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Manuela Ceballos, "Between Dung and Blood: Purity, Sainthood, and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean" (U California Press, 2025)
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Podcast Host
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Manuela Ceballos
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Shobana Xavier
hello, and welcome to another new episode of New Books in Islamic Studies, which is part of the New Books Network. My name is Shobana Xavier and I hope you're safe and well wherever you are, and thank you so much for joining us today. On today's episode, we are joined by Manuela Ceballos, who's an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, to discuss her new book, Between Dung and Purity, Sainthood and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean, which was published by the University of California Press in 2026. The book closely examines the stories of two 16th century saints, one the Spanish Christian Teresa de Jesus, also known as Teresa Avevela, and the Moroccan Sufi Siddi Ridwan al Janui. We learned that they are both descendant from families of converts, and as such we see how blood and bodily pollution are operate as material and metaphoric symbols and tools of power to create religious and political boundaries around their identities. The book draws from rich Arabic and Spanish sources that move us between Morocco and Iberia. Through this generative comparison, we see how constructions of blood and dung circulate across these varied but entangled temporal geographies to constitute notions of purity and impurity as a means to enact power. In the end, though, blood is used to set boundaries around racial or religious identities. The discourses that are utilized for such argumentations, however, are not stable, and so blood and how it is used is not the same across the stories of
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Interviewer
these two saints and their endearing legacies
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Shobana Xavier
Today, the book will be of interest to those who think about embodiment, material culture, the early modern Mediterranean world, and Christian and Muslim mysticism. In our conversation today, Manuela and I spoke about how this project developed the stories of the two saints who are the protagonists in this book, and how mystical traditions like Islam or Christianity deal with bodily fluids like blood and Much more. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Manuela Ceballos about her new book, Between Dung and Purity, Sainthood and Power in Early Modern Western Mediterranean.
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Interviewer
Hi, Manuela. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?
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Manuela Ceballos
Thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here.
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Interviewer
I'm excited you're here. And we're here to talk about your book, Between Dung and Purity, Sainthood and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean. This is an exciting book, and I have lots of questions. I want to dive into it. But before we start, we have a tradition on the podcast to tell us a little bit about who you are and, like, what your intellectual journey was that led you to writing this particular book.
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Manuela Ceballos
Yeah, that's a story. I am originally from Medellin, Colombia, which I write about a little bit in the book, and I went to college outside of Philadelphia and where I discovered the study of Islam through, you know, a variety of mentors and texts and, you know, colleagues and friends. And when I went to graduate school to study, first Spain and then Morocco, my advisor, Vincent Cornell, had this hagiography that he had briefly worked on but hadn't thought that I would be more interested in. And when he gave it to me, you know, this question of between dung and blood wasn't there when I started reading about Sidri Dona Genuine, who was the saint about whom the hagiography is written. That was the sort of main phrase used to describe him. And very briefly, after I found. I found out about this, I got appendicitis and was in the hospital for, you know, maybe it was complicated. It was a. It was a complicated issue. I hadn't realized that I was sick. And so I was in the hospital for a very long time. And so the question of the body was really front and center and both as a way to think about writing and also as an impediment to writing, because I, you know, I was too tired to do anything. And being sick is. Is. Being. Is means being confronted with all kinds of disgusting things about the body and mortality and all these other things that made me think about the way that some of our traditions or some of the traditions that I'm familiar with deal with these very questions of purity and impurity and dirt and disgust. And then, you know, in the case of these saints, sanctity and power.
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Interviewer
It's. It's interesting because one of the things I was doing when I was reading the book was I often think that, oh, like, I do a little bit of material culture, embodiment And I'm like, no, this is like real embodiment. We're talking about blood and sweat and semen and milk. Like you're just things that are coming oozing out of the body. And was just like a really interesting moment to reorient myself in relationship. I think you're writing to Islamic studies, religious studies. You're really an interdisciplinary scholar. Can you situate the project a little bit in terms of geography? Because you're moving towards the Moroccan context and the Iberian context. And so you framed it as the early modern Western Mediterranean. So for maybe listeners who may not know the geographical context and specifically the religious context, which I think informs a lot of the ways that the stories of the saints and blood and filth show up ultimately.
