Were the Moriscos Still Muslim? a Debate Among Historians

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Whether most Moriscos were still meaningfully Muslim by 1609, or had become Christian in fact if not in the state's estimation, is a real disagreement among historians rather than a settled question this atlas can flatten into one answer. L.P. Harvey's standard history reads the record of Inquisition trials, confiscated Aljamiado manuscripts and the Oran fatwa's wide circulation as evidence that clandestine Islamic practice remained genuinely alive across most Morisco communities down to the expulsion, sustained by religious authorities in North Africa and the Ottoman lands who kept advising Moriscos on how to dissimulate.

Other historians, working from regional records in areas such as Castile's La Mancha, have argued that generations of intermarriage, Christian education and simple time had produced communities substantially indistinguishable in practice from their Old Christian neighbors well before 1609, making the expulsion in those places a persecution of people for an ancestry rather than for a living faith. The two readings are not fully reconcilable, and this atlas records the disagreement rather than resolving it: how thoroughly assimilation had proceeded appears to have varied considerably by region, and the sweeping 1609 edict drew no such distinction.