The manuscript tradition did not end with the fall of Granada in 1492. It went underground. Muslims who remained in Spain were forced to convert in the following decades and became the Moriscos, a population that was Christian by law, Muslim in a good deal of private practice, and under surveillance by the Inquisition throughout. They continued to copy religious texts, in Arabic and in Aljamiado, which is Romance written in Arabic script, and they hid them. Caches have been recovered from the fabric of houses in Aragon and Castile, walled up under floors and between joists, the best known found at Almonacid de la Sierra in the late nineteenth century when a house was being demolished.
Those hidden libraries are now a principal source for what Morisco religious life actually consisted of, as opposed to what inquisitorial records say about it, and they are notably practical: prayer instructions, calendars, legal opinions on how to live as a Muslim under a Christian regime, and copies of the Quran. The Moriscos were expelled from Spain between 1609 and 1614, so the manuscripts outlasted the community that made them. The wider western manuscript tradition continued uninterrupted across the Strait, and Maghribi script remains in ordinary use in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and further south to this day, which makes the Andalusi book a living tradition with a broken branch rather than a closed chapter.