The Long-Forgotten Qurans of Spain: A Muslim Scripture in Medieval Spanish

Muslims lived in the Iberian Peninsula for best part of a millennium before their final expulsion of the early 1600s. During those nine centuries, there flourished a rich literary culture, not only in Arabic but also in Aljamiado—a version of Castilian Spanish that was written with the Arabic script. In this episode, we explore the fascinating Quran manuscripts—in Arabic and especially Aljamiado—written in the last few centuries of Moorish life in Iberia. We’ll learn how these rare manuscripts survived—sometimes hidden for centuries in the walls of old houses—and what they tell us about the people who wrote them, and the form of Islam they followed. In so doing, we’ll learn about a long-forgotten chapter in European literary as much as religious history: the only surviving complete Quran in Aljamiado Spanish was written at exactly the same time as Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Nile Green talks to Nuria de Castilla, author of “The Qur’an: Production, Transmission, and Reception in the Mudejar and Morisco Communities,” in The Qur’an and its Handwritten Transmission (Brill, 2024).