“Unstable Identities”: Between a Morisco Fatwa and Morisco Literature in Sixteenth-Century Spain

In times of persecution and fear, of Inquisitorial hegemonic discourse in which an Empire defined itself through an anxious dichotomy of “self” and “other; many subjects nonetheless asserted themselves in contradiction to the dominant ideologies to convey pluralism. In 1492, with the fall of Granada, the Expulsion of the Jews, the publication of the first Spanish Grammar, and the Discovery of America, the politics of the Spanish Church State were aimed against the genealogy of religious, linguistic, and cultural pluralism that had existed in Iberia for centuries. Strict Catholicism, Spanish monolingualism and hegemonic Castilian culture were enforced, whereas, Islam, Judaism, Arabic, and all signs of cultural hybridity were debarred. Conversion was required from all subjects under Spanish rule. Nevertheless, these officially “converted” others, (known as Moriscos), kept expressing their selves otherwise. L.P. Harvey has traced their history, while Vincent Barletta and López-Morillas have analyzed the hybrid languages of this secret minority. My focus is on the unstable and hybrid condition of these subjects' religious identities. This study argues that 16^th Century Spain produced undefined religiosities and unstable identities that were neither Muslim nor Christian, but something in between. These hybrid identities were permitted in fiction (Morisco Literature) as well as in reality (legal opinions, or fatwas). Their form also portrays hybridity, as these texts are written in Aljamiado (Spanish written with Arabic letters). Whereas the imperial context was characterized by an anxiety to define subjects through clarity and dogma, the Moriscos refused to answer the Shakespearean question of “to be or not to be”. They presented themselves as a plural “otherwise”. The constitution of the Morisco subject and its unstable identity, forces us to formulate new questions, rather than to answer old ones. These reformulated questions might be the key to modern debates of pluralism and religious tolerance today.