by Matthew Carr
To Muslim religious scholars, both inside and outside Spain, dissimulation was a desperate response to a desperate situation. In the Middle Ages, the proximity of Muslims with Christians had often been cited as a potential source of theological contamination, and these risks were clearly magnified by the daily immersion of the Moriscos in Christian rituals, prayers, and beliefs. Who could tell whether Moriscos who uttered Christian prayers or bowed their heads at mass were really rejecting them “in their hearts”? How was it possible to distinguish a good Muslim from a bad Muslim when all Moriscos were obliged to adopt the appearance of good Christians on the surface?
These questions also preoccupied the Christian religious authorities in Spain, for very different reasons. The Moriscos were not the only religious group in sixteenth-century Europe to be forced underground by official persecution. Protestant Huguenots in Catholic France were also obliged to practice their faith in secret, as were English Catholics and Protestants at various times. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, tens of thousands of women were burned as witches in both Protestant and Catholic Europe for their imagined religious transgressions. But the suppression of Spanish Islam was not merely aimed at religious belief: it was intended to eliminate an ethnic minority whose customs and traditions were not necessarily religious in origin. Moriscos did not need to be devout Muslims in order to face persecution. Even the least zealous Moriscos were still suspect in the eyes of Christian society because of their clothes, their language, or the way they ate their meals. The more Spain’s ecclesiastical and secular authorities set out to eradicate these cultural differences by coercion and punishment, the more these differences were regarded as expressions of willful defiance. The result was a covert struggle that was unlike anything else in sixteenth-century Europe, which often began from the moment Moriscos entered the world and continued even after they had left it.
The Oran fatwa was widely reproduced in clandestine manuscripts throughout the sixteenth century, but Moriscos did not need to be aware of its specific recommendations in order to practice their own variants. Long after their initial conversions, many Moriscos continued to inhabit a parallel Islamic world beneath a façade of Christianity. Wherever possible, they observed the Islamic religious calendar. They observed the Ramadan fast and celebrated Muslim feast days. In the absence of mosques, they prayed and worshipped in their own homes, individually and sometimes collectively. In 1587 a Morisco alfaqui named Damián Doblet, from Buñol in Valencia, was arrested by the Inquisition a second time for Islamic practices. At his trial, various witnesses described how Doblet had preached to congregations of up to fifty men and women who sat on stone benches in the courtyard of his house, where he delivered sermons and accompanied himself on a lute. One witness described howOn many Friday nights the Moriscos and Moriscas went to Doblet’s house dressed in finery and made up. Suspecting that he was preaching the sect of Muhammad, one night we determined to take them by surprise, and finding the main door locked we entered by a false door. We found Doblet seated in a chair with a lute in his hands and one foot unshod, and a Morisco held an open book in front of him from which he read and sang.2
Many similar gatherings took place in sixteenth-century Spain. In some cases, Moriscos attended secret meetings with their friends and neighbors, where they read from the Koran or heard sermons from alfaquis and itinerant Muslim preachers. At other times, Islamic worship was carried out within the home under the supervision of the male head of the family. Some of the most tenacious guardians of Islamic tradition were women, who were frequently cited by clerics and ecclesiastics for their “obstinate” resistance to Catholicism. The records of the Inquisition contain numerous examples of such obstinacy, such as Isabel de Madrid, who was arrested because she responded to Christian taunts of “Moorish bitch” by declaring “I am a Moor, my father and mother were Moors and died as Moors, I am also a Mooress and I will die as a Moor.”3 The Morisca María la Monja told the Inquisition of Cuenca that “not for all the world would she cease saying that she had been a Moor, so great a source of pride was it for her.”
Morisco defiance was not always so overt. For the most part, Moriscos paid lip service to Catholicism in public, while privately affirming their own Muslim identities. One way of doing this was to neutralize Christian sacraments. After baptizing their children in churches, some Morisco families would take their children home and wash off the baptismal chrism with hot water or bread crumbs. They would then perform the traditional fada name-giving ceremony and give the infant a Muslim name that would be used privately. Other Moriscos continued to circumcize their male children and invite their friends and relatives to attend the traditional festivities that followed.
