The Presence and the Memory of Islam during the “Spiritual Conquest” of the New World (Sixteenth Century): A Brazilian Case Study

Today we begin to perceive how complex and diverse the relationship between military and institutional conquest and “spiritual conquest” was, according to Robert Ricard’s famous definition (even if it, perhaps, has not been sufficiently investigated from an epistemological point of view).¹

In the past, this problem has usually been investigated from the point of view of the entrance of European Christianity into the Atlantic World through the migrations of Europeans to Africa and America. However, more often, particularly in recent decades, scholars have begun to focus their interest on other religious groups, investigating their influence and their concrete presence in the Atlantic space during the Early Modern period. This has led, for example, to an increasing scholarly attention being given to traditional African religions,² or the predicaments of Judeoconversos and Afroiberians.³

The case of Islam, in this sense, is not an exception. Obviously, it is sufficiently known and accepted that in the first century of the conquest, most changes in religious diversity in the New World pertained to Christianity. The first mass migration of Muslims would arrive later as a result of the slave trade.⁴ But new studies in recent decades have shown that a scrutiny of the Atlantic dimension of the Islamic presence could offer important insight.

First of all (and this is maybe the best-studied element), Islam played an important role in the cultural memory of the conquistadores and in their literary reminiscence.

Secondly, the long period of relationships and fights with Islam was crucial in the conquerors’ adaptation to the New World and in their definition of new institutions, above all from a religious point of view (for example, concerning the well-known complex relationship between the catechisms produced in Spain for the moriscos and the ones produced in America for the natives).⁵

Third, the concrete presence of men and women of Muslim faith is a worthy object of discussion in and of itself. The few scholars who have dealt with the problem of a true presence of Muslims in the New World (before the arrival of Muslims among the black slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) agree that the small number of people involved should be emphasized, but they diverge considerably with regard to the interpretation of the collected data. Yet even if the number of Muslims was relatively modest, it does not make the cases in question less interesting.

Fourth (but it may be considered a corollary of the previous three points), Islam was also present in the fears and in the perspectives of the religious men who investigated the spirituality of the new Christians that started to populate the Americas.

The Moriscos and the New World

After a riot in March of 1500, the Muslims of Granada had to choose between conversion or expulsion. Hence, by 1502 all people of Granada were officially “Christians”: from that moment the mudejares, the Muslims in Christian territory had disappeared from Spain (openly at least), and a population of new Christians was created from the descendants of the Muslim population. In a short time, these people, would be known as moriscos.⁶ The moriscos were new Christians, but retained ties to both their cultural and religious traditions. For this reason, as also happened with regard to the conversos of Jewish descent, moriscos became an object of attention for the Inquisition. However, this was not immediately rigorously pursued. During the first forty years of the sixteenth century the Iberian inquisitors devoted much of their attention to the crypto-judaism of conversos and to the traces of Protestant contagion that was spreading throughout Europe. Such dangers, however, were not always so easily recognizable. Doctrinal positions that resembled generic Muslim ideas could be found among heretical groups, such as the Waldensians and Anabaptists. Moreover, at the same time, it was possible to find sympathies and interest in the positions held by Protestant reformers among the moriscos.

Beginning with these concerns, the Inquisition worked on the moriscos, using the same tools...