To Live Like a Moor: Christian Perceptions of Muslim Identity in Medieval and Early Modern Spain by Olivia Remie Constable (review)

To Live Like a Moor is, unfortunately, Olivia Remie Constable’s final contribution to the field of Medieval Iberia. Published posthumously, Constable was unable to finish it before her passing. It is missing the final planned chapter. The final manuscript was prepared for publication by her former student, Robin Rose. In the editor’s preface, Rose explains that her intervention in the manuscript was “deliberately minimal” and was limited to including conclusions to each chapter “for the sake of consistency” (xv). She notes that one planned chapter, that of “Evolving Christian Perceptions of the Arabic Language,” and another one related to music, poetry and song were not completed and, therefore, not included. Despite its incompleteness, it is an exemplary illustration of what organized, exhaustive and well-written research produces. In this book, Constable masterfully documents how day-to-day cultural habits such as dress, bathing, and food, that are, in many ways, passive cultural acts, reveal a great deal about assumed and unconscious cultural identities, how they come about, and how they evolve. Through these commonplace topics, she paints a vivid picture of what life must have been like for a person of the Muslim faith living under Christian rule after 1567.

David Nirenberg provides the foreword, which situates the book in the broader scholarship. He explains that the surrender of Granada in 1492 and the subsequent “choice” given to Muslims to convert to Christianity or face expulsion created a new category of peoples, the Moriscos (vii). The change of religion and, therefore, identity, meant much more than just a change of religious beliefs or practices. With this new category, questions of religious identity arise, mainly “what it meant to be Muslim, what it meant to be Christian, and what aspects of a person’s behavior or belief needed to change in order to make the transition from the one to the other” (vii). Through the analysis of everyday actions, Constable seeks to answer the essential question of what it meant to convert from Islam to Christianity in Christian Spain beyond the practices tied to specific religious dogma.

The first chapter, “Being Muslim in Christian Spain,” is the account of a memorandum written by Francisco Núñez Muley to the chief administrator of the city of Granada, in 1657, some seventy-five years after the conquest of that city by Christian forces. This memorandum was written in response or even as a rebuttal to the ban on practices that were perceived to be of Islamic origin. Núñez Muley was born of an elite Muslim family shortly before the conquest of the city and had converted to Christianity. Records show that he was employed in the household of the archbishop of Granada. It seems that Núñez Muley was not a marginal or an unknown character to the city administrators. His memorandum discusses such traditions as “bathing, dressing, naming, language, and music” (1) in the aftermath of the conversions. The memorandum focuses not so much on the religious reasons for certain practices as defined and demanded by holy texts and religious law. Rather, the rebuttal offers other rational reasons, often economic, for those same practices that are offensive to the Christian authorities. This chapter shows that laws regarding how to deal with the Christian-Muslim problematic in Granada changed over time and were informed by the perspectives of the archbishop of Granada and Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros.

In chapter two, “Clothing and Appearance,” Constable plots the progression of expectations and laws in both the Christian and Muslim circles that defined how one should dress and how this dress is part of a “visual identity” of a group or person. Núñez Muley defends the use of Islamic clothing, especially in the case of women, because it would cause economic hardship to have to...