ABSTRACT
After the fall of the last Muslim kingdom of Granada in 1492 and until the expulsion of the Moriscos (descendants of Iberian Muslims) from Spain in 1609, early modern Spaniards sought to define a national culture vis-à-vis their Moorish legacy. There were several attempts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to uproot any trace of Moorish influence. Royal prohibitions were issued against so-called Moorish cultural practices such as the use of Arabic, clothing, baths, and musical instruments—the most prominent bans were those by Charles V in 1526 and by Philip II in 1566. In addition, as Spanish culture was subjected to close scrutiny, almost any cultural practice could turn out to seem Moorish—sitting on the floor, cooking with olive oil, or wearing certain garments. This process of cultural cleansing was first studied by Alain Milhou in a series of seminal articles, in which he coined several terms to describe it, such as “de-Semitization,” to refer to the simultaneous rejection of both Jewish and Arab cultural legacies, and “de-Orientalization.” Alternatively, he also labeled this process “Europeanization,” as if “Oriental” and “European” were mutually exclusive categories. This constant switching of terms suggests that Milhou suspected that none was fully adequate for describing the process of cultural cleansing, and he unfortunately never resolved the issue. 1 More recently, Barbara Fuchs, extending Milhou’s analysis, has complicated the concept of cultural cleansing of everything Moorish by showing that as a social strategy, it was not uniformly applied, and pointing out that, in many instances, recognized Moorish cultural practices were openly embraced as signs of aristocratic, local, or even national identity. 2