The same tactics were often applied to marriage. In some cases, Moriscos spurned Christian weddings and married according to their own ceremonies. The ecclesiastical authorities often took pains to suppress these practices and force Moriscos to marry in the Christian fashion, but many families followed these obligatory church weddings with their own Muslim nuptials, preferably on the same day. The most contentious and hard-fought battles were often waged over the dead. The Church was insistent that dying Moriscos should receive extreme unction and make their last confessions, and Morisco families who failed to inform their local priest that their children or relatives were dying or seriously ill could be fined and punished. Moriscos were equally determined to ensure that their loved ones “died as Moors” so that their souls would enter paradise, and they often pretended that their relatives had died suddenly without giving them time to call the priest.
This struggle continued even after death. Islamic burial practices, such as washing the corpse in scented water or dressing it in clean clothes, were strictly forbidden, and Morisco burials sometimes had to be delayed until priests had inspected the corpse to confirm that their fingernails and toenails had not been cut and that they had been laid on their backs with their hands crossed on their chests in the Christian manner. If Moriscos were unable to bury their dead in Muslim cemeteries, bereaved families would sometimes lay the corpse on a bed of stones, blessed whenever possible by their alfaquis, so that the body would not touch the earth. If the local gravedigger was a Morisco, relatives would try to ensure that the deceased was buried in virgin soil by asking for the grave to be dug deeper than usual. There were also cases in which Moriscos dug up bodies that had been buried in Christian graveyards in order to give them a proper Islamic burial in virgin soil. The same process worked in reverse, and there were cases in which Moriscos were prosecuted by the Inquisition after suspicious officials had ordered the bodies of their relatives to be dug up, sometimes years later, and found them lying on their sides.
Dissimulation was not easy to maintain in a society where Moriscos might find themselves denounced to the Inquisition for yawning in church, failing to show the correct body posture, or wearing clean linen on Fridays. Public bathing was generally prohibited, but even Moriscos who washed in their own homes could find themselves charged with performing Islamic ritual ablutions. In the city of Cuenca, the Morisca María de Mendoza was arrested because a witness saw her collect a pitcher of water from an orchard and followed her into her house, where, the Inquisition was told, she had been observed “as stark naked as her mother had been the day she was born, and that she was barefoot even though it was summertime, in June or July, and that she was kneeling down and washing her hair.”4
To the Inquisition tribunal, such behavior was evidence of the all-body Islamic religious ablution known as the guadoc. In Murcia in the 1550s, a Morisco named Juan de Spuche was brought before the corrupt inquisitor Cristóbal de Salazar after someone had seen him washing his hands and face in a fountain after chopping wood. Subjected to “the torment,” the unfortunate Morisco confessed to Mohammedanism and denounced a number of his neighbors, only to revoke his confession immediately afterward. Salazar then had him tortured a second time, till his hands were so badly damaged that he was unable to dress
himself and he died in prison shortly afterward.
Was de Spuche merely cleaning himself after work, or was he washing his hands and face in preparation for prayer? The records of the Inquisition are filled with similar incidents in which seemingly innocuous behavior was construed as evidence of the “sect of Muhammad.” Moriscos could be denounced because they rejected an invitation to supper during Ramadan or because they had no religious images or crucifixes in their homes. Juan de Flores, a Morisco from Toledo, was denounced to the Inquisition because “ordinarily he didn’t sit in a chair or eat at table.” In some parts of Spain, Christian officials routinely visited Morisco homes at mealtimes to check that they were not eating their food on the ground.
