page_title: Young Man of Arévalo
section_title: Works
hierarchical_section_title: Young Man of Arévalo / Works
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Thomas van Kempen, De navolging van Christus, titelpagina. Antwerpen, 1505. Houtsnede. Utrecht, Museum Catharijneconvent.
context_page_description: The Young Man of Arévalo was a Morisco crypto-Muslim author from Arévalo, Castile who was the most productive known Islamic author in Spain during the period after the forced conversion of Muslims there. He traveled widely across Spain to visit crypto-Muslim communities and wrote several works about Islam which includes accounts from his travels. His real identity and dates of birth and death are unknown, but most of his travels took place in the first half of the sixteenth century.
context_section_description: He wrote at least three extant works, the Brief compendium of our sacred law and sunna (c. 1533), the Tafsira (c. 1533), and the Summary of the Account and Spiritual Exercise (c. shortly before 1550), all written in Spanish with Arabic script (aljamiado), and primarily about religious topics. In addition to the religious content, the works included accounts of his travels, his meetings with other clandestine Muslims, and descriptions of their religious practices and discussions. These accounts and reminiscences provide historians with information about the crypto-Muslim community in fifteenth-century Spain and their practices.
  The Brief Compendium is a work of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), covering topics of ibadah (Islamic acts of worship) and Islamic economics. It was written in collaboration with Bray de Reminjo, marking a rare collaboration between Castilian (represented by the Young Man) and Aragonese (by Bray) Muslim traditions. The Tafsira is a tafsir or a commentary of the Quran. The Summary is a religious book on topics of devotion and piety.
  Spanish scholar Pascual de Gayangos y Arce mentioned in 1839 of having seen an additional work he called The Pilgrimage of the Young Man in Madrid, but this work is now lost.
  In 1980, Spanish author Gregorio Fonseca Antuña discovered close similarities between passages in the Summary and passages from Thomas à Kempis's 15th-century work The Imitation of Christ, a Christian devotional book. The passages were often adapted to replace specific Christian contexts and features with Islamic ones while keeping the spiritual and moral meaning intact. These similarities occur frequently throughout the book, including in long passages. According to historian L. P. Harvey, Kempis' influence is "established beyond doubt", and could not have been due to chance. The Young Man did not cite Kempis as sources for the passages, and frequently attributed the passages to Islamic scholars such as al-Ghazali and Ibn Arabi, misleadingly. The adaptation of Christian devotional literature in his Islamic work could be the result of his being obligated to attend missionary sermons, and a lack of access to actual Islamic literature. In contrast to the Summary, the Young Man's other works show considerable originality.
caption: The Imitation of Christ included passages that were likely adopted in the Young Man's Tafsira.
exif: {}