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CHAPTER 1

Being Muslim in Christian Spain

In 1567, seventy-five years after the Christian conquest of Granada, an elderly gentleman in that city sent a memorandum to the city’s chief administrator defending a set of customs—visiting bathhouses, wearing local dress, using old family names, possessing Arabic books, and singing traditional songs—that had recently been prohibited by Christian authorities. The gentleman, Francisco Núñez Muley, had been born into an elite Muslim family in Granada, probably around 1490, shortly before the city’s surrender to the Catholic Monarchs, Fernando and Isabel, in 1492. He had converted to Christianity as a young man, and by 1502 he was employed in the household of the archbishop of Granada. By the time he was writing his memorandum, he must have been nearly eighty, with a lifetime of experience of what it meant for Muslims, and converted Muslims (“New Christians,” or moriscos), to live under Christian rule in sixteenth-century Spain.

The subject of Núñez Muley’s memorandum, which contemplates the meaning of traditions of bathing, dressing, naming, language, and music, closely parallels the subject of this book.¹ To what degree were such practices entwined with religious belief, local culture, or political allegiance, and how did perceptions of their meaning change over time during the period from the twelfth to the sixteenth century in Spain? The condemnation of cultural practices in 1567 and Núñez Muley’s vigorous arguments for their continuation draw attention to the permeable, narrow, and shifting line between what was perceived as being Muslim or Christian in late medieval and early modern Spain. Then as now, there were many beliefs and practices that were seen as defining characteristics of one religion or the other, especially articles of doctrine and ways of life that were explicitly set forth in holy texts and books of religious law and tradition. But every religion also has other customs and habits, whether local or widespread, that have come to be associated, sometimes very strongly, with that faith tradition, even though they may have little basis among official aspects of belief. Foodways provide a good example of this duality. On the one hand, there are strict and widely recognized religious dietary laws set out for Jews and Muslims regarding kosher and halal butchering practices and the avoidance of pork products. On the other hand, there are many regional food traditions that can also be associated with Jews and Muslims, without being universal, exclusive, or religiously required. Enjoying kebabs, falafel, or hummus might fall into this category today; in late medieval Spain, this was true of eating eggplants and couscous.

The same is true for traditions of cleanness and purity, where there is a difference between the religious requirements of ritual washing before prayer and the customary and pleasurable cleansing of one’s body in the warm water and steam of a bathhouse. Yet both practices are related in their valuation of hygiene, and they are closely culturally linked to each other.

Many of the practices that Núñez Muley was called upon to defend fell into this often indefinable and sometimes controversial borderland between religious requirement and customary tradition. Christians in sixteenth-century Spain could catalog a broad set of activities, described as “customs,” “superstitions,” “ceremonies,” and “rites” (costumbres, supersticiones, ceremonias, ritos), that they saw as characteristic of Muslim life, which included and yet went well beyond canonical Islamic requirements. For example, the 1554 Synod of Guadix included a list of supersticiones y ritos practiced by New Christians. All were condemned, both those that were overtly Islamic rituals (such as fasting during Ramadan) and others (such as painting the hands with henna) that were categorized as merely superstitious but not heretical.²

In preparing the 1567 edict in Granada, Old Christians argued that converted Muslims must abandon all elements of their former life, not only official beliefs but also long-term habits. The chronicler Luis del Mármol Carvajal, a Christian contemporary of Francisco Núñez Muley in Granada, explained their reasoning in that “because the Moriscos have been baptized and are called Christians, and they have had to both be and appear to be Christians, they have left behind the clothing, language, and customs that they once used as Moors.”³

Similar reasoning and language would continue through the Morisco expulsions in the early seventeenth century. Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza later recalled how Morisco customs (costumbres de los moriscos) had to be reformed, since the local people “appeared to be Christians but were actually Moors” (eran Cristianos aparentes y moros verdaderos), holding to “the rites and ceremonies of their sect” (los ritos y ceremonias de su seta) including foodways, prayers, and music (zambras).⁴

