Muḥammad Rabadán

Muḥammad Rabadán (fl. c. 1600) was an Aragonese Morisco, noted for writing Discurso de la luz de Muhamad ('discourse of the light of Muḥammad'), the principal Spanish-language Muslim account of the lives of the Islamic prophets.

Discurso de la luz de Muhamad

Rabadán's Discurso de la luz de Muhamad begins with a canto praising God as the creator of all; the second canto tells of Adam, Iblīs, Noah and Abraham. Subsequent cantos recount the lives of all the Jewish prophets as far as Jesus (including Jesus himself), and Arab prophets as far as Muḥammad. The life Muḥammad himself is told across five cantos, concluding with his death. The work closes by listing the ninety-nine names of Allāh, explaining each in Spanish.[1] The text was a major influence on the understanding of Islam of the eighteenth-century English historian Joseph Morgan.[2]

Other works

Rabadán has been identified as the author of a sixteenth-century Spanish poem recounting a hajj, "Coplas del peregrino de Puey Monçón". Twenty-first-century scholarship regarded the attribution as unlikely, however.[3]

Editions

• The Poetry of Mohamed Rabadan of Arragon, ed. by H. E. J. Stanley (Brentford: Austin, 1867).

References

1. Abū Isḥāq Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm al-Thaʻlabī, Lives of the Prophets, trans. by W. M. Brinner, Studies in Arabic Literature, 23 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. xxiii ISBN 9004125892, ISBN 9789004125896.
2. Nabil Matar, 'Joseph Morgan', in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History. Volume 13: Western Europe (1700-1800), ed. by David Thomas and John A. Chesworth (Leiden: Brill, 2019), pp. 188-196; ISBN 9004402837.
3. Miguel Ángel Vázquez, '"Coplas del peregrino de Puey Monçón": A Sixteenth-Century Spanish Poem about the Hajj', in Narrating the Pilgrimage to Mecca: Historical and Contemporary Accounts, ed. by Marjo Buitelaar and Richard van Leeuwen, Leiden Studies in Islam and Society, 16 (Leiden: Brill, 2023), pp. 74–90 (p. 78); doi:10.1163/9789004513174_004.