Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa. By Jocelyn Hendrickson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. Pp. 432. $50.00 (cloth). ISBN: 9780674248205.

Since Abraham Udovitch first drew attention in 1993 to Ahmad al-Wansharīsī's late fifteenth-century fatwa forbidding Muslims to remain under Christian rule in Muslim Spain, a multitude of new interpretations have emerged regarding the impact of the European pushback in the Mediterranean against Muslim states.While Udovitch was interested in the case of the Jews and Sicily's social and economic history, in her recent book, Leaving Iberia: Islamic Law and Christian Conquest in North West Africa, Jocelyn Hendrickson provides a wider dimension and a different perspective through a comprehensive reconstruction of the legal literature from North African Muslim jurists on Muslims living under Christian rule in the medieval and early modern periods.As she demonstrates, at the time, this subject solicited a great number of legal writings that have been largely understudied until now.In three appendices, Hendrickson has edited and translated Wansharīsī's various fatwas and other writings, as well as additional contemporary and later legal documents on relevant issues written by jurists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Instead of focusing on one document or a single state at one moment in time, Hendrickson covers political interventions from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, from the Spanish and Portuguese conquests to the French occupation of Algeria and other developments as far south as Mauritania in West Africa.With this long-range Western Mediterranean perspective and combining literary criticism and historical reconstruction, Hendrickson provides a broader treatment than have the authors of previous studies of the way Muslim jurists in North Africa responded to the conquests and how they attempted to reconcile law and political behavior.The political events in question are well known.Before they turned their attention and resources to building empires in the New World, both Spain and Portugal occupied coastal cities and regions in Morocco.With new textual evidence, Hendrickson argues that the debate over Muslims living under Christian rule was not and should not be confined to the Christian conquests of Iberia, but should include the reality of Muslims submitted to Christian rule in North Africa itself.The texts gathered go a long way to illustrate that point.She argues that Al-Wansharīsī's condemnation of Muslims living under Christian rule is taken out of context by portraying him simply as a North African jurist condemning fellow

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