The 1567 ban on what Old Christians perceived as Islamic customs—especially the prohibition on dress, veils, and shoes—caused consternation within the New Christian community and Núñez Muley was commissioned to draft a rebuttal. Strikingly, his defense rested on economic and cultural arguments, not religious associations. Not only would it be a hardship for New Christian women to have to buy entirely new wardrobes, but he emphasized that these clothing practices were merely elements of local culture and style; they were not based on faith traditions. “Their style of dress, clothing, and footwear,” he states, “cannot be said to be that of Muslims, nor is it that of Muslims. It can more rightly be said to be clothing that corresponds to a particular kingdom and province.” (El ábito y traxe y calçado no se puede dezir de moros, ni que es de moros. Puédese de dizir ques traxe del Reyno y provinçia.)⁵

All regions have their own particular styles, Núñez Muley argued, and thus Granadan dress was distinct from the fashions elsewhere in Castile, just as clothing in Morocco was different from styles in Turkey. Yet at the same time, dress was not linked to religion, since Christians in Jerusalem dressed just like their Muslim neighbors. Likewise, the practice of female veiling was shared by both Old and New Christians in Granada, where many women from Old Christian families routinely veiled their faces if they wished to walk in the street unrecognized.⁶

Christianity, he insisted, “is not found in the clothing or footwear that is now in style, and the same is true of Islam,” so that “from all that I have just pointed out, your Most Reverend Lordship will certainly be convinced, as it is true, that the natives’ style of clothing and footwear has nothing at all to do with either support for or opposition to Islam.”⁷

Núñez Muley was in a very tricky position, and his line of argument was necessarily somewhat disingenuous. Whether or not they were strictly “religious,” many of the practices that he defended were indeed holdovers from the previous century, when Granada was a Muslim city and its citizens were Muslims. The Naṣrid kingdom of Granada had survived for two and a half centuries (from 1232 until 1492) as the final outpost of Muslim-controlled territory in the Iberian Peninsula until its last Muslim ruler surrendered to Fernando and Isabel. But by the time Núñez Muley was drafting his memorandum, Granada had been officially Christian for three-quarters of a century, and its inhabitants were all baptized Christians, whether from Old Christian families (cristianos viejos) or relatively recent converts (cristianos nuevos). At least two generations had passed since the early sixteenth-century edicts requiring conversion or expulsion, so only the very oldest among New Christian citizens, like Núñez Muley himself, had actually been born Muslim. Nevertheless, New Christians in Granada still thought of themselves as “natives” of the city (naturales, in Núñez Muley’s words), as opposed to the Old Christian incomers, and they preserved many of their distinctive local customs, including traditions of bathing, fashion, music, names, and language. But, as Núñez Muley’s argument makes clear, there was nothing to be gained for the Morisco community by linking these practices to Islam, since everybody was now technically Christian. Indeed, in an age in which the Spanish Inquisition was a present and fearful fact of life, it was highly desirable to discourage any linkage with Islam.

Yet despite Núñez Muley’s protestations in his memorandum, it is reasonable to assume that many New Christians did, in fact, associate these practices with their Muslim heritage and that Old Christians were not incorrect in believing that certain ways of life distinguished the two Christian populations from each other. It is likewise reasonable to posit that neither group, Old or New, was a solid or undifferentiated bloc. Many Moriscos (the ones sometimes called crypto-Muslims in modern scholarship) actively resisted acculturation and conversion, and they preserved traditional ways precisely because they knew them to be Islamic, while other more assimilated New Christians may have held to their customs more from habit and tradition. Even members of the most highly assimilated group, including Francisco Núñez Muley (who himself knew little or no Arabic, and who has sometimes been described as a collaborator because he served under the postconquest administration),⁸ still clearly felt that these older traditions and practices were an important part of Granadan life.

Within Old Christian society there must also have been a spectrum of opinion about the practices in question, with some people shunning anything that might be perceived to bear a taint of Islam, while others willingly dressed in local clothing styles, ate regional foods, visited bathhouses, and listened to popular music. Even Christian clerics differed in their approaches to these traditions. Shortly after the 1492 conquest, we are told that the first archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera, incorporated local music (zambras) into Corpus Christi processions and tried to win over Muslim converts by preaching the Gospel and inviting them to dinner so as to inculcate table manners and other Christian customs (costumbres cristianas) by example.⁹ Meanwhile, his more conservative colleague Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros ordered the burning of Arabic books and successfully pursued the forced conversion of the Muslim population of Granada.

