Shimʿon Duran’s Bow and Shield and Christian anti-Islamic polemic polemic

In 1423 Shimʿon b. Ṣemaḥ Duran, who had fled his native Majorca after the anti-Jewish riots 1391 and settled in Algiers, wrote an anti-Islamic polemic titled Bow and Shield (Qeshet u-magen). Duran’s polemic against Islam is rooted in the Christian-Jewish polemic. Right at the beginning of his tract Duran asserts that the amount of the Jewish polemical works responding to the Muslim anti-Jewish polemics is rather scarce. Perhaps because of this self-proclaimed awareness of the paucity of the Jewish anti-Islamic polemical tradition, Duran had to fall back on the reservoir of Christian anti-Islamic polemical motifs and techniques. He does not defend the Hebrew Bible and Rabbinic tradition – as the Jewish anti-Muslim polemics usually do – but attacks the rationality of Islam: what is irrational cannot be true or divine. A faulty and irrational Islam cannot abrogate the consummate Torah. To prove this, Duran scrutinises Muhammadʼs moral integrity, the Qurʾānic teachings of God’s existence, the question of theodicy, notions of punishment or reward in the afterlife, and the Islamic concept of the inimitable linguistic perfection of the Qurʾān.

Duran’s labelling of Islam as an irrational and materialistic religion and depiction of the Qurʾān as a composition rife with confusion whose contents contradict logic is a well-known topos of Christian anti-Islamic polemics, particularly those of the Mozarabs, which draw heavily on Ps. al-Kindiʼs Arabic Risāla. The Risāla also influenced the anti-Islamic polemics of the Jews and there is no doubt that Duran was indebted to the text. But al-Kindiʼs Risāla was not Duran’s sole source of inspiration. The proposed paper will treat the takeover of the Christian anti-Muslim polemical motives and its reuse in Duran’s Bow and Shield.