A female Morisco scholar corrected a male scholar’s theological error with playful condescension.

Evidence

I had a tafsir in Gandia, Valencia, which was more than one hundred folios, most of it dealing with the excellence of the month of shaban. In it I said this excellence had the power of securing remission of sins in advance, so that I began to hanker after visiting the Mora of ´Ubeda, and I would have done so if I had not had news that Nuzay Calder´an was in Alc´antara, so I did not waste time, and before the day was out I was with her, and I told her all about what I had found. … She laughed a great deal, then said, “As you eat your bread with the crust cut off, I thought you must be three years old, and you were in the first stage, and speaking through your milk teeth. Don’t you know that the law in the Koran can’t be measured in quantity against all the works of holy men in the past and still to come? In this book all he had in mind was his devotion, and was more inclined than us for abstinence during shaban. He was not condemned for less or for more, and he ended with nothing to reproach himself for.” — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 882

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme of women as religious teachers in Islamic minority history; also evokes A Midwife’s Tale’s recovery of women’s hidden intellectual labor.
• CANDY: The ‘eating bread with the crust cut off’ as a metaphor for childishness is a memorable, tweetable image.