Comparing Comparisons in Muslim Anti-Christian Writings in Christian Iberia and Exile: Muḥammad al-Qaysī’s Kitāb Miftāḥ al-Dīn and the Anonymous Tratado de los dos caminos

Comparison figures prominently in the polemics of the Muslim, Christian,and Jewish inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula in premodern and early modern times. Itspervasiveness as a figure of thought in their sources raises the question of variety in regardto comparison—that is, the multiple expressions of comparison as well as its numeroususes—particularly in the field of polemics. This paper discusses the functions of compari-son in polemics as a necessary first step to advance current knowledge of comparison as ahistorical practice in the making of one’s identity and the definition of groups and individ-uals. The discussion will focus on writings by Muslims who lived in Christian Iberia. It willfocus particularly on two anti-Christian polemics: that by the Tunisian author Muḥammadal-Qaysī in an as-yet unstudied Aljamiado copy (Spanish in Arabic characters); and theTratado de los dos caminos (Treatise of the Two Roads), an early seventeenth-century workof Islamic doctrine by the so-called “Refugee in Tunisia”. The analysis of these two workswill address the most important common points and differences between their respectivepolemical comparisons