Debates, disputes, disagreements, and indecision about the best strategies for Christian-Muslim relations were nothing new, although there were changes over time and differences according to region. By the early 1500s, Christians and Muslims had lived in the Iberian Peninsula for eight hundred years, through periods of warfare and relative peace, sometimes separate and sometimes side by side. For much of this period, they had maintained separate polities under Christian or Muslim rulers, although Christians and Jews also lived in Muslim territories while Muslims and Jews lived in the Christian kingdoms. But mere adherence to a religion does not imply unity, and there were regional political, cultural, and linguistic differences that were unaligned with religion, leading to warfare between Christian states, or between Muslim states, as well as between Christians and Muslims. In the eleventh century, for example, the northern Christian states (Castile, León, Galicia, Catalonia, and others) were often as hostile toward each other as they were to Muslim states, while Muslim rulers of the disparate Taifa kingdoms fought against each other as much as against their Christian neighbors. In the later Middle Ages, consolidation of territories clarified the Christian-Muslim frontier conflict, but did not resolve inter-Christian disputes.¹⁰ By the later thirteenth century, three major political entities emerged: the Naṣrid kingdom of Granada, the Crown of Castile (consolidating the older regions of León, Castile, Asturias, Galicia, Murcia, and Andalusia), and the Crown of Aragon (encompassing Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearics, and other Mediterranean colonies), alongside the separate and smaller Christian kingdoms of Portugal and Navarre (the latter of which would become part of the Crown of Aragon in 1512). In 1492, Fernando and Isabel added Granada to the regions held within the Crown of Castile, putting the entire Iberian Peninsula in Christian hands for the first time since the Islamic conquests of 711.

The period of Fernando and Isabel, who were granted the joint title “los Reyes Católicos” (the Catholic Monarchs) by Pope Alexander VI in 1496, has been celebrated as the culmination of a long process of Spanish unification, but in reality unity remained elusive and differences did not disappear under their rule. The Crowns of Castile and Aragon would not be politically unified into the nation-state of “Spain” until 1516, with the death of Fernando and the accession of Carlos I (Emperor Charles V), the grandson of Fernando and Isabel. Even this merger did not quell unrest, and there were Morisco uprisings in Granada, Valencia, and Aragon throughout the century, creating a feeling of disunity and insecurity. Many Christians feared that the Moriscos could become a fifth column, and that they might receive outside aid from Muslim rulers in North Africa or from the powerful Ottoman sultan.

In many respects, the conquest of Granada paved the way for religious unification of the Peninsula, with the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and increasing pressure on Muslim communities to convert, but Christianization would also prove to be a long struggle. The surrender treaty negotiated with Granada in late 1491 had promised that Muslims could continue to live in Granada, to practice Islam, and to maintain their traditional ways of life. But this policy changed within a decade of the conquest, as hard-liners such as Cardinal Cisneros successfully argued for new requirements of conversion or expulsion. In 1501, in the wake of a local uprising in 1499–1500, Cisneros oversaw an edict ordering the conversion of all Muslims in Granada, followed a year later, in 1502, by an extension of the policy to Muslims throughout Castile.

These proclamations caused many Muslims to leave Spain, but large numbers remained, submitted to baptism, and became New Christians, or Moriscos. These two synonymous terms are controversial, in large part because many of the converts were, in almost all respects, still essentially Muslim. They practiced their faith either covertly (adhering to the Islamic doctrine of taqiyya, or permissible dissimilation) or relatively openly, especially in regions like Valencia where mosques still existed even after further conversion edicts were passed in the 1520s. Scholars like L. P. Harvey have therefore argued that this group, sometimes called crypto-Muslims, should simply be called Muslims.¹¹

But people like Francisco Núñez Muley do not fit comfortably within this rubric, since all evidence points to the fact that he considered himself to be a true Christian, albeit a New Christian. He uses the term cristianos nuevos to designate his compatriots, describing them as “the said natives of this kingdom [who have] converted to our holy Catholic faith” (los dichos naturales deste Reyno se convirtieron a nuestra santa fe católica).¹² The persuasive force of his memorandum itself rests to some extent on an assertion of the New Christians’ loyalty and Christian faithfulness, as well as his own insistence that “my intention [in writing] … is to serve the Lord our God, the Holy Catholic Church, and His Majesty.”¹³

In contrast, Núñez Muley describes Muslims as Moors (moros) and Islam as the sect of the Moors (la seta de los moros). This vocabulary is obviously designed to reinforce his argument that certain customs were regional rather than religious, but these terms must reflect contemporary usage to some degree. Meanwhile, most Old Christians used the word moro for any person who was religiously, culturally, politically, linguistically, or ethnically linked with Islam in Spain or North Africa, usually Muslims but often including converts.

