Forced resettlement raised Morisco political consciousness instead of erasing Islamic identity

Evidence

Paradoxically, what came of this movement of populations of 1570 was not acculturation or the wiping out of sentiments of Islamic group solidarity but what (in equally modern terms) we might call a process of “consciousness-raising” among the hitherto politically inert Moriscos of the regions into which the Granadans were transferred. After the second war in the Alpujarras, marked as it was by great cruelty and unprecedented atrocities on both sides, the last vestiges of the comfortable medieval Mudejar-style accommodation between the religions and the races was wiped away by blood. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 971

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels forced-diaspora arguments in research on how displacement sometimes hardens rather than dissolves ethnic identity (e.g., diaspora nationalism literature).
• CANDY: The irony that a forced resettlement designed to stamp out Islam instead acted as consciousness-raising is a memorable historical twist.