Converting Texts: A 16th-Century Spanish Arabic Catechism in Modern-Day Algeria

In 1554 the Bishop of Guadix, Martín Pérez de Ayala, convened a synod in his diocese, having recently returned from the second session of the Council of Trent. Over the course of the sessions, he and his fellow clergymen drafted an extensive document of Tridentine orthodoxy and social discipline that was directed to the largely morisco province of Guadix and printed in 1556. One of the reforms Ayala proposed was the formation of an Arabic-speaking clergy. To help put this reform in to practice, he commissioned a local clergyman, Bartolomé Dorador, to translate the synod’s Doctrina Cristiana into Granadan Arabic. The use of Dorador’s translation was short-lived in the Granada province, where ten years later in 1566 Philip definitively outlawed the use of Arabic and the possession of Arabic texts. What then would be the fate of such an object, an Arabic version of Christian orthodoxy? Little is known about the use or trajectory of this particular text, except that a copy is extant today in the National Library of Algiers. Though the existence of the text has long interested scholars, difficulties of access have prevented a wide array of scholars from examining the manuscript as an object or from drawing conclusions about the reasons the Granadan manuscript might have been carried to Algeria (and by whom). By examining the distinct hands and annotations on the manuscript and using the limited information of the BNA catalogue, I attempt to recover the journey made by the book from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada to the coast of North Africa.