Some scholars have interpreted the Risālah as a work by a freed slave arguing for the inclusion of his ṣaqālibah freedmen rulers of Dénia in the dominant Arabic-Muslim culture of al-Andalus.
[1] Ibn Gharsiya was born into a Christian Basque family, but was taken prisoner in his childhood and raised in the Islamic faith.
He served under the Slavic Emir of Denia, Mujāhid al-‘Āmirī, and his son, Ali ibn Mujahid.
[2] Like Ibn Gharsiya, the ruling family of Denia were also Muwallad and had broken free from the Caliphate of Cordoba after the turbulent year of 1009.
[3] Between 1051 and 1056, Ibn Gharsiya wrote a risala against the Arab ascendancy in al-Andalus, which concurrently praises non-Arab Islam.
[2] While he boasts about the Muladi mastery of natural philosophy, exact logic, astronomy, music, arithmetic, and geometry, he ridicules Arabs as "experts in the description of towering camels.
According to the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature, this risala was of minor importance, and its few exponents tended to repeat clichés adopted from the earlier Islamic East.
[7] To this, Monroe adds:[7] "Had Ibn Garciá wished to reject Arabic culture in its entirety he would probably have written his risāla in a style different from the one that was judged at the time to be of good literary taste, and unlike the practice of Ibn Bassām, he might possibly have inserted postclassical literary forms into his composition.
It is a veritable mosaic of allusions to Arabic literature and history, containing quotations from the Koran, from poetry and proverbial wisdom.