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Surreptitiously, the Granadine Moriscos continued to recite the Holy Qur’an, gave their children Muslim names, and circumcised their sons. The authorities underestimated the Moriscos’ capacity to resist and attempted to destroy their faith by means designed to work on Christian heretics and Jews. Their first method of control was to eradicate the texts of Islam. In 1499, Cisneros had ordered that all copies of the Holy Qur’an and other religious works should be collected, and then decreed their destruction. This was a deeply symbolic act. While the Inquisition lit slow fires under the heretics and conversos of Spain, Jiménez de Cisneros provided his own auto-da-fé in the main square of Granada: he burned the holy books of Islam.7

This was not quite the act of crass barbarism that it now seems. Cisneros was the greatest patron of scholarship in Spain, who almost single-handedly pushed forward the production of the Biblia complutense, which printed the texts of the biblical sources in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and “Chaldean” (or Syriac) in parallel columns. Just as Jiménez de Cisneros believed in the power of the written word and that Christianity would be advanced through this monumental edition of the Holy Bible, so he was convinced Islam in Spain would be mortally wounded by destroying its sacred texts. He was well aware of the reverence with which Muslims regarded the Holy Qur’an and the extraordinary esteem in which they held the Arabic language. The book burning was an essential part of his policy of accelerated conversion, in cutting off newly converted Muslims from the possibility of reversion. In his eyes there would be a natural propensity for Muslim converts to seek the light of Christ, and only the agency of “Islamizers” could draw them back into their old ways. There were no printed versions of the Holy Qur’an and the manuscript texts consumed in Granada could not easily be replaced.

Certainly, the archbishop of Toledo’s biographers saw the book burning as a supremely potent and meritorious act, evidence of Jiménez de Cisneros’s determination (rectitud) to achieve the purposes of God. So they inflated the number of volumes to more than a million, an unlikely figure that allowed more than three manuscript texts for every inhabitant of the Kingdom of Granada. This total was more metaphor than fact, like the improbably heroic scale of early Christian victories over the infidel on the battlefields of the Reconquest. In the eyes of his advocates, Jiménez de Cisneros had accomplished a majestic triumph in a spiritual war being waged by every means possible. To find a parallel within Christian terms, we need to look to the Catholic horror and revulsion at the Protestant destruction of images and relics in the Netherlands later in the sixteenth century. The bonfire in Granada was an act of purposeful iconoclasm. It was also unsuccessful, because the books themselves were only the apogee of the Muslim structure of belief in Granada. The majority of the Morisco population in Granada lived not in the cities but in the country, where few of the people could read the texts. But the message was known and taught orally, rather as most contemporary Christians learned their faith by ear rather than by eye. So the true strength of Islam resided in the minds and memories of children. Since the days of the Prophet Mohammed they had learned the Holy Qur’an by rote. Thus even within poor village communities there was a human resource of knowledge.

We are now beginning to understand the importance of the written Morisco texts, passed from hand to hand and copied, hidden from the eyes of neighbors and from the spies of the authorities. They were written in a variety of languages and scripts. Some were in Arabic, some in the Morisco dialect of Romance called alajamiado, meaning “foreign.” Sometimes alajamiado would be written in Arabic script and sometimes with a Latin alphabet. It suggests a community restricted in its use of Arabic, because to speak