‘Coplas del peregrino de Puey Monçón’: A Sixteenth-Century Spanish Poem about the Hajj

This chapter presents and contextualizes a poem written in the sixteenth century in Aljamiado (Spanish of the sixteenth century rendered with the Arabic alphabet). In this text, written in Spanish coplas, the author describes different aspects of a hajj pilgrimage—likely undertaken at the beginning of the sixteenth century by a Mudejar from Aragon, who travelled from Spain to Mecca. The poem is a statement of the hybrid identity of its author (a traditional Spanish poetic form to express a Muslim message), and a testament to the poet’s (and his community of coreligionists’) resilience, because he remained and sustained his Muslim identity in the face of an administrative policy that had forbidden any and all expressions of Islam in Spain. As such, this was an act of counter hegemony that defied the persecution of Moriscos and Islam in Habsburg Spain. For all Muslims, performing the pilgrimage to Mecca is an achievement, for a Mudejar it was more than that, given the difficulties the Spanish authorities imposed on such travels. And for a Morisco, copying and keeping a manuscript version of this poem hidden at home, was an act of defiance and a form of jihad.