Forbidden Passages: Muslims and Moriscos in Colonial Spanish America

The author of this book ambitiously seeks to recover documentation that reveals the extent to which Muslims and Moriscos—individuals of Muslim background who had converted to Christianity—were incorporated into the Spanish New World. One of this book's strengths is the author's attempt to expose the reader to the subverted voices of early modern Muslims and Moriscos, either through the archival sources recording both their firsthand perspectives on Spanish culture and society and their lived experiences or through published materials authored by individuals who were not always of Old Christian extraction. Often books on the subject of Islam in the Iberian Atlantic trace the presence of or suspicions about Muslims and Moriscos rather than these individuals' own exertion of presence through first-person accounts, and it is for this emphasis that the author deserves praise.Karoline P. Cook also engages with definitions and characteristics of Moriscos as understood by early modern Spanish authorities in order to then explore how authorities identified Muslims and Moriscos and persecuted them for cultural and religious divergence. These characteristics become essential and often essentialized identifiers of these populations in the early modern period. The author's scholarship will thus furnish the contemporary scholar with additional vocabulary useful for locating these populations in historical documentation. Importantly, Cook successfully argues that larger numbers of Muslims and Moriscos than heretofore realized managed to cross the Atlantic despite legal bans against doing so. Her research will prove worthwhile to scholars interested in overcoming the assumption that only Catholic Europeans performed key roles in the projects of conquest and colonization.Buttressing these inquiries in the book are explorations of Spanish sovereignty and claims to territory and a consideration of the secular and nonsecular development that supported transatlantic expansion. This development included religious and inquisitorial procedures for administrating colonial spaces and their inhabitants, the establishment of municipal authorities and viceroyalties, the resurrection of the encomienda system and the creation of the reducciones system, and the emergence of an institutionalized authority—the Casa de Contratación—tasked with overseeing transatlantic commerce and the exchange of goods and people across the Atlantic. Cook considers how Muslims and Moriscos negotiated each of these aspects of life in the Iberian Atlantic world.While some of the materials explored in this book are not new finds per se—that is, scholars have interacted with them in the past, or they have been published in more recent studies—the general thrust of the book positions these materials within a prism that reveals the multifaceted complexities inherent to both detecting the presence of and representing Muslims and Moriscos in the early modern period. The grafting of ethnic and racial qualities onto certain sets of abilities and contributions resulted, for example, in Spanish authorities appointing speakers of Arabic as translators in the Americas. The belief that certain vocations were executed by Muslims and Moriscos also meant that Spaniards believed that one's profession could point to one's racial and religious background. Cook easily exposes the superficiality of these connections, in part because scholars have identified elsewhere the vocations most typically fulfilled by Muslims and Moriscos in the Americas. It would have been helpful to explore further the contribution of African slavery to swelling the population of Muslims in the Americas, particularly following manumission. And, finally, the gendered nature of Moriscos in the Americas—namely, that there were considerably more women than men, particularly in the first decades of Spanish colonization efforts—is another subject that scholars have addressed and that is briefly commented on in this book.We cannot expect all these subjects to fit neatly into one book, but these particular areas are in urgent need of scholarly attention. For instance, it would have been valuable for Cook to have identified and explored more firsthand testimony prepared by female Muslims and Moriscas in the New World because scholarship relies so heavily on male voices as informants for this period. Of particular value would have been a close examination of visualizations of Muslims produced in the New World, especially in light of this book's final chapter, in which the subject is discussed without any illustrative component. The visual in this sense would have greatly strengthened the chapter, which instead muses over indigenous and nonindigenous knowledge of what Muslims and Moriscos might have looked like based on communication about their physical and cultural attributes through shared social contexts, exposure to religious indoctrination, and ritual.While this book does not contain as much new material as I had desired (despite an excellent array of archival materials cited by the author), Cook's framing and emphasis on Muslim and Morisco lived experience is an important contribution to the scholarship on this subject. Evidently the book also highlights other areas in urgent need of scholarly attention, which in itself is a contribution to the discipline.

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