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The Martyrs of Cordoba: Community and Family Conflict in an Age of Mass Conversion. By Jessica A. Coope. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1995. Pp. xx, 113. $25.00.)
When Visigothic Spain fell to Muslim invaders in 711, the Iberian Christian population found itself absorbed into the Islamic empire as a subject community. Though protected from forced conversion, the Andalusian Christians were expected to maintain a low profile religiously, socially, and politically in the newly and incompletely Islamized al-Andalus. Over the course of the eighth and early ninth centuries, the numbers of Muslims in Spain increased due primarily to immigration but also as a result of increased conversion. During the same period, al-Andalus benefited greatly from its economic and cultural ties with the Muslim "heartland" in the eastern Mediterranean. In...