Between Dung and Blood

"Manuela Ceballos retells the stories of the sixteenth-century saints Teresa of Ávila and Sīdī Riḍwān al-Januwī with incredible insight, exceptional linguistic skill, and a refreshingly comparative approach. The two saints' contemporary but independent narrative traditions reveal how Christians and Muslims, respectively, reimagined religious identity following the demise of interreligious cohabitation in Iberia."--Jocelyn Hendrickson, author of Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa "Intertwining the histories of two converts--a Christian convert to Islam and Jewish convert to Christianity--Ceballos elegantly traces the polysemous qualities of blood in the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions as they come to shape and inform modern ideas about race and inheritance. One cannot call this work merely comparative or interdisciplinary without doing injustice to its sophisticated methods and aims."--Hussein Fancy, Associate Professor of History, Yale University "Ceballos's parallel analysis of a Muslim Sufi and a Christian saint is a stirring interdisciplinary accomplishment. Scholars of religion and Mediterranean studies owe themselves the delight of reading it."--Thomas E. Burman, author of Reading the Qurʾan in Latin Christendom, 1140-1560