Narrating Faith Across the Straits: Morisco Manuals of Faith in Tunis and the Early Modern Mediterranean
The century-long expulsion of Moriscos reached its final stage in 1609 when the Spanish Crown began deporting the remaining communities in the Iberian Peninsula through a series of edicts that lasted until 1614. Between these successive waves of migration, Moriscos formed literary networks across the Mediterranean that reflected a diversity of class, religious background, educational pedigrees, and language. Based on my dissertation research, this project focuses on the large Morisco community that settled in Tunisia during the seventeenth century and the religious treatises that circulated among them. Written in Spanish by a religious and intellectual Morisco elite, these didactic texts were intended to provide their exiled community with spiritual guidance on Islamic practices and belief. With attention to the process of Morisco narrative creation, Narrating Faith demonstrates how movement and displacement across spatial and cultural boundaries is captured and reflected in Morisco cultural production. It situates diasporic Morisco literature within a transregional milieu and explores how ideas travel from one shore of the Mediterranean to another, how they are adapted and transformed in the process, and what their impact is once they reach new domains. To do so, I examine Morisco didactic miscellanies, doctrinal treatises, and polemical poetry written in Arabic and Spanish that are archived in Spain and Tunisia. Further, I put these understudied texts into conversation with early modern Spanish literature and Arabic writings like qasida poetry, hagiographies, Qur’anic and exegetical (tafsīr) sources, and Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). This multilingual framework puts into relief how early modern Morisco writing in diaspora was shaped by experiences of connectivity and interaction in the Mediterranean and, therefore, critically responds to scholarship that has subsumed this corpus under the rubric of Spanish literature while portraying its authors as passive admirers and recipients of a European literary canon. I argue that Moriscos creatively engaged classical Arabic and North African Islamic traditions while strategically adapting literary forms and tropes rooted in Christian Europe to forge a narrative ethics reflecting their diaspora experience in Tunis and the broader Mediterranean. Bringing together methodological frameworks from comparative literature and religious studies, I demonstrate how these narrative strategies bring questions of pedagogy and ethics into dialogue with theorizations of literature and aesthetics.