Tuhfa: The Gift of the Wise to Refute the Followers of the Cross

Anselm Turmeda, born in 1355 in Mallorca, was a friar of the Franciscan order and an author who is considered one of the founding fathers of Catalan literature. After a discussion about a passage from the Gospel of John, the young priest learned something from the seminary director that would change his life forever. His admirers in Europe were shocked to learn that he had emigrated to Tunisia and converted to Islam. Under the name Abdullah at-Turguman, he spent the rest of his life in his new homeland and wrote a wealth of works, including the tuhfatul arib, a refutation of Christianity published here for the first time in its entirety in German. He died in Tunis in 1423. It was not until the early nineteenth century that scholars discovered that two well-known authors of Arabic and Catalan literature, upon closer examination, turned out to be one and the same person. The breadth of his knowledge of both Christian-Western and Islamic literature was highly valued at the time for each of these individuals, who were considered distinct. The fact that he writes in both the languages ​​of Islam and Christianity makes him a very rare, possibly unique, literary figure.