Salvation in Times of Survival: The Singular Voice of a Crypto-Muslim Scholar in Sixteenth Century Spain
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Authors
Antar, Amanie
Date
2025-09-22
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Moriscos , Aljamiado , Islamic History , Early Modern Mediterranean
Alternative Title
Abstract
Morisco communities were the inheritors of a deeply vibrant intellectual, architectural, and mystical heritage that had reigned across the kingdoms of al-Andalus throughout the medieval and early modern period. Yet, following the conquest of Nasrid Granada in 1492, the scholastic and cultural terrain of mudejar existence was irrevocably transformed. How did Moriscos—Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism throughout the sixteenth century—respond to the imperial onslaught of the Catholic monarchy and its hegemonic project of religious, cultural and social dominance? In what ways did Moriscos contest and resist imperial and colonial imaginaries and their attendant anti-Islamic rhetoric amidst a time of growing inquisitorial surveillance and oppression? This dissertation examines the ways in which one crypto Muslim scholar living in sixteenth century Spain, the Mancebo de Arévalo, articulated a sovereign and emancipatory approach to religious praxis and spiritual realization. The Mancebo’s spiritual, pietistic, devotional, and communal worldview conveys powerful notions on the pursuit and attainment of salvation and belonging for Moriscos in a period defined by Church and state persecution. The Mancebo’s singularity lay in firmly embedding his narrative in an Islamic paradigmatic worldview—one in which the pursuit of knowledge, the cultivation of piety, and the possibility of transcendent salvation endured. Even whilst those very modes of existence were pathologized and criminalized, the Mancebo’s narrative defines salvation and piety firmly within the realm of the Islamic tradition without refuting religious doctrine or praxis. This lends it its discursive power and enables the Mancebo de Arévalo to emerge as a singular voice whose views on self-realization and spiritual attainment were emphatically dependent on Islamic criteria, contesting external projects of ‘otherization’. Ultimately, the crypto scholar’s spiritual thought resists and contests the hegemonic order of Monarchial Spain by offering Moriscos a vision of salvation grounded in the very thing they were asked to deny and reject—their ‘Muslimness’.