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Manuela Ceballos
Sure, sure. And you know, there's. There's some questions there of, of nomenclature that, that are. Nomenclature. How do you say that in English? Nomenclature, I think that are not clear or that I'm not satisfied with rather. But yeah, I am primarily a scholar of North Africa and of early modern North Africa, but I did take a fair amount of, or I did study under, you know, this wonderful mentor, Maria Mercedes Carrion at Emory, read Teresa de Jesus and other 16th century saints in Iberia really extensively. And of course that is part of the tradition that I grew up around, right. Which is a sort of Spanish, Latin American Catholicism. So what I'm writing about is primarily early modern, which, you know, is a very European term. I don't know that we situate that Islamicate societies function in the same ways or that we can apply these temporal terms in the same manner or as seamlessly. Although I think, you know, the idea is gunpowder and a certain kind of technological development that determines what early modernity is. In any case, you pick your battles about how you want to. What are the categories you want to fight against and which ones you're just going to sort of submit to begrudgingly. And so this one was one the early modern. Just to talk about the 14th to the 17th century centuries in both what is now Spain, a little bit of Portugal too, so both countries make a little bit of an appearance. And what is now Morocco, which Vince Cornell in particular, as well as others, have made an argument that it was a proto nation of sorts. And scholars of nationalism are gonna push back against this, which is all well and good, but yeah, talking about the ways in which two geographies and these two locations experienced this sort of surge in preoccupation with hereditary thinking, with thinking about in Spain particularly, this is something That'll be well known to a lot of people. The purity of blood statutes, or the limpiesa de sangre statutes, which begin as early as the 15th century but become pretty well established in the 16th, which are these series of laws that prevent the descendants of converts and the descendants of converts at this point from participating in various areas of public life, joining the military, joining certain religious orders, being able to own land in particular ways. Right. Which of course align with also the activities of the Spanish Inquisition, which is particularly active in the 16th century and which is seeking to sort of root out heresy from Spain. So on the one hand you've got this very well established legal, sort of institutional aspect of thinking about inheritance and genealogy, and then in Morocco, a much looser, much more diffuse form of thinking about these things, which comes in the shape of the shurafa or the importance of the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad in the establishment of a particular kind of ruling elite, whether it be. And also a Sufi elite. So in the 16th century in particular, the Jezuliya Sufi way rises to power and establishes the. The Saudi dynasty, or helps establish the Saudi dynasty, claiming that only the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad are fit to rule and fit to root out the corruption that is plaguing Morocco, particularly because of Iberian occupation.
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Interviewer
So much of, like, understanding the literal blood and kind of the different fluids of the text is really deeply political and cultural. And I think that the context in which you're writing and the period in which you're writing really helps as the book develops, really indicates the significance of it. The book is really focused on two main figures, ultimately, I think, and we are introduced to the 16th century Moroccan Sufi saint, Sidi Ridwan Al Januwi.
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Shobana Xavier
Is that correct?
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Interviewer
Yeah, in the first chapter. And so did you want to say something about him and who he is? And particularly the story of, I think, his father, which ultimately becomes, from where you get the title of the book, Between Dung and Dyke. Yeah. Which is. I loved. It was a great. Yeah, it was a great story. I know it's a teaching story, but I think just. I still have the image of that in my. The horse and the. And the church.
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Manuela Ceballos
And the church. And the church. Yeah. Yeah. So it's such a wonderful story. And you know, this was again, Vincent Cornell's contribution, I mean, or influence on the text. I mean, without that. Without him sharing that hagiography with me, I wouldn't have. Would have never written the book. But. Yeah. So Cider Ridwan El Janoui is Genoe from Genoa. Right. So that's the Nispa. And he is a 16th century Fessi saint. So he dies in, I think it's 1582 or 83. He and Teresa of Avila are contemporary and he's born in Fez. He dies in Fez. And he is known for being an expert on hadith. So he teaches the Sultan Ahmed Al Mansur hadith and gives him an ijaza on Al Bukhari and is very well known during his time period. He's mentioned in all of the biographical dictionaries, both the Maliki biographical dictionaries and the Sufi biographical dictionaries. So he's a prominent figure in both legal circles and Sufi circles who is not very well known in Morocco today. So there's one monograph that just came out a couple of years ago by a Moroccan scholar who edited his manuscript, Farida Tabash. And aside from that, I haven't found any sort of like full length study on him, despite the fact that he was really important. He appears in, in some, you know, sort of canonical sources, Muhammad Haji's dissertation, so on and so forth. But you know, the thing that makes him so particular in, in this, particular, in this, in this context, you know, this is. And for people who do early Islam, this is not, you know, a super surprising thing. Oh, you know, you have here you've got this guy who's the descendant of converts, big deal, right? But for the, the time period, this is a kind of extraordinary situation where you've got Sidi Ridouan, who's the son of a merchant from the city of Genoa in Italy who converts to Islam after an experience. You know, he's walking down the streets of Genoa and he sees the horse of his neighbor, or his horse, depending on who's telling the story, go inside a church. And so he runs after the horse, and before he can get the horse, the horse defecates inside the church. So, you know, he's this rot. He takes the course back to the stable and by the time he comes back, the church is full of people. And the priest has gotten there. And the priest, you know, is. And like everyone who's there is rejoicing and he can't understand why. And people are smearing the dung all over themselves and the priest is selling it for a really high price and saying that this is the relic of the donkey of Jesus Christ who has miraculously visited the church at night. Of course, this man knows what happened, that wasn't the case. And he becomes terribly disillusioned with the entire system, with Christianity as a Whole and begins thinking about maybe going to North Africa and starts getting curious about Islam. And eventually he converts, moves to fez, marries a woman who is a refugee from Castile, a Jewish refugee from Castile who converts to Islam, or who comes from a family of converts. It's not clear. And in any case they both convert before they get married. And then that is how he comes to be. And so when he's asked about this, and the hagiography that I have is incomplete, so this must be a part of the hagiography that I don't have. But then that is where recounted in biographical dictionaries, he says about himself that he emerged from between dung and blood. And then there's various versions of this, you know, either he was purified by taking the path of his master Al Ghazwani, who is, you know, one of the seven saints of Marrakesh. So he takes the spiritual path of his master, who's also affiliated with the Jezaliya. And, you know, also has, you know, is considered to be one of the major saints of his time. And another other renderings of the story, you know, he emerges from between dung and blood and becomes like milk, which is of course a direct citation from the Quran, which is the Surah, Surah Nahl. And I think it's describing the way in which milk is produced from inside the belly of cattle.
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Interviewer
Right?
