No abstract

In spite of a widespread ignorance of Arabic among the Moriscos (the last Muslims of the Iberian Peninsula, expelled in 1018–23/1609–14), and the prohibition of the possession of books in Arabic script, the Moriscos continued transcribing and transmitting the Qur'an. These copies exhibit various peculiarities related either to their physical presentation, or to their cultural significance. The materials which are part of the Almonacid de la Sierra collection (today in the Tomás Navarro Tomás library (CCHS-CSIC), Madrid) – that means, 37 fragmentary copies of the Qur'an – provide us with an idea of the kind of Qur'anic texts the Moriscos were using by the end of the tenth/sixteenth century in spite of the religious and linguistic restraints which were imposed on them. There are complete maṣāhif, usually divided into four volumes. In addition, we find Qur'anic extracts, the contents of which are almost always the same; this probably implies some ritual use. Finally, there are family prayer books containing some suras and verses which can be recited according to the moment. The diversity of these manuscripts gives us an idea of the knowledge of the Qur'an among the Moriscos and the strength of Islam in tenth/sixteenth-century Aragon.

Three copies of the ‘Morisco Qur'an’, RESC/101D.2, RESC/39E, and RESC/58B.1, provide an exceptional testimony for the study of textual transmission within Morisco communities. They lead us to think that the copyists working for these communities knew and used a systematic methodology for transcribing texts which we could call ‘commented’ (or ‘translated’) Qur'ans, with 13 lines to the page. In all three cases, the text was written at the beginning of the sixteenth century, if not in direct parallel at least within a short time span, by the same hand, with an identical layout, on a paper of the same type and size, and with the same portions of text on the same page. They are clearly exceptional, since no similar examples have been found in the entire manuscript production of the Western Islamic world known to date. We are dealing here with a careful process of standardisation similar to that found later in the wider Islamic world––more precisely in the Ottoman Empire––from 1620 onwards, which will become widespread in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Among the diverse and usually rather carelessly produced Morisco handwritten manuscripts we find twin copies of the “Morisco Qurʾān”, dating from the end of the sixteenth century. Each is made up of a series of gatherings, the remains of two larger yet unbound codices, which contained the usual Morisco selection of Qurʾānic extracts. To date, these are the only examples from the Morisco period of two exactly similar copies of a text. Although this fact might seem exceptional in the Iberian Peninsular Islamic context, it is by no means isolated: the beginning of the seventeenth century witnessed the development of what has come to be called the “standard Ottoman Qurʾān”, with fifteen lines of text to the page. Are these parallel developments or resulting from the influence of one production on the other?

No abstract