Saʿīd ibn Ḥasan z Alexandrie: Židovský konvertita k islámu a jeho důkazy Muḥammadova proroctví z hebrejské Bible

Abstract

The article deals with a polemical treatise Masalik al-nazar (1320) of Saʿīd ibn Ḥasan, a Jewish convert to Islam from Alexandria. Since Saʿīd did not succeed with his attempt to organize a disputation with the spiritual leaders of the Jews and the Christians, he put his polemical arguments on paper. The author gives in the treatise a long list of putative prophecies concerning the prophet Muhammad and Islam culled from the Hebrew Bible, which bear witness to Saʿīd’s unfamiliarity with the Muslim polemical literature. In so doing, when unable to shut down the houses of prayer of ”protected people” altogether, he aimed at least to persuade the Muslim authorities to eradicate the pictures and the statues from them. Masalik al-nazar contains inter alia interesting biographical parts describing the author’s process of conversion which was triggered by a dream vision urging him to convert. The treatise offers a valuable testimony to aggravating social conditions of the non-Muslim minorities in the Mamluk Egypt and Syria.