Polemic and Hybridity in Early Modern Spain: Juan Andrés’s Confusión o confutación de la secta Mahomética y del Alcorán

This article analyzes the problems of orientalism and hybridity in the polemical work Confusión o confutación de la secta Mahomética y del Alcorán (1515) of Juan Andrés, a convert to Christianity from Islam and former Muslim religious leader in early modern Spain. This article offers a nuanced reading, one that finds a compromise between, on the one hand, a Saidian reading of Spanish anti-Muslimism as orientalism, and on the other hand, an awareness of the kind of cultural and religious hybridity theorized by Homi Bhabha. In current scholarship, the theories of Said and Bhabha are often described as mutually exclusive, but this essay shows how they can operate in a complementary manner. The article argues that Juan’s text takes a traditional Roman Catholic approach to Islam in the sense that it divides and defines Christianity and Islam in a series of binaries, but that the Confusión also exhibits a profound sense of hybridity as this traditional discourse is often undermined by the author’s acute awareness of Islamic doctrine and tradition. The text both supports and questions the traditional polemic against Islam in which it participates, and thus it ultimately blurs the boundaries between East and West, Christian and Muslim, in its attempt to maintain them.