ABSTRACT
In this volume I departed from the idea that legal discourses on conversion and intermarriage may be understood as boundary-maintaining mechanisms. Such mechanisms aimed to define who belonged to a given community and who was excluded from it. My reading of legal texts of Christian and Islamic origin has demonstrated that such boundaries were not static, nor were they similarly defined by Islamic and Christian medieval cultures. For example, in the case of mixed marriages these mechanisms varied according to both religion and gender. first, in the case of women the legal boundaries were strikingly similar. Neither Christian nor Muslim women were allowed to marry outside their faith. Moreover, since it was forbidden for women to have any sexual relationships outside of wedlock, the sexual interfaith boundaries for women were absolute in both religious traditions. This is, for instance, illustrated by the fatwās in which dhimmī men who had become too close to Muslim women faced severe punishment. Hence, each community aimed at controlling its women and their offspring. Second, in the case of men, the interfaith boundaries as established by the Islamic and Christian legal traditions were non-identical. The main difference was that Muslim men were permitted to marry women of another faith (Jewish and Christian women) up to the number of four, whereas Christian men were only permitted to marry one Christian woman. Furthermore, in principle, Muslim men were allowed to have intercourse with an unlimited number of self-owned female slaves, whereas Christian men could legally cohabit only with one concubine at the time (contrary to the wife, she was not required to be a Christian). In sum, Islamic law permitted more non-Muslim women into the Muslim community than Christian law permitted non-Christian women into the Christian community. In that sense, the Islamic boundary might be considered more permeable than the Christian one when it comes to mixed relationships.
