Muslim refugees from Spain faced suspicion of suspect orthodoxy from coreligionists in Islamic lands.

Evidence

The sustained campaign to eradicate Islam from Spanish soil was led by the Inquisition, but there is no reason to suppose that the Old Christian population at large was not behind the Inquisitors in their endeavor. And to make things worse, from the crypto-Muslim point of view, in this period when these native-born Spaniards were denied the right to be anything other than Catholic Christians, in the Muslim world their status as true Muslims was by some called into question. Muslims in genuinely Islamic lands, noting ill-defined differences, might well regard refugees, when they arrived from Spain, as being of suspect orthodoxy. The apparently Christian air that seemed to cling to the refugees was not welcomed. The heroic determination of these people to cleave to the faith of their forebears, so impressively attested in the Moriscos’ own surviving writings (to which we can add their refusal to buckle under Inquisitorial interrogation—as we now know from the Inquisition’s own archives) ought to have evoked the admiration of their coreligionists, but did not always do so. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 507

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did the crypto-Muslims respond to this double disenfranchisement — rejected by Christian Spain and mistrusted by the Islamic world? Worth chasing for the nuance it adds to the refugee experience.