The century-long expulsion of Moriscos – Iberian Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity – 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. With attention to the process of narrative creation, this talk 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 travelled from one shore of the Mediterranean to another, how they were adapted and transformed in the process, and what their impact was once they reached new domains. To do so, this talk explores Morisco didactic miscellanies, doctrinal treatises, and polemical poetry written in Arabic and Spanish, placing them 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 underscores how early modern 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.
Susan Abraham is a scholar of the history and culture of early modern Spain in connection with North Africa and the wider Mediterranean. She received her PhD in 2025 from the University of Virginia. Currently, she is a EUME Fellow 2025/26 at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Her work is dedicated to broadening the scope of early modern Spanish literature by underscoring the textual interventions and contributions of Moriscos in sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Tunisia. Her research was awarded a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for ground-breaking work addressing questions of ethical and religious values in the humanities and social sciences, and in 2024, she was a Max Weber Stiftung Doctoral Fellow in Residence at the Orient-Institut Beirut. Her book project, Writing Diaspora: Moriscos, Spanish Culture, and Islam, examines how Morisco authors in Tunis creatively deployed literary, legal, and narrative strategies to orient readers in faith and exile. Her book project examines how Morisco writers helped shape an ethics of diaspora which at its core aimed to forge a concept of home in the wake of its upheaval.
Islam Dayeh is Research Professor of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Ghent University. His research focuses on Islamic intellectual history and the formation of knowledge across disciplines. He is Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project KNOW: Polymathy and Interdisciplinarity in Premodern Islamic Epistemic Cultures (1200-1800 CE). Before joining Ghent, he taught at Freie Universität Berlin and directed the research programme Zukunftsphilologie: Revisiting the Canons of Textual Scholarship (Forum Transregionale Studien). He is founder and editor of the journal Philological Encounters.
This event will be held in a hybrid format. To receive the login details, please register via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de.
Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.