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Manuela Ceballos
So it's a pure substance that is produced from between, you know, the, these, the viscera or the, the dung and the blood. But milk never touches these things and you know, it's this miracle that, that, that milk can. Can be pure and sweet to the drinker when it emerges from this kind of foul place.
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Interviewer
And the. The other protagonist of the story is a Catholic saint. You know.
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Manuela Ceballos
Yeah.
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Interviewer
And I'm wondering. And this story is like really radically different because, you know, here's an instance. I mean, some of the things that struck out for me when I read this chapter was really this idea of like the hemorrhaging of blood. Right. It's just. And hemorrhaging and ultimately leading to death. But subsequently in death, you know, that there's still living blood. And then it continues to result in kind of this canonization of the same new person and how this gets kind of framed as like martyrdom. So I'm curious about how this became maybe, you know, an interlocutor for you for in terms of these two sames and why this particular story and this focus on this particular blood.
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Manuela Ceballos
Yeah. So I did not know Sidi Ridouan at all. His story was, was unfamiliar to me. I got, you know, I became very, very engrossed with it and, and you know, studied it for a long time and you know, dealt with all these sources that were new to me because even in Morocco people didn't, didn't know too much about Citi Redouan. But Teresa de Jesus, or Teresa de Avila, for those who know her, is a very, very well known figure in the Spanish speaking Catholic world. And so, you know, this was somebody that I grew, that I had grown up, you know, listening about and hearing about as one of the women who was a doctor of the church right along with Catherine of Siena. So she was not only, you know, an ordinary saint, but somebody who was capable of writing doctrine. And you know, who I didn't know, what I didn't know at the time when I was, when I heard about this. And of course, you know, Latin America doesn't have the same. There's a different kind of politics of blood. Sure, but it's not the same politics of blood. Some of it has been inherited from the colonial relationship with Spain, but it's not, you know, it's not an equivalent by any means. What I didn't know about Teresa Jesus, and that's how she signs her name. So she's Teresa of Avila from, you know, that's how she's frequently known. But she signs or works as Teresa Jesus. And that's. That's something. That's why I refer to her in that way. But again, what I didn't know about her was that she was the granddaughter of a man who had been accused by the Inquisition of Judaizing activities. I mean, what does that mean? It means that somebody. The Inquisition doesn't try people for being Jewish, doesn't try people for being Muslim. They try people for being bad Catholics. They try people for being bad Christians, right? And so when folks were forced to convert to Catholicism, right, People, you know, people had different reactions to that conversion. And there were always suspicions, even when people sincerely converted, that they hadn't fully done so, particularly. And this is especially true with Jewish communities initially and then Muslim communities eventually, or convert or converts from Judaism initially and converts from Islam eventually. And so this family who were famous for. I mean, they were one of the most prominent silk traders in their time, had to sort of switch jobs. I mean, Theresa's dad becomes like a sheep herder, right? They buy a title and, you know, are trying to really, really hide that. Those Jewish origins, right? And this is not something that was known publicly at least. This might have been something that people kn about or whispered about, but until the 1940s. So this is something that was hidden for quite a long time. Teresa doesn't. She doesn't write about it explicitly. You know, people have tried to find the connections, and there's various arguments about how much does she know about this or not, right? It's not clear. But, you know, she doesn't say anything. And the people around her don't say anything quite explicitly about it, right? So here you have two folks who are contemporaries, who are descendants of converts, who are very sincere in their traditions and who have radically different experiences and who live in radically different environments in which blood and conversion both play a role, albeit in very, very different ways. So that becomes an interlocutor. And the other thing that I didn't know until I read a very important book called From Madrid to Purgatory was that she had died. And then, you know, there's all these sources about. About her death that are cited in that book. And she died of a vaginal hemorrhage, right? So here's this person in this environment whose blood would have been considered to be impure. And in Spain in the 16th century, blood was. I mean, this wasn't blood. As a metaphor. Right. There were, for instance, because blood becomes milk when in. In. In theories, when. When you're breastfeeding. So there were all kinds of prohibitions against noble families hiring converso or the. The descendants of converts, wet nurses, for the fear of, you know, the transmission of Judaism or Islam in the blood. So blood is really like, as a material thing, considered to be substantively different when it comes from different bodies. And here you've this person whose blood should have been considered impure, and yet. Right. You know, as she continues bleeding after death. These are the relics. Right. It's. You can go on ebay and look for Teresa's blood, and there you can find, you know, for. For a variety of prices, you know, you can purchase a cloth that's been stained with her blood because her body continued bleeding after death, which was miraculous.
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Interviewer
And with both of these figures, what I understood your work to be doing is like, to showcase for us that these are not like blood is not a stable metaphor, material, nor is like, the connotations, you know, of blood, whether it be, you know, genealogical purity, which we'll get to, but just generally, notions of purity and pollution, in a broad sense are not at all static. Like, it's just such a. There's. There's entanglement and there's like shifting nature. And I think this is what the work is really doing between using these two figures, the protagonists, ultimately. And in chapter four, you. And chapter five, you get into kind of some of this analysis of what you're able to tease out in almost like a comparative sense between these two figures and their social context and geographical context. And in chapter four, you start off, interestingly, to get us into this with the story of Uthman's codex, you know, the Quran. Right. Particularly of the story in the moment where blood may have a particular connotation, but. But in the way that he was assassinated and what happens to the blood, his blood, on a Quran, there's like a different outcome, which then again, as you're indicating throughout the book, is that it challenges this notion that blood metaphorically or materially is never like, consistently deployed ultimately. Right. So did you want to say a little bit about the story of Uthman's codex, which I think then you also use different. You know, there's a story of, you know, any kind of bodily fluid coming out of the Prophet Muhammad and disciples either trying to drink the blood in the middle of war or any of this, or the sweat and maybe even urine. And then the story of Adam, which
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Shobana Xavier
I hadn't known, which is about kind
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Interviewer
of the black, almost black blood and which maybe is connecting to ink and knowledge ultimately. So there's so many different exciting stories in this chapter. It's hard for me to pick one. But I wonder if you could walk us through a little bit of maybe some of the work you're doing in this one.
