The Moriscas’ testimonies also show how individuals continued to observe Islamic fasts and religious holidays in Spain, with varying degrees of commitment and participation. Elena, the slave of the count of Chinchón, declared that she “fasted during Ramadan and observed Fridays, dressing herself in a clean shirt.”50 She described the two times she had observed the holy month of Ramadan, saying that “each lasted an entire month of not eating during the entire day until the star came out at night, and that at midnight they got up … moistening their mouths with a little water, and then they would go to sleep.”51 Another Morisca slave, María de Andrada, also spoke of Ramadan when she informed Spanish inquisitors how her father had taught her to observe “the fasts of the Muslims … on the days which were customary for the Muslims, not eating during the entire day until the night when the first star appeared in the heavens. Later, at dawn, they would take a jar of water and wash themselves under their arms, and their hands and ears and feet, each of these things three times.”52
In Mexico City, María Ruiz similarly recalled before inquisitors how, when she was a child in Albolote before the Alpujarras rebellion, her mother had taught her to fast during Ramadan. She participated in the fasts “two or three times, but she did not continue with them because, as such a young girl, she became hungry and ate…. Her mother carried out the said fasts with other women in the neighborhood … and they were cautious around her, and her mother told her not to talk about the fasts … because if she did they would be burned.”53 Other Morisco parents in Spain were similarly cautious, delaying their children’s instruction in Islam until they were old enough to be discreet around old Christians and not rouse the suspicion of inquisitors.54 The contrasting accounts of María Ruiz, Elena, and María de Andrada portray differing approaches and strategies taken by parents in the Alpujarras to raise their children in light of increasing inquisitorial scrutiny.
Spanish inquisitors also stigmatized certain dietary restrictions and practices, collecting numerous examples of their observance. Evidence of abstention from pork and meats not butchered in the manner licit in Islam and consuming foods such as couscous appear repeatedly in inquisitorial accusations against Moriscos in Spain. In this way, inquisitors conflated foods prepared in the halal manner with dishes like couscous that had no religious significance but that they associated with Muslims. Before the Toledo tribunal, María de Andrada also recalled that when she was living with her family prior to the Alpujarras rebellion, her father had told her, “She could not eat fowl or any other thing unless it was killed with the ceremony mandated by the law of Muhammad, for which [her father] took a knife, and she does not remember well to which part of the heavens he turned and said certain words, and cut the throats of the fowl, and she saw them butchered with this ceremony, and because she was a young girl, she does not remember the words which were said.”55 Knowledge of dietary practices was passed on clandestinely within families and communities, despite the now obligatory participation of Moriscos in Catholic feast days. Andrada described a conversation she had had with other Moriscas while attending Mass. During this encounter, which may have taken place in the back rows of the church, they lamented, “That it was their great misfortune to have come to this land where they were made to go to communion and [Andrada] said what a shame … and [the Moriscas] also said that the sacrament was nothing but a piece of bread. They also asked her if she ate bacon, and replying that she did not, they said that she was doing a good thing to not eat it because it was against the law of Muhammad and otherwise she would not be saved, and [they advised her] that she also not drink wine because it was against the same law, and she would not be saved. They said that they neither ate bacon nor drank wine for the same reason.”56 In the eyes of Spanish inquisitors, Moriscos who recited Islamic prayers, engaged in ritual bathing, and exchanged words in Arabic were committing subversive acts. In Toledo in 1530 a slave named Pedro testified against another slave, Isabel. Pedro accused Isabel of having spoken to him in the “Arabic language and this witness [Pedro] did not want to reply unless it was in the Castilian language, and because of this the said slave Isabel reprimanded this witness a great deal, asking him why he did not speak the Morisco language.”57 When summoned to testify and asked whether she had ever spoken in algarravia, Isabel responded that she had several times while reciting a prayer, invoking God. The testimonies of later Morisca slaves in Toledo during the 1570s, after the Alpujarras rebellion, continue to suggest the persistence of algarravia. Angela de Hernández, an eleven-year-old slave of the princess of Portugal, declared that she could speak “some algarravia,” although her parents, as a precaution, had taught her Christian prayers and had taken her to church “with the other small children, and she does not know anything about the sect of the Muslims because they would not teach her.”58 Andrada presented another aspect of maintaining language through prayer. She confessed that her father “taught her to say certain words, putting her hands next to her ears, which were es hedu alehilla la huete es hedu mohamat reculala … and these same words she would say during the times in the morning when she would wash herself as she had said, and [the words] mean that God is our savior and Muhammad is very dear to Him.”59 The prayer that Andrada confessed to saying each morning was the shahada, the first Pillar of Islam. Sylviane Diouf argues that the shahada, which she transcribes as La-ilaha ill’l-Lah Muhammadan rasul-ul-lah, and translates as “there is not another God but God and Muhammad is His Prophet,” was significant in its recitation by enslaved African Muslims in the Americas.60 By praying the shahada in spite of a tightly controlled environment, Muslim slaves affirmed their faith daily, implicitly rejecting the conversion to Christianity many had been forced to accept after their enslavement.61
GROWING SUSPICION: THE SECOND ALPUJARRAS UPRISING AND ITS AFTERMATH
In 1568 a large Morisco community in the Sierra de Alpujarras in Granada responded violently to the expanding currents of repression and surveillance. During the course of these “wars of Granada,” many Moriscos were captured and sold to various regions across Spain. Some enslaved Moriscos were also taken to Spanish America. Their individual displacement foreshadowed the expulsion and dispersal of Granada’s Moriscos, which was decreed officially in 1571 after the Alpujarras rebellion was suppressed. Because men were more likely to be killed during rebellions, a majority of the Moriscos who were enslaved were women.62 This second “Guerra de las Alpujarras” had a profound impact on both Moriscos and old Christians across the Iberian world.
The Alpujarras rebellion had lasting repercussions because it resulted in the first diaspora of the more orthodox Granadan Moriscos among the diverse Morisco communities in other regions of the Peninsula. Large numbers of displaced Granadan Moriscos, who were among the last forced converts in Spain, carried Islamic beliefs and practices with them to other towns and cities. The presence of small concentrations of individuals whose commitment to Catholicism was deemed less than secure created the propensity for the wider old Christian community to conflate both groups and label all Moriscos, regardless of geographic diversity, as potential Muslims and rebels. Rumors spread across various municipalities that their local Morisco populations could similarly rise up against old Christians and invite the Ottomans to invade Spain.
The accounts told by the Granadan Morisca slaves to Toledo inquisitors illuminate aspects of the Alpujarras uprising, its aftermath, and the enslavement they suffered. María Agueda stated, “Being in the place called Veneacir in the house of her parents, there came to the said place the Muslims who had risen up…. Afterwards they went to the Sierra with the others, where this confessant remained