The term moro, like morisco, frequently had a derogatory flavor. Morisco was also a contemporary usage, but its meaning is confused by having two separate senses. It could either (as a noun or adjective from about 1500 onward) refer to a New Christian, or (as an adjective, and an older usage) pertain to anything to do with los moros. Thus, for example, a piece of clothing described as a capa morisca could either be a cloak in the style worn or made by New Christians or, more generally, any cloak in a Moorish style. This double meaning can sometimes be confusing, but it does not detract from the legitimacy or utility of the term when used, as by Luis del Mármol Carvajal, in the sense of “the Moriscos who have been baptized and are called Christians” (los moriscos tenian baptismo y nombre de cristianos) even though they may not act or dress like Old Christians.¹⁴

Cardinal Cisneros and his contemporaries were well aware of the obstacles to conversion and assimilation if New Christians in Castile preserved their older customs and habits, and he moved, unsuccessfully, to ban them in 1516. A second ban on Muslim clothing, language, and customs in Granada, imposed in 1526, was postponed for forty years after local Moriscos petitioned Charles V and paid over eighty thousand ducats to the crown.¹⁵

During the early 1520s, Muslims in Valencia and Aragon also faced forced baptism and suppression of their customs and usages.¹⁶ And opposition to any practices perceived as Islamic, including traditional Morisco modes of dress and appearance, bathing, foodways, names, and the use of Arabic, continued to appear throughout the sixteenth century, both in royal documents and inquisitorial records. Then in January 1567, precisely timed to coincide with the seventy-fifth anniversary of Granada’s surrender, the Audiencia of Granada issued its proclamation banning Morisco dress, language, names, bathhouses, and other traditional customs. The original text of this edict does not survive, but evidently it revived many of the bans originally promulgated by Charles V in 1526.¹⁷

Reactions to the 1567 decree included not only Francisco Núñez Muley’s carefully argued memorandum but also the launching of a major rebellion among Moriscos in the Alpujarras in 1568. Neither effort achieved its desired effect. There is no evidence that Christian authorities paid any serious attention to Núñez Muley’s appeal, and the Alpujarras revolt was put down after two years, followed by the deportation and relocation of many Granadan Moriscos to other areas of Castile in 1570. Meanwhile, uprisings in Aragon and Valencia led to forced disarmament of Moriscos in these regions and an intensification of efforts to enforce Christianity and suppress Islamic practices. Whether these goals were even achievable became an increasingly hot topic for debate among Christian administrators and clerics, with the majority eventually deciding that it would never be possible to assimilate the Old and New Christian populations. Between 1609 and 1614, during the reign of Felipe III, the entire Morisco population was expelled from Spanish territories.

The Morisco period in Spain lasted for roughly a century, from the conversions of the early sixteenth century until the expulsions of the early seventeenth. It was only the final chapter in the story of Muslim life under Christian rule in the Iberian Peninsula, yet this Morisco chapter was dramatically different from what had gone before. Until about 1500, and even after the conquest of Granada, Muslims had been able to live openly as Muslims (mudéjares) in the Crowns of Castile and Aragon, although it was often a struggle to maintain the requirements and customs of their Islamic identity. The difficult question of how to continue to live a fully Muslim life under Christian rule became a pressing issue in Iberia from the conquest of Toledo in 1085 by 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 liberties, and they present a conspicuous religious symbol at odds with French expectations of a secular society. Face veils were also banned in Belgium a few months later, and other European countries are discussing the issue. All of these measures have met with resistance and lawsuits from Muslims living in Europe.²² Controversy over Muslim women’s clothing has also been at the center of debates in North America, especially in Quebec where efforts to ban veils and other religious symbols culminated in the 2013 promotion of a “Charte de la laïcité.”²³