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Manuela Ceballos
Yeah, I mean, so I think one of the things that I, that I. That I had to think about throughout the book was, you know, I'm writing these parallel stories, which, you know, I guess that's a form of comparison. I'm not trying to sort of do an equivalence there, but. But when you're trying to narrate two. Two parallel stories, right. The. The comparison is implicit.
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Interviewer
It.
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Manuela Ceballos
And trying to figure out whether things meant the same, whether concepts meant the same thing across religious and geographic boundaries. And sometimes they did and sometimes they didn't. But blood in particular tends to be pretty shifty. And even when we're talking about blood, for instance, if we're talking about blood as a humoral. In humoral medicine. Right. You know, and. And I'm talking about like, various traditions and there's. There's a lot of debate about this and in. In the medical humanities that, that I. I'm not an expert on, but that I reference briefly. But, yeah, the idea that like blood, phlegm, you know, black bile, yellow bile are the humors. Right. That blood as a humor is the same as blood as a flu. It's not. It's not. Right. And that when people describe, you know, blood as the basis of kinship, that that's a universal thing. It's not. Right. There are other fluids or other metaphors or other, you know, forms of. Of understanding connection that. That don't pass through blood or even semen. You know, sometimes it's. Sometimes it's semen, sometimes it's milk, sometimes. Sometimes it's other things. And so thinking about not all bloods are the same, which is also some things how I end the book. And this is something that we see in contemporary discourses on blood. Right. Not everyone's blood is the same. And when it comes to blood transfusions, when it comes to who is allowed to donate blood and who gets which blood and whatever else. And all the discourses regarding contagious disease, particularly HIV and other viruses. Yeah. The Red Cross had a, you know, a famous ad that said, you know, not all bloods are the same. And with Uthman's Quran was the idea that martyrs.
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Interviewer
Right.
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Manuela Ceballos
And, you know, this is a very specific Martyr. Right. Their blood is not washed off in funeral rites. Right. During. In the ways that it would be for. For other folks. Right. Martyrs are buried as they are found. And so even materially. Right. That blood is considered to be ritually different. The Kitaba Shifa, which was a very important book that continues to circulate quite widely, but was important in both Morocco and Iberia, among the Moriscos or Muslims in Spain, even after the forced conversions. The idea was that, you know, the Prophet's blood was. There were questions about whether it was, you know, polluting at all, right. And so there's all these traditions in which. Which, you know, are traditions of various. Which can be, you know, contested and have been contested by a whole variety of folks, but, you know, our traditions that circulated quite widely about people trying to preserve or consume the bodily fl. Fluids of the prophet, Right. Because his body is not polluting in the same way that other people's bodies are polluting. And we see this then, you know, with the. The descendants of the Prophet in Morocco too, right. Whose blood, you know, is considered to be healing in certain. Or was considered to be healing in certain instances. And so not all bloods are the same, which is. I mean, in Spain, that's instituted in policy. Right. And you don't have anything like the Spanish Inquisition in Morocco. Right. It's not. This is not an equival situation. So I'm not trying to say that. That. That it is just that what we think of as being universal and stable and static is not always so. And that begins with some of the most basic things that we think of. We all understand the same thing by, like, blood. And it turns out that even something as. As visceral as blood is not the same thing to everyone across all time and space.
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Interviewer
Space.
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Shobana Xavier
I mean, and there's also like a
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Interviewer
feminist angle that you bring into kind of engaging with these hagiographies, particularly with Teresa and one of the stories from chapter four that really, I've never heard of the story before. And I was like, wait, what was Nizamuddin Aliyah, who I think was critiqued for not praying, I believe. And then therefore, he just was bleeding. And so because he was assumed, the narrative was that because he was in comparably, like a menstrual state of bleeding, therefore he did not need to pray. Right. And so there's this kind of the sense that within, like a woman's body, if it's gendered in a particular way, there's a connotation of blood being associated with pollution and Kind of dirt and impurity and how the Nizahuddin aliyah story is like kind of. You know, it's hard. It's hard with Sufi stories. Like, you don't know if this is a teaching moment or if this is trying to be subversive or if it's reinscribing kind of a particular sense of patriarchy. Right. But this is also, I think, with Theresa and her hemorrhaging, as you had said, vaginal hemorrhaging ultimately would be a version where that would be associated with impurity. But of course, in death is celebrated. And it's kind of like, you know, that is elated and it's presented as this is blood that is holy. Right. And therefore people are trying to buy it, not like noting that the death was caused by vaginal hemorrhaging, which would have been people and to this day will still perceive as some kind of religious connotation that is impure.
