Deixis, taqiyya, and textual mediation in crypto-Muslim Aragon

Abstract

The present article is an analysis of the scribal and lectoral activities of crypto-Muslim minority communities within sixteenth-century Aragon (Spain). Looking specifically at traditional Islamic texts translated into Ibero-Romance and copied out in Arabic script (a largely ad hoc writing system that modern scholars have termed aljamiado [pronounced: al-xam-yAH-ðo]), this article focuses on the ways in which these texts index specific frameworks of lectoral performance and mediation that lie at the very center of processes of textual interpretation and cultural practice within the clandestine religious communities that made use of them. Central to this study is an analysis of the different forms of deictic reference encoded within these texts. The specific argument that underlies this article is that such reference links these written texts—which functioned as complex symbolic tools—to the social world of scribes, readers, and the listening public in profound and concrete ways. Looked at in this manner, the extant manuscript texts of Aragonese crypto-Muslims allow modern researchers a powerful form of access to the micro- and macro-level social practice of this large, sixteenth-century minority community.