Forced conversion drove formerly public Islam underground and clandestine

Evidence

Those who did not live near enough to the coast to plot such an escape had to find other means of surviving as Muslims. It is against this background that we must understand the reaction of the Muslim masses to conversion: it was to turn their religion, always hitherto thought of as essentially a faith to be lived and proclaimed in public, into a secret and underground phenomenon. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 272

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to crypto-religious phenomena like Iberian conversos and marranos, and to the broader theme in ‘On Sacrifice’ and other work about how state pressure reshapes religious practice.
• QUESTION: The passage says Islam was ‘always’ a public faith — worth interrogating whether clandestinity was truly unprecedented or had pre-Muslim-Andalus analogues.