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Manuela Ceballos
Right, Right, right. And I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that. That Mary Douglas does. Has. Has. Has done very well is, you know, sort of problematize the concept of dirt as matter out of place, which doesn't, you know, it's. It's a. It's. It's a rule that doesn't work. You know, and Marion Katz has had. Has problematized this and in various ways. It doesn't work. It's not a rule that applies all the time. Right. We. Dirt is not always matter out of place. This. This is. There's more to this than. Than just a kind of basic structural, you know, fluids that, like, come out of the body. And there's more than this. Right. Like people. People create and use concepts according to what they need in various ways at various times sometimes. But yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that. That. That ideas about. About the body do, right, Is they. They. They create, you know, we have the sense of. Of certain normative bodies, right. Which are gendered in particular ways, which are bodies that can do certain things versus bodies that can't or that won't. And with menstruation in particular, which, you know, presents all kinds of. Of.
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Interviewer
Of.
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Manuela Ceballos
I'm not even talking about religious issues, but also, like, social taboos. Right. And. And this is true today as well. Right.
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Shobana Xavier
Um, and there is this other story
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Interviewer
of a saint as well. Said Amina. Right? Saida from fat.
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Manuela Ceballos
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Sayyida Amina. Right. So this is. Yeah. And Scott, Google has worked on this.
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Interviewer
This
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Manuela Ceballos
extensively. And it's the idea, you Know, here you've got this woman who doesn't go to battle against the Portuguese, right?
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Shobana Xavier
Right.
- [36:10]
Manuela Ceballos
But here she is shaming all of those who aren't fighting for the right cause by bleeding for them, right? So her, her blood, instead of being shameful to her, right? And in, in particular ways becomes an indictment of. Of all the cowardly men, men who aren't, you know, and of course this reinforces certain gender binaries in, in. In in kind of obvious ways. But even the, the. The reversal of like, well, you know, I am the beloved of God, and so, you know, the, the. The. The case he cited, you know, I am the beloved of God and so I am exceptional and I don't have to pray, and I don't have to pray, you know, in ways that you recognize such, you know, and I am going to demonstrate that I don't have to pray because. And then my body is going to ooze, right, so, you know, blood as, as awarding people a particular kind of exceptional status. So, you know, the, these exceptional bodies that either help establish or re. Or. Or reinforce certain kinds of norms or subvert them. And like you said, it's hard with Sufi stories because they, they can do those things, right? They can, you know, say the Amina story or Lala Amina's story can, can do all those things. It can, it can reinforce the gender binaries of, you know, men should be out fighting and you know, for the women and you know, but here she is wounded in battle in a way that also says something about the, the stability of bodies that I think is. Is quite interesting thing. So. Yeah, no, I think when you're thinking about the body too, there's, you know, Christina Richardson has done interesting things about also questions of disability in medieval Islamic contexts and power. Right? So there's gender, there's race, there's disability. There's just all these questions of difference and how they're managed that come through with the, the way that bodily fluids of certain folks are dealt with. And I mean, even in sort of basic ways, we don't deal with the urine of little boys or little girls in the same way that we deal with the urine of adults. And who is capable of controlling their bodily fluids, right? There's a tremendous social punishment for those who are unable or unwilling or, you know, have some kind of impediment in being able to control their bodily fluids in the way that is socially acceptable. And so, you know, bleeding in a way that is visible creates, you know, is a social spectacle in ways that can Be politically very meaningful, but also very stigmatized.
- [39:17]
Interviewer
That's so fascinating. I'm. I'm also thinking about how in this chapter. I think it's. In this chapter you talk about tanning, like, skin tanning, like, which I didn't realize in terms of some of the material culture that was produced with, I guess, blood, but also, like, other relics. And also if, like, it was. It's. It's a world that I didn't know. I mean, it seems obvious as you had written it. And I'm like, whoa. But it also. I didn't realize there were legal treatises kind of written about whether you were allowed to do this or not. Right. And.
- [39:49]
Manuela Ceballos
Right. Right. I mean. And also. I mean, how. I mean, in a lot of contexts, you're writing sacred texts. You're writing scripture on. On vellum, right. Or skin. Right. On animal skin and parchment. And so what is the process? Like, what are the. What are. What are the kinds of things that you have to do to purify this material before you can write scripture on it? And I don't know if you've ever been to a tannery, but in Fez, there's all these very famous tanneries, and they smell. They smell very strongly. And it's the coloring, the materials that they use to give the leather certain colors, but it's also the tanning fluids and the whole process in the same way that if you go to a slaughterhouse, right. There's the smell of death, right. And life. And so there's specific rituals associated with those professions. And this is something that I'm really interested in, is the idea of purity in certain professions and the rituals of purity in certain professions. But, yeah, it's just the management of waste is a part of people's daily lives, and we. We don't see it as much anymore because we have aqueducts and, you know, toilets and all these different things.
- [41:18]
Interviewer
But.
- [41:19]
Manuela Ceballos
And we don't live close to each other if we. Most of us live, you know, even in cities in ways that. That are pretty sanitized and. And keep us distant from. From the realities of. Of other people's bodies and. And. And even our own, right. We're not, you know, managing our waste in the way that other folks who have to go out into the, like, outhouse. Right. And. And. And deal with this, you know, but in a place like fez, right, which is very much at the center of some of my thinking here, you. I mean, the tanneries are there, and they're, you know, and. And if you're I was thinking, you know, there's what happens during eid, right? Like, where can you. Where can you slaughter animals? Animals. What happens to the blood when. When, you know, like, is there a place for it to drain? Do you have to clean the streets on. On the day after? And what are the. The sort of sanitary precautions that you have to take? And what has this looked like historically? So, yeah, I mean, a lot of this is about thinking kind of pragmatically about the management of waste and what that does to hierarchies and who are the people who are closest to it and what does it mean for the them.
