The Routledge Handbook of Muslim-Jewish Relations invites readers to deepen their understanding of the historical, social, cultural, and political themes that impact modern-day perceptions of interfaith dialogue. The volume is designed to illuminate positive encounters between Muslims and Jews, as well as points of conflict, within a historical framework. Among other goals, the volume seeks to correct common misperceptions about the history of Muslim-Jewish relations by complicating familiar political narratives to include dynamics such as the cross-influence of literary and intellectual traditions. Reflecting unique and original collaborations between internationally-renowned contributors, the book is intended to spark further collaborative and constructive conversation and scholarship in the academy and beyond.

The present study focuses on the intersection between Islamic jurisprudence, poetics, and manuscript culture in the secret Muslim communities (moriscos) of sixteenth-century Aragon. Using as a theoretical rubric the Islamic legal concept of ^curf (“custom”), I argue that early modern Aragonese Muslims made use of handwritten Islamic legal texts, and the physical books that contained them, to incorporate specific and adaptive local innovations into their religious and cultural practice. At the center of such innovation is the practice of translation and the specific forms that Aljamiado legal texts took within the space of the manuscript folio. All of these features and practices, I argue, revolve around a broader concern with closeness at the physical, social, linguistic, and ultimately metaphysical levels.

Amid mounting fears of violent Islamic extremism, many Europeans ask whether Muslim immigrants can integrate into historically Christian countries. In a groundbreaking ethnographic investigation of France’s Muslim migrant population, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies explores this complex question. The authors conclude that both Muslim and non-Muslim French must share responsibility for the slow progress of Muslim integration.

Claire Adida (University of California, San Diego), TEC affiliate faculty David Laitin, and Marie-Anne Valfort (Paris School of Economics) found that in France, Muslims are widely perceived as threatening, based in large part on cultural differences between Muslim and rooted French that feed both rational and irrational Islamophobia. Relying on a unique methodology to isolate the religious component of discrimination, the authors identify a discriminatory equilibrium in which both Muslim immigrants and native French act negatively toward one another in a self-perpetuating, vicious circle.

Disentangling the rational and irrational threads of Islamophobia is essential if Europe hopes to repair a social fabric that has frayed around the issue of Muslim immigration. Muslim immigrants must address their own responsibility for the failures of integration, and Europeans must acknowledge the anti-Islam sentiments at the root of their antagonism. The authors outline public policy solutions aimed at promoting religious diversity in fair-minded host societies.

In the aftermath of the fatal attacks on the cartoonists of Charlie Hebo, TEC affiliate faculty Cécile Alduy explores the French reaction to the violence in light of the competing ideologies of an inclusive, secular republican unity and a more traditional, fearful nationalist rhetoric.

The first cultural analysis of the secret literature of sixteenth-century Spain’s Muslim communities.

Covert Gestures reveals how the traditional Islamic narratives of the moriscos both shaped and encoded a wide range of covert social activity characterized by a profound and persistent concern with time and temporality. Using a unique blend of literary analysis, linguistic anthropology, and phenomenological philosophy, Vincent Barletta explores the narratives as testimonials of past human experiences and discovers in them evidence of community resistance.

Now available in its first English translation, Núñez Muley’s account is an invaluable example of how Spain’s former Muslims made active use of the written word to challenge and openly resist the progressively intolerant policies of the Spanish Crown. Timely and resonant—given current debates concerning Islam, minorities, and cultural and linguistic assimilation—this edition provides scholars in a range of fields with a vivid and early example of resistance in the face of oppression.