Andalusian Sufism did not survive into crypto-Muslim underground literature.
Evidence
Al-Andalus was the homeland of one of the best-known writers on Suļ¬ themes in Arabic, Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi (born in Murcia in A.D.1165). We might therefore have expected Suļ¬sm to make a strong contribution to the underground literature circulating in Spain. However, whether we look at the books in Arabic available to Spainās crypto-Muslims or at their own original writings, the Suļ¬element, so important elsewhere in the Islamic world at this time, is relatively absent. Moriscos had access to few Suļ¬religious texts of any level of intellectual sophistication, almost the sole exception being the Minhajal-abidin by al-Gazali (discussed below). Of course, some of the pious anecdotes and stories contained in the lives of prophets would not be out of place within a Suļ¬framework, but the unpretentious literature that has survived from the Moriscos is characterized, above all, by straightforward Sunni orthodoxy rather than by mysticism. ā L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 707
Categorization
- QUESTION: Why did Sufism ā so vital elsewhere in the Islamic world ā vanish from Spanish crypto-Muslim practice? The author suggests craft guilds could have been the vehicle but no evidence exists.
- XREF: Connects to my silence/religious-literature reading thread: underground religious communities choose which texts to preserve, and mysticism apparently lost out to orthodox practice under persecution.