Abderrazak Halloumi, “Le Livre de l’Eschiele Mahomet’, un manuel d’isslamologie au XIIIe siècle. Histoire Culturelle, 26. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2024, 551 pp.

When the right constellations have come together, true breakthrough in research can happen. At the court of King Alphonse X the Wise, an entire team of translators was at work to make available particularly Arabic texts in Latin and thus made possible their further distribution in the various vernaculars. One of those was the Le Livre de l’Eschiele Mahomet, which has recently attracted considerable attention (see the modern French translation of the Old French version by Peter Wunderli, 1968, and a flurry of other editions and translations). In his doctoral dissertation submitted to the university of Poitiers in June 2022, Abderrazak Halloumi has drawn from his two cultural backgrounds, Arab and French, to dedicate himself to this unique text to identify to what extent it accurately reflected Muslim teachings or whether it mirrored, as was so often the case, negative Christian perspectives toward Islam and contorted the true essence of that other religion in order to idealize the own.