Only religious devotional poems circulated among crypto-Muslims in Spain

Evidence

Al-Andalus was the homeland of one of the best-known writers on Sufi themes in Arabic, Muhyi al-Din Ibn Arabi (born in Murcia in A.D.1165). We might therefore have expected Sufism to make a strong contribution to the underground literature circulating in Spain. However, whether we look at the books in Arabic available to Spain’s crypto-Muslims or at their own original writings, the Sufielement, so important elsewhere in the Islamic world at this time, is relatively absent. Moriscos had access to few Sufireligious texts of any level of intellectual sophistication, almost the sole exception being the Minhajal-abidin by al-Gazali (discussed below). Of course, some of the pious anecdotes and stories contained in the lives of prophets would not be out of place within a Sufiframework, but the unpretentious literature that has survived from the Moriscos is characterized, above all, by straightforward Sunni orthodoxy rather than by mysticism. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 707 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Spanish crypto-Muslims circulated only small devotional works of al-Gazali, not his major treatises; Persecuted crypto-Muslims craved austere doctrinal certainty over Spain-relevant content — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 721; Andalusian Sufism did not survive into crypto-Muslim underground literature. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 707

Broader Connections

• Andalusian Sufism did not survive into crypto-Muslim underground literature. #complicates (0.76) — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 707