- [42:31]
Interviewer
Right, yeah, it's like a very basic infrastructural issue, too.
- [42:34]
Shobana Xavier
Right.
- [42:36]
Interviewer
Kind of thinking through where our values around proximity to those things are inherently coming from, you know, the places that we exist in ultimately. And I was thinking a lot about that and how I think also in this. In this chapter, you kind of signaled to us how sometimes there are moments in which the notion of blood and ink as knowledge production is. You know, it's. It's. It's a very literal thing. Like, are you led to write something that is going to communicate a particular set of facts to somebody who needs it? Right. That it's literally serving. Yeah.
- [43:10]
Manuela Ceballos
Right. And I mean, there. The. The question of blood writing, which is. Is. Is, you know, something that is found in a variety of contexts, of ritual contexts. Right. And even in secular context, there's that legend of Mufti Sakari, who's the person who wrote the Algerian national anthem. Right. During a period of great unrest. And I mean, I don't know whether the story is true, but the legend is that he wrote the Algerian anthem and blood on the walls of his jail cell while he was imprisoned by the French.
- [43:48]
Shobana Xavier
Right.
- [43:48]
Manuela Ceballos
And that this is an act of patriotism. And we have similar stories of, you know, Irish hunger strikers. Right. Also writing on the walls with feces. Right. And communicating that transmission of knowledge very literally through the body. Right. And with the body. So a much, much less sort of austere and sanitized version of writing than we have with computers.
- [44:25]
Shobana Xavier
Right, right.
- [44:26]
Interviewer
Right. It's really fascinating to think about, like, the romantic ways that we think knowledge has been communicated. I mean, the other reality of this is also. And I think the biggest. I don't know if cloud is the right way to frame it, but I think the. Maybe one of the key points you're also trying to take away is kind of this notion of how blood defines genealogical purity and especially a context of Conversion, regardless of converting, whether or not for particularly these two protagonists, for Sidi Ridwan and AFU Theresa, whether, you know, the blood has also gotten them out of the racial identity or the cultural identity or the religious identity of their ancestors in some ways. Right. And so then this is like not only a very practical question of how does blood translate from generation to generation as you're talking about, especially with, you know, the wet nurse and breastfeeding is a great example of that. Right. But there's also then a very real sense of whether can your identity be changed. Right. Like ultimately. Right, right. Like in a context where you've set it up for us, where religious identity is so part of the boundary making politically and socially and culturally of who's inside and who's outside society or the center of society, blood really matters. And how blood is interpreted in terms of whether you're an insider, outsider matters. And we know this because it continues to unfold in contemporary context and has been a colonial methodology to categorize indigenous communities. Right. It's really interesting to think about how blood quantum and all of these continue to be a mechanism for eugenics or all of this racialization of identity in kind of a very deeply biological way way. But it's fascinating, be it in this moment in time entangled with very visceral, like with purity, impurity, religion and the right type of, like the right religion.
- [46:28]
Manuela Ceballos
Right. No, I mean, there's the notion that, that certain folks are poisoning the, the common blood of our, you know, shared or the shared blood of, of the nation state. And, and that's something that, that we see quite vividly. There's also, I mean, and, and people especially, there's, there's, this is not my area of expertise, but you know, there are those discourses about DNA and DNA tests and you know, and, and I remember watching a commercial for one of the companies where somebody discovers that they have, you know, whatever, you know, geographical. They're linked to whatever geographical area through their DNA, and all of a sudden they come out and they're dressed in the costume of wherever they're now from. So I always thought I was X, but it turns out that, and thinking that this is how identity is constructed in certain contexts. Right. So for Teresa and for Sidi Reduan, this means different things. Right. Both of them in some ways are able to either hide or conceal or emerge through, right. These, these various genealogical discourses and, and construct a, a kind of holiness that, that, that is very, very much dependent on those discourses of, of objection and, and and blood. So, you know, what is it? How is it that. Through these marginal substances, when, you know, they have been charged in particular ways. And these two figures are interesting because in very different contexts, they managed to. Well, in Teresa's case, you know, avoiding it in some way and then now in another, and then in Sidi Ridouan's case, by just completely sort of giving in to the management of impurity. Impurity. Become these models for everybody else in. In. In these very specific ways. Right. So. And it's not. It's not by abandoning the body, it's not by abandoning the. Even the foulness of the body, but by sort of working through it that. That both of these figures sort of emerge as. As important models for their devotees. Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh my gosh, they're so fast.
- [49:21]
Interviewer
And breathe.
- [49:22]
Manuela Ceballos
Oh, sorry. I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [49:30]
Interviewer
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- [49:34]
Manuela Ceballos
1-800-contacts.
- [49:36]
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- [50:03]
Manuela Ceballos
Experian.
- [50:06]
Interviewer
And I think you're also in the book, contributing to the relationship of, you know, I'm thinking about mysticism and contemplative tradition with really like blood, which is. Yeah, that's in, you know, like, I think within mystical traditions. One way to think about it is it's calling for an interiority that is quite, quite, you know, like abstract and not in a literal, like embodied and fleshed sense. But that interiority is also signaling as to, in your case is like, you know, purity, impurity, connotations of the body and then the blood as well.
- [50:38]
Shobana Xavier
Right.
