Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Cultural Practice in Early Modern Spain

by Vincent Barletta

Forcibly expelled from Spain in the early seventeenth century, the substantial Muslim community known as the moriscos left behind them a hidden yet extremely rich corpus of manuscripts. Copied out in Arabic script and concealed in walls, false floors, and remote caves, these little-known texts now offer modern readers an absorbing look into the cultural life of the moriscos during the hundred years between their forced conversion to Christianity and their eventual expulsion. Covert Gestures reveals how the traditional Islamic narratives of the moriscos both shaped and encoded a wide range of covert social activity characterized by a profound and persistent concern with time and temporality. Using a unique blend of literary analysis, linguistic anthropology, and phenomenological philosophy, Barletta explores the narratives as testimonials of past human experiences and discovers in them evidence of community resistance. In its interdisciplinary approach, Vincent Barletta's work is nothing less than a rewriting of the cultural history of Muslim Spain, as well as a replotting of the future course of medieval and early modern literary studies.

Genres: History

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[isaac dwyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Any book that deals with the experience of Muslims and Islamic cultural heritage after 1492 and the fall of the Grenadian caliphate is one I’ll pick up.

The source material at the core of this book—aljamiado, that is, Castilian Spanish composed in a sui generis form of the Arabic script—is a captivating one. That said, the theoretical orientation of Barletta is more towards a broader argument in continental philosophy around concerning how we in the present should relate to these texts—think Hegel’s diatribes on capital-T Time—than it does in close readings of the manuscripts at hand.

Barletta’s most provocative question: what was the point of authoring texts in aljamiado at all, given that the writers all knew standard Romance script (even did side-by-side translations), and that owning works in Arabic script could put a Morisco squarely in the crosshairs of the inquisition, regardless of its contents?

In summa—lots of great source material, some cool provocations, but lukewarm execution.

[Jared Joseph · Rating 2 out of 5]

...the "work" of an "author," which we still place at the summit of our hierarchy of literary values, took second place to those written forms which we tend to devalue: commentary, continuation, remaniement. In fact, praise accrues to the author in direct proportion to the amount of emendation readers carry out upon his text.