Morisco books and Middle Eastern scholars

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show how the Orientalist scholarship of Christian Arabs who had come to Spain from the Middle East (via Italy) adressed the literature of the Moriscos, to examine how it was understood by such scholars and what they used it for. We show that these scholars, from among whom we have chosen the examples of Marcus Dobelius and Miguel Casiri, could not carry out their Orientalist work using the Arabic manuscripts of the El Escorial library without confronting the Morisco problem in the form of Morisco texts held in several collections confiscated by the Inquisition. The knowledge and activities of these Moriscos served to trace the broad outlines of an intellectual history of the Arabic language in Europe, in which Morisco activity was interppreted in relation to its linguistic and doctrinal variables. This was achieved by means of the construction of a scholarly discipline (Orientalism) at a time of religious polemic between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, i.e. during the period of the development of religious dissidence and skepticism in early modern Europe.