A facile comparison between restrictions imposed in twenty-first-century Paris or Montreal and sixteenth-century Granada might seem to suggest intriguing similarities, but ultimately, this comparative exercise is elusive. The contexts of these legislative acts are profoundly different, as are the beliefs about humanity and society on which they are based. Contemporary Western arguments about the veil are overtly grounded in assumptions about equality, openness, and security within a modern secular society, even while anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant sentiments may lurk just below the surface of this discourse. In contrast, legislators in sixteenth-century Granada made no bones about their anti-Islamic and pro-Castilian Christian opinions. Most early modern Christians saw Muslims and Islam in Spain as a recently defeated enemy and a righteously obliterated religion, while many suspected that crypto-Muslims were still dangerous as a potential military and religious fifth column. Christian administrators and inquisitors cherished a mutual goal of creating, by force when necessary, a single unified Catholic Spain. To achieve this goal, in the wake of mass conversions, many saw it as equally necessary to stamp out all earlier habits and customs possibly associated with Islamic life. The reactions to these acts of restrictive legislation, modern and early modern, are likewise fundamentally different. Modern Muslims have responded with appeals to their rights to freedom of religious practice and expression. Francisco Núñez Muley, in contrast, knew that there was no freedom of religion, and in consequence he argued that these practices were not an expression of religious belief.

The details of Francisco Núñez Muley’s defense of Granadan cultural practices in terms of styles of dress, haircuts, use of henna, and visits to bathhouses, will be discussed in the individual chapters of this book devoted to these topics, along with one other distinctive aspect of Muslim custom and practice (mentioned only very briefly in his memorandum): the continuity of Andalusi foodstuffs, foodways, and table manners. Núñez Muley’s arguments reflected their particular late sixteenth-century Granadan context, but the customs and practices that he defended had a much longer history. In the chapters that follow, I will examine the legislation, perceptions, and debates about Muslim appearance (Chapter 2), bathing (Chapter 3), and foodways (Chapter 4) in Christian Spanish kingdoms from the late eleventh century until the late sixteenth century.

Over this five-hundred-year period, there were remarkable changes in Christian attitudes about the continuation of Muslim rites and practices under Christian rule, from a relatively easy acceptance in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to increasing hostility during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to eradication in the sixteenth century. This was true both for outright aspects of Islamic law and faith, which were always completely separate from Christian norms, and the more ambiguous aspects of daily life, such as foodstuffs and popular music, that could fairly easily assimilate across the borders of faith. Thus, ordinary habits that had been widely shared by Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Iberia during much of the medieval period, such as regular visits to community bathhouses, became tainted as filthy, disreputable, and un-Christian by the late medieval and early modern period. This book will trace these changes and consider their causes, looking not at the overtly religious aspects of Islamic practice (which are easy to explain) but at the more equivocal but deeply ingrained habits of daily life, which, though widely recognized as Muslim, could also be argued as being merely regional and customary.

In the final clauses of his memorandum, almost as an afterthought after the signature, Francisco Núñez Muley posits two counterfactual situations in order to drive home his point. First, Núñez Muley asks what would happen if

there should be established a decree requiring all Christians to dress like Moriscos and wear their footwear; to cease celebrating weddings in the Castilian way and instead begin celebrating them as Moriscos do; to have no other music but the Morisco zambra and the instruments that accompany it; to bathe in the Morisco baths and to hire only Morisco bath-workers and no others; to speak no Castilian whatsoever but only Arabic; to cease using any Castilian names or surnames; to keep the doors to their homes open at all times. Furthermore, this decree would prohibit women from leaving their faces uncovered in public and require them to cover them as Morisco women do, and it would prohibit Christians from possessing any contracts, registers, or land titles in Castilian—all of these would have to be written in Arabic.²⁴

Second, he follows on this long hypothetical suggestion by asking, what if instead of requiring Castilian Christians to speak Arabic, they were required to speak and write in the Genoese dialect of Italian, would they comply? No, he answers. Even though Genoese is not that different a language from Castilian (certainly “much closer to Castilian than Arabic is”), and both the Castilians and the Genoese are Christian, “they would not comply, but rather they would die and suffer under burdens and punishments.”²⁵

These two hypothetical scenarios are revealing in the degree to which they seek to turn the issue at hand from a question of religious identity (Christian vs. Muslim) to one of linguistic and regional identity (first Granada and Arabic vs. Castile and Castilian, then Castilian vs. Genoese). By extension, the Moriscos were also willing to die and suffer to preserve their regional identity, language, and customs, even while being Christians. Like Francisco Núñez Muley’s memorandum, this is also a book about identity and the structures that support our understandings of identity, but unlike his work, it includes religion as one among many factors creating identity in medieval and early modern Spain.