To Live Like a Moor. Olivia Remie Constable

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      DAVID NIRENBERG

      In 1492 Fernando and Isabel accepted the surrender of the city-kingdom of Granada, the last redoubt of Muslim political power on the Iberian Peninsula, granting in return to the conquered the right to continue practicing their religion. In 1501 officials of the same monarchs broke that promise and offered the region’s Muslims a “choice” between conversion to Christianity or expulsion from their homes and lands in the Peninsula. Tens of thousands chose conversion, giving birth to what would become a new religious category in Spain, that of the Moriscos, as the converts and their descendants came to be known.

      The creation of this new category (made much larger over time by the eventual forced conversion of Muslims living in Valencia, Aragon, and other regions of the Peninsula) raised any number of new questions. Among these were questions of 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. Today we often speak of “religious identity” as if the phrase—with its etymological implication of the subject’s religious “oneness,” “unity,” or “sameness”—were unproblematic. But what these mass conversions of Muslims to Christianity catalyzed was a debate about precisely what such spiritual “oneness” required of the individual. This basic question, already posed sharply a century earlier but in a different flavor with the forced conversion of the Peninsula’s Jews to Christianity, was the bellows that raised the issue of Christian perceptions of Muslim identity to a red-hot heat.

      Addressing the converts at around the time of their baptism, Hernando de Talavera, Granada’s first archbishop, took a position on this question: “So that no one might think that you still adhere to the sect of Muhammad in your heart, it is necessary that you conform in all things to the good and honest ways of good and honest Christian men and women, including their manner of dressing, wearing shoes, doing their hair, eating at tables, and cooking their food.”¹ Note how the model of religious subjectivity implicit here approaches a totalizing “identity.” In order for the interior spiritual state (the heart) of converts to be legible as Christian to someone else, their exterior, so to speak, had to “conform in all things” to the exterior of known, nonconverted Christians (“old,” “clean” Christians, in the vocabulary of Talavera’s contemporaries).

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