- [50:38]
Interviewer
And so how do you contain and hold these? You know, what the call of, like, ideal call of the mystic should be, which is to negate all of these things and seek for this union, which is really not bounded by materiality. Right. But it's fascinating with both of these figures who are coming from two different mystical traditions, for them, for their stories to really be bloody. Right?
- [51:06]
Manuela Ceballos
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I think part of it is not being bounded by materiality requires a very specific social position. Right. So. And in a very specific, you know, social situation. So not everyone is able or wants to get rid of the body entirely. Right. And I mean, even when I'm thinking about how it is that I. We think about books as. As these things that just kind of like we encounter as, yes, as matter in some ways, but that, you know, are you produced by the intellect of the author, but, you know, you have to eat, you have to get up and walk around, you know, you are sick. Are, you know, all of these different things as you're writing. And so knowledge production is. Is very much linked to the specific capacities of. Of certain bodies. And the specific, you know. Yeah, the. The specific, like, abilities and. And disabilities and. And the matter of the body. Right. And so there are. Are particularly, like, women, children, racialized folks, disabled folks are considered to be a lot more material or much more linked to matter than. Than. Than dominant men of whatever that, like, however, whatever that might look like. Right. Whiteness is. Is. Is. Is immaterial. Right. Is the norm. And then everyone else is. Is embodied in. In very specific ways. Right. And so if we. If we consider mysticism as being fully immaterial. Right. Who is able to. To engage mystically. Right. If. If that is a category and. And who's left out? And. Yeah, that's. It's the majority of folks. Yeah, right.
- [53:19]
Interviewer
Yeah, totally. Absolutely. So fascinating. I want to pivot and spend a little bit of time, really, with the conclusion, which was really profound and very interesting and very intense and I imagine took a lot of, like, strength and courage to write the conclusion.
- [53:38]
Manuela Ceballos
Right.
- [53:39]
Interviewer
Because, I mean, part of it is also a methodological intervention, ultimately. And I think you're trying to, you know, situate, yeah. Your embodied self in relationship to all the. All the kind of bodily fluids that you were spending time with, researching as you were going through your own. And you really land on this idea. It's fascinating to me because what you, for the reader, you kind of give us a methodological reflection, you know, perhaps you yourself, as a scholar, as a storyteller and what that means. And then you also kind of reframe what constitutes residue or waste. Right. Which is an interesting exit for us collectively. So I Wonder if you feel comfortable to talk about why that was there a process to that decision and why you perhaps wanted us to dwell on this. And really, ultimately, I think I find it was an invitation and the entire book was really an invitation to think about power and relationality and agency and how some of these fluids are really defined, are entangled with all of these bigger issues that we're contending with.
- [54:55]
Manuela Ceballos
Yeah, that's a really lovely way of putting that question or that. And I don't know how to start except to say that I think, I mean I, I do think that there is a necessity to situate, at least for me. I felt like at I got to the end of this book and I thought about writing the conclusion and then all of a sudden it was like, well, why did I write this? Right? You know, why did I spend all this time, you know, on, on, on, on dung and blood of all things, for a book that's supposed to, you know, hopefully knock on wood, get me tenure. You know, if, if everything goes correct and who thinks, who thinks to do that? And, and, and part of it has to do with the, I think all of us are, are telling a little bit of our story in, in, in different ways as we write. But for me, and you know, people have different relationships with self disclosure and all of that is fine. But for me, the notion that this was situated in a very specific bodily experience and a very specific historical experience also meant that I would allow the reader to decide how this intervention would sit with them. That once they knew where this was coming from, they could figure out what to do with what I had said rather than having it sort of having this very, you know, in depth exploration of the body that then, you know, doesn't have a body from which it emerges. So having that, that, that kind of, of grounding seemed necessary even though it was really nerve wracking to tell a little bit about, you know, know, to talk about myself in our first book and talk about myself in terms of waste, which, you know, isn't the most self evident thing, and to talk a little bit about my family who also doesn't like being talked about, especially right. In a language that they don't understand, that I have to translate for them and apologize because this is, this is a, a whole, a whole venture that, that they, that they've, you know, experienced from afar, but that they can't even access. Right. So yeah, no, I, that was, I, I, I feel like if I think about it too much and I felt at the moment, if I Think about this too much. I'll go back and not write this, and I'll erase this and write about something else. So I just have to kind of. Of be done with this and make the decision and. And just go.
- [57:53]
Interviewer
Well, I would say that it was probably my favorite part of the book. I mean, every part of the book was great. But, yeah, there's something I. I often think that, you know, the wonderful guests I have on the show and. And every. All of us who write and all of our colleagues, all of us put Blood and Sweat into these projects. And in a very literal sense, what I think your book is about is Blood and Sweat. And I think you've named it in terms of the case studies you've explored in this particular period and these kind of mystical figures. But you've also named it literally in terms of you as a human who did the work of setting the Blood and Sweat. And I think it's a profound thing to do, and I think it's so important, and I think it's a beautiful testament to your family and your mother. And I think it's really. Because, yeah, we don't name it and think about it as much, but in very real ways, it is what informs all of us. Right. And so as I was reflecting on the book and the conclusion, really, I think, forced a different type of reflection. Like, it changed from the intellectual as somebody who's interested topically to kind of an introspective that is thinking about maybe parallel stories, a family and who we are and the blood and sweat that. That carries. Right. And maybe not always clean kingships and community and all of that work, but I think to name it and to read it. Yeah. I was deeply moved and I just wanted to thank you for it, Effy.