Such vigilance was not the same everywhere. On the more remote estates of rural Valencia and Aragon, Moriscos could dispense with clandestinity for much of the time, secure in the protection of their Christian lords. Where they lived in closer proximity to Christians, however, a single stray remark or word out of place could bring disaster. The victims of an auto-da-fé in Granada in 1571 included Ramiro de Placencia, a Morisco from Burgos, who was seen yawning and murmuring “May Muhammad close my eyes,” and a Morisca woman named Mayor García, who asked, “How could a married woman remain a virgin after giving birth?” during a discussion about the Virgin Mary. Luisa Hernández, a Morisca in the town of Tinajas, in Cuenca, was brought before the Inquisition because she had lost her temper and shouted, “A Moor is worth more than a Christian” on hearing a Morisco child insulted in the street. Francisco de Córdoba was denounced by his Christian neighbors because he kept refusing invitations to lunch during Ramadan. The Morisco salesman Jorge de Peralta was arrested because he muttered the name “Muhammed” in exasperation after someone had refused to buy his wares.
Invited for lunch by her Christian neighbor, the Morisca Isabella Garda was told afterward that her meal included pork. She immediately stuck her fingers down her throat and vomited—and was denounced to the Inquisition as a result. We cannot know whether her revulsion was an instinctive physical reaction to a religious/cultural taboo or whether it was motivated by concern for the salvation of her soul if she ate proscribed food. But there must have been many Moriscos who found themselves in a similar predicament to that of the elderly tinker charged by the Inquisition in 1528 with abstaining from wine and pork and “using certain ablutions,” who protested that he was already forty-five years old at the time of his conversion and had never been able to acquire a taste for pork.
If some Moriscos were unable or unwilling to break the habits of a lifetime, others consciously chose to “live as Moors.” Some Moriscos did so because they were terrified of eternal damnation, like Juan Carazón, a Morisco from Cuenca who confessed to having performed ritual ablutions in order to save himself from the “fires of Chiana, which is hell.” Others were persuaded by their alfaquis, by relatives, or peer-group pressure to remain steadfast in their faith. Some clung to their Islamic past as a defiant response to persecution. Whatever their motivation, many Moriscos continued to live this psychologically demanding and dangerous existence throughout their lives and succeeded in passing on these same dual identities to their children and grandchildren.
This continuity is even more remarkable considering the isolation of so many Morisco communities from the wider Islamic world. Without mosques or religious institutions, with their books burned or prohibited and their religious leaders driven into clandestinity, many Moriscos faced the dilemma described by the Morisca Ana de Padilla, who told the Inquisition that “she did not perform Moorish ceremonies because she did not know them but she had the will to perform them if she knew them.” Some Moriscos tried to glean these banned rituals and beliefs by listening carefully to the detailed lists of forbidden Islamic practices contained in Inquisitorial edicts. Others taught each other what they knew or studied under alfaquis and itinerant preachers. Many Moriscos retained contact with their Islamic past through the underground literature known as aljamiado, from the word aljama (community). These writings consisted of handwritten texts, generally in vernacular Castilian, Catalan, or Portuguese but using Arabic characters, for reasons which have never been made clear. Some scholars contend that Arabic was used in order to conceal their contents, others argue that the use of Arabic was a deliberate affirmation of cultural resistance, while another school of thought depicts these writings as another example of the cultural hybridization that was already intrinsic to al-Andalus.
