The "Conversion" of Sol Hachuel from Judaism to Islam in Nineteenth-Century Tangier, Morocco.

In 1834, the Sultan of Fez publicly executed a seventeen-year-old Jewish girl, Sol Hachuel, for apostasy from Islam. Since then, Sol Hachuel's story has evoked a long history of Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and also secular interpretive readings. This article puts this historical episode into dialogue with the literature on religious "conversion" in Africa. By placing Sol Hachuel's experiences at the center of its analysis, this article argues that her "conversion" may have constituted an attempt to remove herself from an abusive situation rather than a genuine shift in religious allegiance from Judaism to Islam. In doing so, this article adds to a growing body of literature that demonstrates the limits of the social-structuralist and intellectualist theories of "conversion" for explaining the nature of religious change in Africa and highlights the ambiguity that can exist over religious identities when majority and minority religious communities live side by side. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]