Anselm Turmeda
Franciscan friar, writer and theologian from Mallorca (c. 1355–c. 1423), trained in theology and astrology at Lleida, Paris and Bologna, a singular and controversial figure of medieval Catalan letters owing to his dual literary career: first as author of moral and satirical texts in Catalan written from within the Christian faith, and later, following his conversion to Islam in Tunis around 1385 —adopting the name Abdallah al-Tarjuman ('the interpreter')—, as author of Muslim apologetic texts in Arabic. Among his Catalan works stands the Book of Good Admonitions (1398), a compendium of moral advice in verse of wide popular success that circulated in reprints well into the nineteenth century, and above all the Book of Beasts or Dispute of the Ass (1417), an allegorical fable in which a donkey argues with wit and erudition before a tribunal of animals for the superiority of animals over humans, a work of sharp irony and notable originality within the tradition of the medieval moral fable, in the line of Ramon Llull, of whom Turmeda considered himself in some sense a critical intellectual heir. His conversion to Islam, motivated according to his own account by a prophetic revelation announcing the religion's future triumph and recounted in his Arabic autobiography Tuhfat al-arib, led him to settle in Tunis, where he worked as a customs interpreter for Christian merchants —hence his Arabic epithet— and where he wrote his most important apologetic work, also titled Tuhfat al-arib, a systematic refutation of Christianity from an Islamic perspective that achieved considerable circulation in the Muslim world. Turmeda's figure, venerated as a popular saint in Tunisia under the name Sidi Abdallah, with a mausoleum still visited today, and remembered at the same time in Catalonia as one of the great medieval prose writers, continues to spark scholarly debate over the sincerity, opportunism or intimate complexity of his double religious conversion.