A Christian Iberian Attack on Twelfth-Century Medina? Keys to Understanding an Unusual Story

Abstract

According to a history of Medina written in the first half of the fourteenth century, in the year 557/1162 two Christians from the Iberian Peninsula attempted to steal the remains of the Prophet Muḥammad from his grave. In a later source, the culprit is presented as a Shīʿī. This paper seeks to explain how the story—full of colorful details—came into being, how it relates to other stories dealing with attempts at stealing the Prophet’s body and with Christian attacks on Muslim holy sites, and why in the earliest extant source the protagonists are Iberian Christians. This study demonstrates that to understand the central role given to Christian agents in such narratives one should consider how the Andalusīs, forced to migrate from their land because of Christian territorial advance in the Iberian Peninsula, tried—unsuccessfully—to influence the policies of rulers in the Mashriq (Islamic East) to save their homeland from Christian conquest.