Monk and Faqih: An Intersecting Biography of Nicholas Kleinard and Muhammad bin Kharouf

Abstract

This study attempts to reconstruct the biography of the Belgian monk Nicholas Kleinard and the Tunisian Faqih Muhammad bin Kharouf, focusing on uncovering the circumstances of their meeting in Grenada and subsequent move to Fez. Kleinard had resolved to study Arabic through his own efforts, and left his country on a long journey which took him to Grenada. There he met Ibn Kharouf, one of the great figures of Islamic culture, who had been imprisoned during the Spanish campaign against Tunis and then transported to Spain and sold as a slave in its markets. In the course of this meeting he helped to teach Kleinard more about Islam, information the latter hoped to use in religious disputation. The study suggests that this meeting was probably unique in its time, since it resulted in a kind of mutual education as well as an emotional closeness between these two great men – the opposite of the general atmosphere of strife and hatred that was then characteristic of the relationship between the Christian and Islamic worlds