To Live Like a Moor. Olivia Remie Constable

Alfonso VI of Castile, through the watershed victories of Fernando III of Castile and Jaume I of Aragon in the first half of the thirteenth century that consolidated most of the Iberian Peninsula in Christian hands, to the conquest of Granada by Fernando and Isabel in 1492.

      From the late eleventh century to the late fifteenth century, it was generally assumed that subject Muslim populations living within the Crowns of Castile and Aragon would continue to be just that: Muslim. They could continue to practice their faith traditions and to live their daily lives much as they always had, even though now under Christian lordship. Latin and Romance documents often mentioned that certain things could continue as they had in the time of the Moors (en tiempo de moros), although life would never really be the same. Christian rulers normally allowed at least some mosques to remain in operation; Muslim communities could live according to their own religious law and custom (sharīʾah and sunnah in Arabic, xara and çuna in later medieval Romance texts); the call to prayer continued; halal butchers were permitted; Muslim schools, cemeteries, bathhouses, and pious endowments stayed in operation; Muslims could go on pilgrimage, they could observe Ramadan, they could circumcise their children, and they could continue to use Arabic and call themselves by traditional Islamic names.

      But was this really enough to live a fully Muslim life? In fact, many Mudejars found their lives increasingly restricted and impoverished, their religious practices curtailed, their communities segregated, and they were largely cut off from the larger Islamic world. Within the Muslim community outside of the Iberian Peninsula, especially in North Africa, many Islamic jurists argued that despite Christian promises of continuity for the sharīʾah and sunnah, it was not actually possible to live as a true Muslim under Christian rule. They urged that all Muslims should leave Christian lands, and many Mudejars complied, emigrating to Naṣrid Granada, North Africa, or the eastern Islamic world.¹⁸

      Many other Mudejars chose to remain in Spain, whether by preference, economic necessity, family commitments, or for other reasons. Continued Muslim life in Spain is recorded in a small number of texts produced by their own community and a much larger body of Christian sources, mainly legal and economic materials, relating to Mudejar affairs and legislation. The realities of Mudejar existence did not remain unchanged in the four centuries between 1085 and 1492, and there were significant regional variations between the large Mudejar populations in Valencia and Aragon, and somewhat smaller ones in Castile and Andalusia. Although these men and women continued to live as Muslims, it is clear that their access to religious and cultural traditions became more restricted over time as Christians around them became gradually less tolerant of public and private practices that they associated with Islam. This shifting context and changing attitudes about certain aspects of Muslim life will be discussed in more detail throughout this volume.

      The eve of the sixteenth century ushered in fundamental changes for Muslim life in Spain. After the conquest of Granada, the long-standing though contested toleration of Muslim customs and religious practice under Christian rule quickly shifted into a zealous Christian conversation about how to eradicate these pernicious symbols of Islamic identity. By 1500, most Christian authorities in Spain had come to the conclusion that it was impossible to be Christian and yet still live one’s daily life in a fashion that many people perceived as Muslim (vivir como moro). This was true not only in Granada, where Núñez Muley composed his memorandum in response to the 1567 restrictions, but also in Valencia and other regions of the Peninsula where there were New Christian populations. Among Old Christians, urban administrators, bishops and local clergy, inquisitors, kings, and queens were all openly concerned about backsliding among converts; secret Muslim rituals practiced at home behind closed doors, in bathhouses, and elsewhere; furtive teaching of Arabic and Islamic texts to children; continued adherence to Muslim dietary laws and fasts; attendance at traditional festivals, weddings, and musical events; clandestine funerary practices and circumcisions, as well as many other aspects of earlier Islamic life, especially concerning clothing and appearance. These worries about residual Islam were quite aside from concurrent and significant concerns about improper or insufficient Morisco knowledge of Christian prayers, rituals, practices, and doctrine. And these anxieties were reflected in repeated statutes prohibiting perceived Islamic practices, reiterated throughout the sixteenth century.

      Although at first glance such early modern legislation seems a dramatic break from the medieval past, in fact, this new push to eliminate Muslim “rites and customs” was merely the mirror image—reversed yet fundamentally the same—of earlier laws concerning Muslim life and practice. Before 1500, Christian legislation had been largely intended to maintain clear barriers between Muslims and Christians, with laws explicitly designed to assist segregation and to prevent assimilation, intermarriage, social and sexual mixing, or any confusion of religious identity. For example, medieval sumptuary laws in Spain, at least since the rulings of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, had functioned to preserve easily recognizable visual markers of identity in line with differences of religion: Jews must wear a star on their clothing or a particular style of hat or cap; Muslims should wear distinctive types of dress, cut their hair in a certain way, or wear a crescent moon symbol on their clothes. After 1500, and following the wave of forced conversions, the same basic impulses dictated that all baptized Christians should look, dress, pray, eat, and otherwise conduct themselves in the same way. In Granada, according to the edicts of 1567 “with respect to clothing, it was ordered that they [the Moriscos] not make any new dresses, veiled gowns, hose, or any other sort of dress such as those that they wore during the Muslim period; and that all the clothing that they cut and made in the future be like that worn by Christians.”¹⁹ If there was no longer any difference of religion, nor should there be any distinctions in dress or daily life.

      Because of this, in the sixteenth century, a whole group of practices that had once been open, acceptable, and even required aspects of Muslim culture, even under Christian rule, now became newly dangerous signals of imperfect Christian belief and probable markers of crypto-Islam. Inquisition records and episcopal correspondence from the early sixteenth century onward are filled with accusations not only of the inadequate Christianization of Moriscos (such as not knowing prayers, working on Sundays, failing to attend mass and confession, or avoiding baptizing their children) but also of outright Islamic practices (including prayer, circumcision, fasting, abstaining from pork and alcohol, reading the Qurʾān in Arabic, and ritual washing), together with a whole host of other more customary and cultural activities (things like visiting bathhouses, dressing in traditional clothing, veiling of women, eating couscous, dancing and singing zambras, staying up all night at parties [laylas], using henna to tint one’s hands and feet, sitting on the floor to eat, or wearing sandals and jewelry decorated with amulets and folk patterns). This new inquisitorial and administrative attention to Morisco ritos, costumbres, and supersticiones provides the context for Francisco Núñez Muley’s decision to argue his defense on the basis of culture and local tradition, while suppressing any associations with Islam.

      Lines differentiating religion and custom are still often unclear today, but apparent parallels between past and present can be misleading. Regulations on female veiling provide a case in point. In the contemporary Islamic world, there is ongoing debate about the interpretation of passages in the Qurʾān (such as sūrah 24, āyah 31) and ʾaḥādīth in regard to veiling, and the degree to which women should be covered when they go out in public. Muslims likewise differ over whether the wearing of a veil is a religious requirement for all women or a personal choice to be made by individual women.²⁰ The origins of the tradition are also a matter for dispute among scholars, whether female veiling was an innovation of the early Muslim community or a practice adopted from Christian fashions common in late antique Syria and Egypt.²¹

      Ironically, in the modern Muslim world, laws requiring the veil may lead some women to wear it as a legal necessity or a habit rather than as a dictate of personal faith, whereas women elsewhere who veil by choice usually do so with an explicitly religious rationale. Meanwhile, in western Europe, there has been much recent condemnation of the wearing of the veil (whether in the form of a hijab, niqab, burka, or other regional style) on the grounds that veiling is inconsistent with prevailing local expectations and law. In April 2011, veils that hide the face were banned in France, on the basis that they oppress women, they are a violation of individual