Persecuted crypto-Muslims invented a written Romance language in Arabic script to preserve their culture.

Evidence

It is most remarkable that a community under the systematic persecution of the Spanish Inquisition, not to mention the other organs of the Spanish state, should have managed not merely to preserve a great deal of its religious and cultural inheritance (in a difficult language, Arabic, not spoken by many of them) but should also have gone beyond that and created a new written language of its own, in Arabic characters, for Islamic purposes. This way of writing their own Romance vernacular was not, as I will argue below, first developed in this period, but over the very short time span covered by this volume, that is to say, over little more than one century, we can watch the evolution of what had been little more than a medium for jotting down marginalia and occasional notes into an effective instrument for the preservation of a whole distinctive culture. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 596

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines aljamiado — the crypto-Muslim practice of writing Spanish Romance in Arabic characters.
• XREF: Connects to other accounts of persecuted minorities creating parallel scripts/languages, e.g. Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, Coptic survival under Islamic rule.
• SEED: Article angle: how persecuted communities invent new written languages as survival technology — aljamiado alongside Judeo-Arabic, Yiddish orthography, etc.