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Journal of Islamic Studies Advance Access published online on July 21, 2006
Journal of Islamic Studies, doi:10.1093/jis/etl024
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© The Author (2006). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Original Papers

The Genealogy of the Spanish Qur{rhamza}an

Consuelo López-Morillas 1 *

1 Indiana University

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Consuelo López-Morillas, E-mail: lopez{at}indiana.edu


  Abstract

Between the mid-fifteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, Muslims in Spain produced, copied, and circulated translations of the Qur{rhamza}an into Spanish for the benefit of members of their community who could no longer understand the sacred text in Arabic. Until 1502 in Castile and 1526 in Aragon, Muslims (‘Mudejars’) lived in protected communities and were allowed to practice Islam, but after those dates they were forced to convert to Christianity. Now called ‘Moriscos’, they continued their Islamic practices in secret, but suffered the increasing handicaps of loss of teachers and schools and pressure from the Inquisition. The Moriscos were expelled from Spain en masse in 1609.

From this period, 26 Spanish-language Qur{rhamza}ans survive in manuscript form and one in print. Only one is a complete version, while the rest are abridged or fragmentary. The present study compares all of the extant versions in an attempt to answer several fundamental questions about the genre. Should they be called ‘translations’ or ‘interpretations’ of the Qur{rhamza}an, based on how much interpolated commentary (Arabic tafsir) they contain? Which passages of the Qur{rhamza}an do they preserve? Are they monolingual (containing the translation only) or bilingual (incorporating the Arabic text)? In what alphabet are they written, the Latin or the Arabic (in which case their language is known as ‘Aljamiado’)? Is their dialect of Spanish Castilian (from central Spain) or Aragonese (from the northeast)? What are their respective dates, copyists, provenance, and authorship, insofar as these can be known? Most important, what genetic relationships exist among them: which ones are copies of others, and which constitute truly independent translations?

Five Appendices (available only in the online version of the article) provide corroborating information: I: library collections, catalogs, and bibliography; II: all Qur{rhamza}anic passages translated in the respective texts; III: Aragonese and Castilian dialect features; IV: tables of genetic relationships among the versions; and V: graphic representations of those relationships.

Appendices A-E of this article are only available in the online version at http://jis.oxfordjournals.org.
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