Representations of Muslims in the Kingdom of Sicily and Castile during the 13th Century

Abstract

Representations of Muslims in the Kingdom of Sicily and Castile during the Thirteenth Century Abstract My Doctoral Thesis is a comparative study of the representations of Muslims in the Kingdoms of Sicily and Castile during the thirteenth century. It seeks to identify these representations and to analyse the social and cultural frameworks that gave them meaning, exploring how the representations functioned within the Castilian and Sicilian social settings. The study acknowledges that Muslims were not the only marginalised group; Jews and Greeks, as other Christian enemies, also occupied subordinate positions. Furthermore, the research seeks to explain how the producers of these discourses legitimated their dominance, and by doing so, shaped and constructed their own identities. In a related vein, it poses the following interpretive questions: How were Muslims represented? What meanings did these representations carry? Why did they take the forms they did? Moreover, did these representations share structural Patterns across both peninsulas, or did they differ? And why were certain elements developed in one context but not the other? Finally, the research aims to understand how these representations of Muslims were constructed from the observable daily lives, physical appearance, and behaviour of Muslims,...