims of Late Medieval Christian Iberia examines the corpus of polemical literature against the Christians and the Jews of the protected Muslims (Mudejars). Commonly portrayed as communities in cultural and religious decay, Mònica Colominas convincingly proves that the discourses against the Christians and the Jews in Mudejar treatises provided authoritative frameworks of Islamic normativity which helped to legitimize the residence of their communities in the Christian territories. Colominas argues that, while the primary aim of the polemics was to refute the views of their religious opponents, Mudejar treatises were also a tool used to advance Islamic knowledge and to strengthen the government and social cohesion of their communities.

This important work is an historical study of the Islamic writings in Spanish and Aljamiado (Spanish in Arabic script) of the Muslim minorities in medieval Christian Spain, the Mudejars and Moriscos. On the basis of both Christian sources, such as archival documents and the writings of John of Segovia, and Islamic sources in Spanish and Arabic, this book focuses on the life and writings of Yça Gidelli (ca 1450), religious authority of the Mudejar community of Segovia (Castile). Of crucial importance for the history of Islamic Spanish literature, Yça's best-known work is a Spanish translation of the Qur’ān made at the request of bishop John of Segovia (d. 1458). This study follows the early history of Islamic writings in the vernacular (13th-14th centuries), continues with a description of Yça's writings and biography, and finally deals with his influence on Moriscos in the 16th and 17th centuries.