Morisco writers forged a distinctive literary style under severe persecution.

Evidence

In the case of the Islamic Spanish of this Morisco period, there was hardly time for a great deal of development and evolution to take place; indeed, it is remarkable that differences of such magnitude as we do find became fixed so quickly. Writers such as the Young Man from Ar´evalo built a distinctive style that could never be confused with the work of their Christian contemporaries. … After the final expulsion of 1609, the refugee community from Spain was free to pick up the threads of Arabic culture once more; because aljamiado literature did not live on into modern times, we should not underestimate the tremendous effort that the crypto- Muslims of Spain in the sixteenth century had put into developing it. In spite of all the limitations inflicted upon them by the persecutions of the Inquisition (for whom any manuscript in Arabic script was liable to be condemned as a Koran), a new literature was created. It was paradoxical that considerable innovatory ingenuity was deployed in the service of cultural and religious conservatism. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 673

Categorization

• SEED: Aline for an essay on how repression can paradoxically fuel literary innovation — ‘innovatory ingenuity in the service of conservatism’ as a pattern across persecuted script-communities.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the Inquisition treated ANY Arabic-script manuscript as a Koran — what did this do to ordinary commercial and personal documents in Arabic script?