Funerary Practices in a Multi-Religious Context from the Iberian Peninsula to the Eastern Mediterranean
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Burial rites of religious minorities in the Iberian Peninsula were dominated by strong issues of identity from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Treaties and royal law permitted Jews and Muslims under Christian rule to maintain separate cemeteries, where these religious minorities enjoyed absolute freedom of ritual and practice. Within this framework, therefore, Jewish and Islamic religious ideology could be fostered as well as the sense of belonging to a select, religiously defined group. This paper will be divided in two parts. In the first, I analyze a number of features of Islamic and Jewish cemeteries in Christian Iberia and the capacity of these communities to negotiate their situation in the city. The second part will discuss the particular features of Muslim cemeteries in the Christian kingdoms of Iberia, including social and gender markers on their tombstones and in their graves. Recent excavations permit a deeper discussion of the rituals preferred by Muslims in Iberia and a comparison with those rituals practiced by their coreligionists in the Magreb, Egypt and Turkey. The dominance of Maliki legal prescriptions, alongside the legal and social prescriptions imposed on the Christian Islamic community in their subjected situation, resulted in significant differences that complicate the labeling of a “Mediterranean” transmission of burial customs in this period.