The idea that Arabic was a form of concealment does not seem plausible, since the Inquisition regarded all aljamiado manuscripts as evidence of the “sect of Muhammad” regardless of their content, and anyone caught in possession of them was liable to arrest and punishment. Such warnings were undoubtedly seen by some of those who wrote and read them as a form of resistance. In the course of the sixteenth century, thousands of aljamiado texts were confiscated and burned, particularly in Aragon, where Arabic was not widely spoken. These manuscripts were discovered in wall cavities, under floors and rugs, and even, in one case, among weapons hidden in an Aragonese cave. Nevertheless, they were not always so difficult to find, if Cervantes is to be believed. In the early part of Don Quixote, Cervantes interrupts his protagonist’s battle with a giant to inform the reader that the rest of the novel is a co-authored “translation” from an Arabic manuscript written by “the Arabian and Manchegan author” Cide Hamate Benengeli. In Cervantes’ authorial conceit, this manuscript is discovered by chance in a Toledo market, when he stumbles on a boy selling “parchment books,” including one “with characters which I recognized as Arabic.” Excited by this discovery, Cervantes finds a “Spanish-speaking Moor” who translates what most of his readers would certainly have recognized as a proscribed aljamiado manuscript in order to continue his narrative of Don Quixote’s adventures.5
So effective was the Inquisitorial suppression of aljamiado that its existence was largely forgotten until the nineteenth century, when a number of these manuscripts were discovered by chance during building works. In one incident in Aragon that is redolent with irony, a priest saved one of these books for posterity when he stopped a group of local boys from tearing its pages and throwing them into a bonfire. When aljamiado manuscripts were first translated by the Spanish Arabist Pascual Gayangos and other scholars in the nineteenth century, some Spanish intellectuals expressed the hope that they might constitute a lost literary Indies filled with undiscovered literary masterpieces. So far, these expectations have yet to be realized.6 Though there were some Morisco poets who wrote in aljamiado, the primary concern of these writings was cultural and religious survival rather than aesthetic expression. Most of the texts that have been uncovered so far consist of anonymous anthologies and compilations from other sources, whose main objective appears to have been the preservation of a religious and cultural world that was in danger of extinction. Their contents range from extracts from the Koran and Koranic commentaries, writings on Islamic jurisprudence, and folkloric accounts of the life of Muhammad to collections of medicinal cures, spells, and magical charms, such as The Book of Marvelous Sayings, or miscellaneous almanacs, such as The Book of Divination.7
Some texts also contain accounts of journeys and travels, anti-Christian polemics, and legends and epics from early Islamic history. Many of them feature legendary Muslim heroes invested with superhuman powers who triumph over human and demonic enemies, such as Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, and the seventh-century Muslim general Khalid Ibn al-Walid. One of the most popular aljamiado texts was the tale of Carcayona the Handless Maiden, who is converted to Islam by a golden dove and has her hands cut off by her pagan father. Driven from her home because of her beliefs, Carcayona lives in a cave, where she is tended and cared for by wild animals until the king of Antioch falls in love with her and makes her his wife. When a jealous clique at the king’s court drives her into the wilderness once again, she is saved by her animal friends, and her hands are miraculously restored, as a reward for he
r faith and purity, before her husband finally rescues her and restores her to the throne.8
Read aloud at family gatherings and clandestine meetings, these tales of faith, endurance, and ultimate deliverance undoubtedly brought consolation and hope to their audiences, but they were also a means of holding on to an Islamic past that had largely vanished from the surface of Spanish life. This sense of living in a vanishing world was given poignant expression by the anonymous author known as the Young Man of Arévalo, whom we have already encountered in Granada. Little is known of him except that he came from the Castilian town of Arévalo and his mother appears to have been a genuine Christian convert. He lived and wrote in the first half of the sixteenth century and traveled extensively around Spain, in what appears to have been both a spiritual quest and a pilgrimage in search of the lost Islamic heritage of al-Andalus.
The Young Man’s accounts of these journeys contain some telling glimpses of the Morisco underground, with its clandestine religious gatherings and anguished theological discussions on whether their improvised forms of worship will be sufficient to bring salvation. It is the world of heroic magas (wise-women) such as the indomitable Mora of Ubeda whom the Young Man meets in his journey to Granada in the early years of the century. Nearly a hundred years old and virtually blind, barely able to kneel to say her prayers, the impoverished Mora remains a figure of religious authority in her community, and her resilience clearly impresses and inspires her youthful visitor:Granada and all the country round were governed by this Mora. She never married and was said never to have known any man. The ordinary people of the region said that this Mora had more credit in matters of our religion and sunna than anybody.... She was well known by all nations, because she showed me letters from all four of the legal schools, besides others from great muftis and scholars. She never allowed herself rest because she said that the highest form of jihad is to propound our Religion in lands not ruled by Muslims.9
