Free Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain by Matthew Carr Page A

authorities were always keen to curb outward expressions of Islam, such as the call to prayer, where Muslims lived near Christians. Yet Christian barons not only permitted the muezzin to summon the faithful to prayer by voice or by horn, but allowed their vassals to build new mosques on their estates.
    Such tolerance may have been driven primarily by self-interest, but it was resented by the Inquisition and also by the Christian lower orders in Valencia, whose anti-Muslim sentiments often overlapped with an equally intense loathing of their feudal masters. Many commoners regarded the Muslim vassals as competitors within the feudal system, while Christian urban craft guilds similarly regarded Muslims—and Jews—as economic rivals. In periods of social crisis, these sentiments could easily explode into violence, such as the 1455 riots in the city of Valencia, when a Christian mob razed the local morería .
    These riots were fueled partly by recurring fears of a Muslim uprising, a possibility that haunted a kingdom where Muslims made up more than a quarter of the population. The belief that Valencia’s Muslims were waiting with “ears up and lances sharpened” was exacerbated by fear of the corsairs who raided Valencia from North Africa in search of slaves, booty, and captives for ransom. The Spanish expression for “the coast is clear,” no hay moros en la costa , literally “no Moors on the coast” derives directly from the long centuries in which Barbary corsairs terrorized Christian communities near the sea. With North Africa only twenty miles away from its extended and undefended coastline, Valencia was particularly susceptible to these raids, which were so common that some coastal Christian towns maintained permanent funds to pay the ransom of captives taken to Barbary. This vulnerability and insecurity could rebound with devastating consequences on the Muslim population of Valencia, and it was to prove a decisive factor in shaping official policy toward them in the century that followed the fall of Granada.
     
    All Spain’s Muslims inhabited an Islamic cultural and religious world whose basis was the Koran and the Hadith—the sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. Their lives were based around four of the five pillars of Islam, the shahada (testament of faith), fasting, daily prayer, and almsgiving—few could undertake the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca. In addition to the festivals and holidays in the Islamic calendar, Spanish Muslims had their own sites of religious pilgrimage, hermitages, cults of saints, festivals, and traditions. In parts of Granada, Muslims celebrated Ramadan with street processions of dancers and musicians, who showered each other with fruit and colored water. In Valencia, Muslim women marked the New Year with visits to the local cemetery, where they adorned themselves with henna and wove flaxen shrouds to cover the dead. In rural Murcia, Muslim farmers and peasants celebrated the harvest with festivals of music, singing, and dancing in their vineyards and orchards.
    The introduction to the Muslim community began seven days after birth with the namegiving ceremony known as the fada , in which newborn infants were anointed with henna and given amulets with Koranic verses to wear around their neck. In the case of male children, circumcision was followed by festive celebrations to which relatives and neighbors were invited. The lives of Spanish Muslims ended with burial in the prescribed Islamic manner, washing and dressing the body in clean linen and laying the corpse in virgin soil, turned on its side to face Mecca. Many Muslims buried their relatives with raisins and food and a “letter of introduction” that identified the deceased to the angels of death as true believers and helped them find their way to paradise.
    Other features of Iberian Islam were less obviously religious. Like Christians, Spanish Muslims were great believers in astrology and numerology. They consulted