Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, competing scholarly communities sought to define a Spain that was, at least officially, entirely Christian, even if many suspected that newer converts from Islam and Judaism were Christian in name only. Unlike previous books on conversion in early modern Spain, however, Parables of Coercion focuses not on the experience of the converts themselves, but rather on how questions surrounding conversion drove religious reform and scholarly innovation.
            In its careful examination of how Spanish authors transformed the history of scholarship through debate about forced religious conversion, Parables of Coercion makes us rethink what we mean by tolerance and intolerance, and shows that debates about forced conversion and assimilation were also disputes over the methods and practices that demarcated one scholarly discipline from another.

• The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment
• Islam without Europe: Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Thought (Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks)
• Spain Unmoored: Migration, Conversion, and the Politics of Islam (New Anthropologies of Europe)
• Between Christ and Caliph: Law, Marriage, and Christian Community in Early Islam (Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion)
• Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)
• Speaking of Spain: The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World
• Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain
• Colonial al-Andalus: Spain and the Making of Modern Moroccan Culture
• Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain
• Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain