Muslims in Spain: 1500–1614 (review)

Muslims in Spain is a social and intellectual history of Spanish Islam spanning a period that dates from the final years of the fifteenth century to 1614, when the last remnants of Spain’s Muslim population were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. Apart from chapter five, which deals with the intellectual achievements of Spanish Muslims during the last century of their presence in the peninsula, the remaining eleven chapters are devoted to an analysis of the social history of Spanish Islam. The history recounted by Harvey in this volume is a history of tragic decline; yet, despite the final tragic outcome of that history, it is also a history of repeated triumphs on the part of an oppressed minority in the face of sometimes overwhelming odds. Intertwined with this history of suffering and repression, then, is a narrative in which ingenuity and disciplined determination often succeed in outwitting—if only temporarily—the combined efforts of the state and the church, both of which had committed themselves, by the second decade of the sixteenth century, to a policy of forced conversion and eventually to one of expulsion. By the later decades of the century, Spain’s Christian majority had come to see its Muslim population as an alien element, despite the fact that Muslims had been in Spain for the better part of nine centuries and had constructed a culture that was undoubtedly one of the most open and tolerant of the medieval period, and one that made a place for both Christians and Jews.

Chapter five, which deals with the intellectual history of Spain’s Muslim minority over the course of the sixteenth century, in many ways stands as the centerpiece of the work; it is, not surprisingly, the longest of the chapters (some eighty pages in length) and in some respects the most important single chapter. Judging from its placement in the work and its length, we are entitled to conclude that Harvey too saw it as the centerpiece of the work. The chapters that precede chapter five and those that follow recount a narrative that ends finally in the events of 1614. It is ultimately a story of a victimization, one planned and carried out by others, that is, by the Christian majority. Chapter five, in contrast, allows the reader to enter into the thinking of this oppressed minority and to begin to view their plight from their own vantage point. In this chapter, Muslims are the actors; they tell us something of who they were and how they viewed the circumstances thrust upon them. What is perhaps most remarkable of all, they speak in a language of their own creation. Arabic, though still in use in parts of the coastal region of Valencia in the sixteenth century, had become the language of a relatively small minority. The special and favored language of most Spanish Muslims for much of the sixteenth century was aljamia, a dialect of the Romance language of Spain, but one written with Arabic characters. It was aljamia that enabled the Muslims of Spain to communicate among themselves without non-Muslims being able to listen in, so to speak. As Harvey rightly observes, the use of the Arabic script was an act of loyalty and a repudiation of Latinate Christian hegemony. In the case of aljamia, the medium was to some extent the message.

The literature in aljamia, then, is about what Muslims did, viz. what they wrote for the benefit of fellow Muslims so as to ensure the survival of their faith and their way of life. The quite considerable literature produced in aljamia is a testament to their creativity and their ingenuity in circumventing a legal system that explicitly proscribed the use of aljamia. Harvey carefully catalogs the aljamiado documents that have survived, describes the more important genres, and, in some cases, subgenres, and frequently cites them, sometimes at length.

Chapters one to four, which lead up to and provide the backdrop to chapter five, chronicle...