When Aḥmad ibn Qāsim al-Ḥajarī left Spain for North Africa in the late sixteenth century, he described his departure as “emigrat[ing] to God” (muhājiran ilā Allāh)¹. This is merely one example from an extraordinary life he dedicated to God in every decision he made. The polymath Aḥmad ibn Qāsim al-Ḥajarī (c. 1570-1640) was a Morisco born into a family of crypto-Muslims in al-Ḥajar al-Aḥmar (in Hornachos, Extremadura, Spain), where he was raised outwardly Catholic, concealing his religion and his first language, which he had to learn in secret due to the banning of the Arabic language. Al-Ḥajarī managed to escape Spain in 1599, at a time when Moriscos were not allowed to travel, and their movement was severely constrained because the Catholic monarchs feared that Moriscos would conspire against them with the aid of the Islamic world and the Ottoman empire. His journey was not an easy one, but he managed to pass as an Old Christian in order to cross these borders. Once in Morocco, he established his position in society and became a translator for the Saʿdī Sultan Aḥmad al-Manṣūr (d. 1603) and subsequently several Moroccan sultans, most notably Muley Zaydān who rose to power in 1608. Reading al-Ḥajarī’s life through a Mediterranean framework opens up the possibility to read the history of the region as interconnected and see Iberia and the Maghrib not as a binary but as continuous parts of a whole.

His book Kitāb Nāṣir al-dīn ʻalā ʼl-qawm al-kāfirīn (The supporter of religion against the infidels), an abridgement of his autobiography Riḥlat al-Shihāb ila Liqāʾ al-Aḥbāb (The voyage of the Shihab to meet his loved ones), of which no manuscript copy is known to have survived, is a narration of his journey to France and the Netherlands in order to restore the possessions of the expelled Moriscos. Throughout this journey, he engages in polemical debates, refuting Christianity by using the Bible as his evidence. These encounters make visible the Morisco upbringing of al-Ḥajarī; since he was raised as outwardly Catholic, he knew the Bible well enough to use it in his debates. The book also includes an autobiographical account of his departure from Spain, a journey he undertook while pretending to be an Old Christian to be allowed passage. Several years later, with waves of Morisco refugees arriving in North Africa, al-Ḥajarī decided to leave his position as a translator for the Sultan and instead help refugees learn about Islam by translating religious texts from Arabic into Spanish to facilitate their assimilation into Muslim societies in North Africa. Al-Ḥajarī’s contributions can be traced across the Mediterranean in various literary traditions.² As a result of these experiences, al-Ḥajarī left a legacy in both Arabic and Spanish literary heritage, and his intimacy with these languages is a testimony to his dual belonging. 

Al-Ḥajarī’s experience with language was political: from having to conceal his first language in public, to having perfected the Old Christian dialect to leave Spain, to his translation work being instrumentalised to help refugees arriving in North Africa. He derived great pride from his belief in Islam and exerted tremendous effort to defend Islam while refuting Christian doctrines. For al-Ḥajarī, this was ultimately a spiritually-driven mission. He wrote his book as a documentation of the struggles of his people as well as a manual for refuting Christian doctrines in debate, which he believed was part of his life purpose. He hoped his book “will be an Unsheathed Sword against every Infidel and that its proofs will prevail.”³ Although al-Ḥajarī sojourns beyond the Mediterranean in Northern Europe, his debates and encounters are a result of his Mediterranean background, where he was educated in Spanish, French, and Arabic as well as the Bible and the Qur’an. It is his cultural background, unique upbringing, and his fragmented “self” across two borders in a single place that made this text possible.

Prior to his emigration, in Spain he became famous for his translations of the Lead Books of Granada (los libros plúmbeos / los plomos del Sacromonte) from Arabic into Spanish, for which he was given a salary as well as an official licence to translate from Arabic into Spanish.⁴ This was the beginning of his career as a translator. The affair of the Lead Books was a salient episode in the history of the Moriscos of Granada. The Lead Books were a collection of texts inscribed on lead leaves, which are now considered forgeries of Christian documents written by the Moriscos to legitimise their belonging to Granada. Condemned by the Pope in 1682, the story of the Lead Books of Granada began in 1588 with the demolition of the Torre Turpiana minaret. A parchment and several relics, including bones, were discovered; and over time, a total of 22 lead books were found on the hills of the mountain of Sacromonte (Holy Mountain) in Granada. The parchment of Torre Turpiana contained a prophecy attributed to Saint John that was written in Latin, Arabic, and Castilian, posing such a great difficulty to decode that eventually expert translators were called in to decipher its script. Those documents present a version of Christianity that is in accord with Islamic orthodoxy, asserting that God had no son and avoiding any mention of the trinity. A translation of al-Ḥajarī’s from the Lead Books reads as follows:

From the adversities of the very East comes a king gleaning the spread of his power.

With the completeness of his power he stands against the world victoriously.

O eternal master, where to escape from this event?

A king who will dominate the whole world until Doomsday.

