Europe, America, and Africa formed in 1492 the so-called Encounter of three worlds. But, in reality, other peoples, cultures, and civilizations also came into contact with each other from the start. The Arab world was one of the protagonists in this first stage of globalization. The study of the Arab and Moorish presence in Spanish America, as well as the Jewish one, has grown in recent decades. Colonial Spanish America was one of the main refuges for both persecuted peoples.

Karoline Cook's book is part of this academic concern and one of the first contributions in English on this subject. Cook draws attention to a scarcely explored aspect of this contact with an innovative approach: the significant influence that the Moors had in various aspects of the economy and society (sometimes also in politics and colonial administration) affects the growing trend to create the image of a homogeneous Spanish empire based on a Visigothic and Christian (Catholic) culture in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As a result of this “predatory” model used to establish the cultural identity of the Spanish body politic, the Arab and the Muslim were considered archaic, backward, and deformed for not corresponding to Christian orthodoxy and the supposed European origin of the Spanish population and civilization.

The Arabic presence is not under question. The focus is on the Moorish—those Muslims converted to Christianity and suspected of continuing to be Muslims. Hence the emphasis of the book: the religious and political identification of the Moors in Spanish America. Cook makes a fine tracing of the information on the faith of the Moors in both aspects, especially after the second uprising of the Alpujarras of Granada (1569–72). First, she establishes the extent to which the Moors were actually Christians and not Muslims who were practicing “taqiyya” or syncretic cover-up of previous religious practices. Second, she explores whether the Moors represented a fifth column for a possible invasion by the Ottoman Empire of Spain and its colonies in conspiracies that were supposed to take place in the privacy of numerous houses of the “false subjects of Spain.”

The taqiyya and the gradual loss of the mixed forms of the Andalusian Arabic language, in addition to the imperial paranoia of legal and theological treaties and reports, make it difficult to recognize how widespread the Muslim practice could be in Spanish America. To overcome this serious hermeneutical difficulty, Cook uses the scarce but valuable information preserved in the Inquisition and royal audience archives in search of traces of denunciations and defenses in cases of apostasy and defamation. The defense arguments of the selected case studies serve the author to reveal the negotiation mechanisms to be included in the Spanish body politic used by those accused of being false Christians or false subjects. It does not seem to be a coincidence—and Cook quite rightly points out—that the denunciations increased when at the end of the sixteenth century the competition for bureaucratic positions was greater, thanks to the increase in the number of candidates who had to demonstrate their purity of blood and the orthodoxy of old Christians.

For this reason, this book should help us to better understand the category of “Spanish” in Spanish America and the subterranean struggles within the Republic of Spaniards and their relationships with indigenous and Afro-descendant members of Hispanic American society. In summary, this is a well-written text that contributes in a very significant way to the knowledge of colonial religiosity and politics. It should encourage new research on a subject little known and accepted in Hispanic American history, in spite of the fact that Arabic culture is one of the most important components of Hispanic American societies and cultures. Above all, research is needed for the Bourbon period that is not covered by Cook and that could be a quite different time when the religious and political Moorish problem “disappears.” Ojalá الله شاء إن