- [59:28]
Manuela Ceballos
Thank you. Well, that means a lot to me. I think one of the things that I was also. And I hadn't sort of articulated that until now, writing a book and is I. You know, you never know who's going to read this. I didn't think there. There were that many people, but at the same time. Right. You know, I. It's. It's a kind of communal endeavor. Right. And one of the things about living in community and being in community and taking care of one another is. Is dealing with each other's bodies and being able to confront moments of. Of disgust that we've been trying to. Trained for. And, you know, if you're caring for children, if you're caring for somebody who is ill, if you're caring for yourself. Right. And Having somebody care for you and having to build community through these barriers of disgust and, you know, having to kind of build bonds of kinship that are not genealogical and that are built through that. Those, that. Those shared experiences with those bodily fluids in ways that are not, you know, linked to heredity, but to care and hopefully signaling that, you know, did something to thank everyone, you know, including you, who sort of participated in the. The generation of the book or in the, in the creation of the book and in the writing of the book and in the community that. That nurtures me and sustains me and allows me to. To. To do whatever it is that. That I do. And. Yeah, so I'm. I'm. I'm glad that that landed in a way that. That was at least a little bit, you know, resonant or meaningful.
- [61:23]
Interviewer
Yeah, it really, really was. Yeah, it was perfect. It's hard to pivot from such. We're having a profound puppet. First of all, congratulations just on a beautiful book. As I said before we started recording, it just. It's so beautifully written and there's so many details that we've barely even got into. So I'm really hoping that the listeners will pick up and get into it. And it's just amazing pieces that have lots of notes on gone. But this is just a teaser for our audience. And I wonder, even though it's just come out, I always don't like asking this question, but this is our closer question is that you've just. The book's come out and I hope you celebrate and sit with it and especially when it. So much has gone into it. But are there things maybe on the horizon after you rest a little bit and all of this stuff.
- [62:15]
Manuela Ceballos
Couple things from. So I have, over the last maybe 10 years or something along those lines, maybe a little bit more, have been interested in. In calligraphy and I'm terrible at it and I. I don't do this particularly well, but I've got these, like, wonderful teachers and friends who are, you know, incredible and who deal with this question. And Sidi R was a. A big, you know, inspiration for this too, was thinking about knowledge production and in particular writing and the relationship between certain purity practices and the act of writing. Right. So who gets, you know, what are the kinds of preconditions that underlie certain writing practices and how are they gendered? How, you know, what does illness or age or anything have to do with how these. How bodies are managed in the process of writing scripture and interacting with scripture and all these different things? So particularly in Morocco, I mean, some of this is really well documented in places like Turkey or in general, the Ottoman Empire. Right. Where, where, you know, the calligraphic tradition was very, very strong, but in Morocco and in, in the west, where people also, I mean, also where you had interreligious communities also writing each other's texts and learning each other's texts. You know, how did people learn how to write? And what, what, what kinds of bodies were imagined as being capable of. Of both writing and learning to write. So that, that's something that, that is in the horizon. And then I've also been doing a whole lot of translation and just literary translation, which has been a really interesting shift. And translation can be either. It can transmit, you know, all kinds of structures of dominations. Of domination. But, you know, you hope that it can be liberatory and so sort of struggling with that tension. But yeah, so I've got a. A couple of books from the Moroccan author Abdel Fattahqi Itun. I translated the Tongue of Adam into Spanish a couple of years ago, and now I translated an anthology that's coming out in Mexico City later on this year. And then hopefully I'll start my project on writing scripture in early modern Morocco at some point this summer.
- [65:11]
Interviewer
One of these days, I want to sit down and talk to you about translation.
- [65:14]
Shobana Xavier
That's for.
- [65:14]
Manuela Ceballos
Oh, I would love that.
- [65:15]
Interviewer
Yeah. Because it's like something that I haven't picked your brain about, but I know you do all this amazing translation stuff and you're operating in like, it's multilingual and it's like Spanish and. Yeah, it's amazing. And so just I'm always fascinated and amazed by the work translators do and kind of the deep, deep it's itself, it's another version of an embodied experience, right? Oh, sure. Learn, like, the flows of things through you. Right. And so I think all of that connects together all of the embodied pieces in terms of your scholarship. Thank you.
- [65:46]
Manuela Ceballos
And all the. I mean, and, and as a. And I mean, mysticism is such a loaded term. Right. But it's the idea of sort of emptying of the self. Right. And. And allowing the, the presence of somebody or something other to, to occupy you and. And to guide your movements and your hand. Right.
- [66:09]
Interviewer
What a great way to think about translation. Right. That's so me hadn't thought about it.
- [66:14]
Manuela Ceballos
That wasn't me. That's what rabanya means.
- [66:21]
Interviewer
Thank you so much for spending time with me and really enjoyed your book and I am happy to celebrate it with you. And congratulations.
- [66:29]
Manuela Ceballos
Thank you. And thank you so much for having me and for the generous questions and the, you know, just the continuous engagement and support. I'm very, very grateful to you.
- [66:38]
Shobana Xavier
And that was my conversation with Manuela Ceballos about her new book, Between Dung and Purity, Sainthood and Power in the Early Modern Western Mediterranean. I hope you enjoyed our conversation, and I hope you'll join us again next time. Until then, take your time.
- [66:54]
Interviewer
Count.