Muslims, Christians, and Jews: A Shifting Landscape

This chapter examines the complex and evolving relations among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in al-Andalus during the taifa period. Drawing on legal, historical, literary, and polemical sources, it traces demographic shifts—including the long process of Islamization and the decline of Christian communities—and explores how political fragmentation, Christian military expansion, and changing power balances shaped interreligious dynamics. Christians and Jews, as dhimmīs, occupied distinct social and cultural positions: while Christians experienced progressive Arabization but increasing vulnerability, Jewish communities—highly acculturated yet religiously resilient—flourished intellectually and sometimes rose to prominent administrative roles. The chapter further analyzes Muslim polemical responses to Christianity in the context of Christian advances, and the tensions provoked by the political prominence of certain Jewish elites, particularly in Granada. Overall, it portrays a nuanced landscape of coexistence, conflict, and social negotiation within a rapidly changing eleventh-century Iberia.