Calling converted Muslims Moriscos imposes an unaccepted Christian identity on them

Evidence

A second objection, and one of much greater moment, is the insidious ideological bias inherent in this use of the word. To accept that an individual is correctly referred to as Morisco is by implication to go along with the proposition that it was justifiable to redesignate him in that way against his own free will in the first place. It is to reclassify him, to impose a new sub-Christian identity on him without his assent. We can tell from their own writings (and, as we will see from chapter 5, there is quite a large corpus of such material) that the “converted” Muslims did not think of themselves as in any way different doctrinally from their fellow Muslims in other parts of the world … Their aspirations, as clearly expressed in their own writings, were not at all those of converts to Christianity. On the contrary, they constantly expressed wishes that the institutions of Islam might be restored in their native land (“the minarets raised up again,” “las ac¸omoas empinadas”). And, as has been said, they normally speak of themselves simply as muslimes. Moro and morisco (Morisco) were names that other people had for them, not the name they used for themselves. As time went by, they did perforce have to begin to accept the label, but Morisco was not ideologically neutral when employed in the sixteenth century, and it can easily smuggle an undesirable bias into our discourse today. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 62

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the loaded, externally-imposed nature of ‘Morisco’ as a designation.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing the 1587 Granadan Arabic text with the racist joke using ‘moriscos’ — a rare window into the word’s salience to Moriscos themselves.