After the fall of Granada in 1492, the Muslims who remained, later to-be baptised and known as Moriscos (or New Christians), were racialised subjects in early modern Spain. The Morisco identity was characterised by paradox: converts were not allowed to be Muslim but neither fully accepted as Christians; they were always seen as traitors and bad Christians. At the same time, they were menacing in their ambiguity, not identifiable through visible markers of difference. This kind of ambiguity facilitated the transgression of boundaries across religious and racial divisions. In 1567, in order to solidify the differences between Moriscos and Old Christians, the Catholic monarchs issued a series of edicts that forbade cultural practices associated with Islam, such as wearing certain types of clothes, consuming couscous, speaking Arabic, or even bathing. The edicts also included a prohibition on owning slaves. Those edicts represent a violation of the capitulations agreed upon between the Nasrids and the Catholic monarchs at the time of the conquest of Granada in 1492, and that would later be a cause for the eruption of the second Rebellion of the Alpujarras (1568-1571).

In response to these repressive laws, Francisco Núñez Muley, a Morisco from Granada, wrote a memorandum appealing to the Catholic monarchs and arguing for a separation of culture and religion using arguments that delink these practices from any religious association: people in Granada dress as Granadans, not as Muslims, he would argue; Muslims in other parts of the Islamic world, such as Turkey or the Levant have their own way of dressing. Similarly, Christians in Jerusalem speak Arabic. This separation of culture and religion has attracted the attention of many scholars, leading them to describe it as a modern, secular text[1]. In his separation of culture and faith, Núñez Muley sought to assimilate the Moriscos with Old Christians and make them indistinguishable, and significantly, he refers to Moriscos as naturales (natives) of Granada.

Núñez Muley, in this text, finds himself grappling with his positionality in early modern Spanish society. As a Morisco, due to the statutes of blood purity (limpieza de sangre), Núñez Muley is a racialised subject. The pure blood statutes of Spain were regulations that prohibited people of Muslim or Jewish descent from occupying governmental posts, from entering certain universities, or from immigrating to the Spanish colonies in the New World. It was a form of legal discrimination against Moriscos and Conversos that deemed them impure if they had any Muslim or Jewish ancestry in their bloodline, which was a form of racialization. By referring to the Moriscos as naturales and making his arguments about their cultural practices, Núñez Muley is attempting to reverse this racialisation.

Yet, the irony of his question, “Must everyone be seen as equals?”[2] in which he argues that Moriscos should be allowed to own Black slaves, has received little to no scholarly attention. His claim flows logically from his quest to nullify the otherness of the Moriscos and conflate them with the Old Christians. In attempting to “de-racialise” the Moriscos, Núñez Muley resorts to racialising another group of people, instrumentalising anti-Blackness in Castilian society as a remedy for the plight of the Moriscos. This text raises an important question about the nature of race. In the words of Ayanna Thompson, “Race is a fiction.”[3] Race is not a self-evident category nor is it a stable biological trait that is easily identifiable. Rather, as Adam Hochman notes, what we should pay attention to is the process of racialisation: “we need to abandon the idea that individuals and groups simply belong to races and start thinking in terms of processes.”[4] On the one hand, Moriscos were marginalized in Old Christian society, and on the other hand, Núñez Muley instrumentalised the otherness of a different community: enslaved Black Africans. Núñez Muley’s positionality and his negotiation of difference, more than complicating the binary of Old/New Christian, creates “triangulated” difference, a term I borrow from Emily Weissbourd’s Bad Blood: Staging Race Between Early Modern England and Spain (2023). Framing race in early modern Spain only as a self-other opposition erases the nuances that Blackness, which Weissbourd argues, in early modern Spain is “presented as a less threatening form of difference than ‘impure blood,’ in part because Blackness (unlike the ‘taint’ of Jewish or Moorish ancestry) cannot be concealed.”[5] Reading Núñez Muley’s text today invokes similar questions of racialisation and racism and reinforces that race is not a binary nor a self-evident category. It is a reminder that racialised subjects could also enforce and uphold a racist system.

Bibliography

Núñez Muley, Francisco. A Memorandum for the President of the Royal Audiencia and Chancery Court of the City and Kingdom of Granada. Translated by Vincent Barletta. Chicago ; University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Hochman, Adam. “Racialization: A Defense of the Concept.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 42, no. 8 (2019): 1245–62.

Kimmel, Seth. “‘In the Choir with the Clerics’: Secularism in the Age of Inquisition.” Comparative Literature 65, no. 3 (2013): 285–305.

Reynolds, Dwight. The Musical Heritage of Al-Andalus. Abingdon, Oxon ; Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021. 

Thompson, Ayanna, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. First edition. Cambridge, United Kingdom ; Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Weissbourd, Emily. Bad Blood : Staging Race between Early Modern England and Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023.

[1] See Reynolds, Dwight. The Musical Heritage of al-Andalus, p. 229 and Kimmel, Seth. “In the Choir with the Clerics: Secularism in the Age of Inquisition”

[2] Núñez Muley, 91

[3] Thompson, 7

[4] Hochman, 1245

[5] Weissbourd, 11