ABSTRACT
The rejection of the use of the word ‘Mozarab’ when referring to the Christians of al-Andalus in the centuries before the advent of the Almoravids and Almohads is rational. The Arabic form of the word is absent from contemporary accounts, Arabic histories and chronicles. Whatever Spanish historians may have called the Christians of al-Andalus, they were not called Mozarabs. Simonet was alert to this fact when, in the 1860s, he was compiling data for his Historia de los mozárabes. The collective noun musta‛riba, which describes the Arabicized community, is not to be found until it occurs in Arabic histories relating to the Eastern territories of Islam in the tenth and eleventh centuries, where it denotes statusless non-Arabs of unspecified religion, in receipt of fewer privileges than the Christian Arabs.1