And a religion which will proceed against those who have filled it with vices.

And a secret which will be understood by [the power] given to it by the Divine decree to nullify sins. (93)

Al-Ḥajarī was very invested in the translation of these documents. He believed they were ancient and sacred documents and believed it was his spiritual duty to work on this project. For this reason, he believed that God saved him from the threat of the Inquisition.⁵ After the official decrees of expulsion in 1609-14, al-Ḥajarī mentions the Moriscos arriving in North Africa had carried copies of these documents with them, proving their importance for the Moriscos.⁶ His devotion to this project led García-Arenal to suggest he may have been one of the forgers of these documents.⁷ She notes that the Lead Books show an example of the Islamic doctrine of taḥrīf (deformation or corruption), “one of the chief instruments that Muslims used in their anti-Christian polemics. They maintained that the Church Fathers and decisions of early Church councils had twisted the Revelation, that Jesus had never claimed to be the Son of God, and that God could have neither son nor father––He was one, not three.”⁸

Al-Ḥajarī’s deep investment with the affair of the Lead Books is in line with his life mission that is dedicated for the service of God. He ends his book with a chapter, “Relating the Graces God Bestowed Upon Me in al-Andalus and Elsewhere,” in which he narrates miraculous events that he experienced throughout his life, among them was that he was able to cure people’s illnesses and that he learned to read Arabic in less than one day at the age of ten “due to a divine benefaction and to success granted by God.”⁹ This chapter is the most personal of his book, and in it he includes anecdotes from his life in which he saw divine grace manifest, concluding the different threads that tied his life journey together. In addition to “emigrating to God,” al-Ḥajarī considered his advocacy for the Moriscos and his translation work, as well as his religious and polemical debates with the Christians a form of jihād, a struggle in the way of God. It was thus not only a way of making a living but it was profound personal and spiritual work, putting into practice what he saw as a noble intellectual pursuit in the greater good. Even though al-Ḥajarī left his birth home in pursuit of religious freedom, he saw the whole world as his home, so long as he could worship God. His vision of the world questions the very foundation of a homogenous Spanish nation; his life and works are a remaining testament to the inseparable Spanishness and Arabness that make up who he was. He may have crossed a geographical border to save his life at one moment in time, but his whole life was an attempt to dissolve many of the iterations of these borders. Perhaps that is another of al-Ḥajarī’s miracles: a worldview that unmakes borders at a time when these very borders are being consolidated. 

Bibliography

García-Arenal,  Mercedes and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, “Diego Bejarano al-Hajari and the Morisco Understanding of the Lead Books.” The Orient in Spain: Converted Muslims, the Forged Lead Books of Granada, and the Rise of Orientalism. Leiden: Brill, 2013. 139-153.

Al-Ḥajarī, Aḥmad ibn Qāsim. Kitāb Nāṣir al-dīn ʻalā ʼl-qawm al-kāfirīn (The supporter of religion against the infidels), eds. P.Sj. van Koningsveld, Qasim al-Samarrai and Gerard Wiegers. 2nd ed. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2015.

Zhiri, Oumelbanine. Beyond Orientalism: Ahmad ibn Qāsim al-Ḥajarī between Europe and North Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023.

[1] Aḥmad ibn Qāsim al-Ḥajarī, Kitāb Nāṣir al-dīn ʻalā ʼl-qawm al-kāfirīn (The supporter of religion against the infidels), eds. P.Sj. van Koningsveld, Qasim al-Samarrai and Gerard Wiegers.  (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2015), 109.

[2] Oumelbanine Zhiri’s recent book Beyond Orientalism: Ahmad ibn Qasim al-Hajari between Europe and North Africa (2023) explores the often overlooked role of Arab scholars in the work of early modern European Orientalists, and al-Ḥajarī was at the centre of these contributions through his teaching Arabic, translating texts from Arabic, and discussing with European scholars the contents of Arabic texts of various genres.

[3] Kitāb Nāṣir al-dīn, 274.

[4] Ibid., 96.

[5] Ibid. 96.

[6] Ibid. 275.

[7] Mercedes García-Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, “Diego Bejarano al-Ḥajarī and the Morisco Understanding of the Lead Books.” The Orient in Spain: Converted Muslims, the Forged Lead Books of Granada, and the Rise of Orientalism. (Leiden: Brill, 2013).

[8] Ibid., 149.

[9] Kitāb Nāṣir al-dīn, 256.

Title Image: Al-Azhar manuscript of Kitāb Nāṣir al-dīn ʻalā ʼl-qawm al-kāfirīn, accessed here

Reem Taha is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She completed her MA in English literature with a collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture at the University of Toronto. 

Her dissertation focuses on fifteenth to seventeenth-century Iberia and North Africa, particularly exploring travel and movement across the Mediterranean, outlining a comparative and interdisciplinary study of the Moriscos (Muslims forcibly converted to Catholicism in early modern Iberia). She studies the role of Moriscos in textual transmission between Arabic and Romance languages, as well as their resonance in early modern English and Spanish literatures.