Islam and Columbus' America
Lessons We Can Learn from the Fall of Islamic Spain
Dr. Thomas B. Irving
In March 1492 Columbus met with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel in the Alhamra, only two months after they had taken Granada. He came to solicit funds so he could sail westward to unknown lands across the Atlantic, the Arabs' Sea of Darkness. By October of that year he had landed in the Bahamas and was exploring the Caribbean's. What relation does this have five hundred years later with how we think about the discovery of America, and the conquest of Granada, the last Muslim outpost.
In 1499, seven years after the tragic fall of Granada into Castilian hands, Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros came to that city to break the 1491 treaty that the Catholic monarch had signed with Boabdil, the last king of Granada, which among other matters, guaranteed Muslims' religious rights. As Cisneros began to persecute the Granadine Muslims, this initiated a reaction which turned him into a mass murderer as well as a cultural vandal. By 1502, three years later, valuable books, many of them bound in leather and trimmed with gold leaf, were seized from private libraries in Granada, and burned publicly, while 2000 respectable matrons and maidens were sold at auction. Into what service, I might ask?
Was this Christian charity? The significance for us today, as we talk about the 'discovery of America', is that these same laws were next applied just as ruthlessly in Mexico beginning in 1521, and in Yucatan and Peru, scarcely a quarter of a century later. Thus the campaign was not a local aberration in the Iberian peninsula; the archives and codices of the Aztecs and Mayas also perished, so that historians in later centuries have called the Mexicans and Peruvians 'barbarians' simply because they were left with no written history. The native Americans had history and laws, just as the Muslims of Granada represented a civilisation that was now barbarized.
In 1521 vicious Pragmatica or official decree was issued by the Castilian crown to regulate Muslim conduct under which among other things, Muslims were to leave their windows and doors open on Fridays and Islamic holidays, in a vulgar invasion of privacy, lest they be caught saying their prayers or celebrating a marriage or a funeral in their traditional manner. If they avoided pork and wine at meals, 'familiars' or busybody neighbours posted by the Inquisition were encouraged to denounce them, so they might be carried off to jail. Their property was sold over their heads to pay for their keep in prison, with no concern for their wives or children, who were thrust out onto the streets.
This procedure was serious because as 'lapsed Catholics' who had been baptised forcibly, they could - and were - burned at the stake, cynically 'to avoid bloodshed'! Hundreds of Muslims, if not thousands were murdered publicly in this fashion all up the East coast of Spain. Nothing to date has been done by the Spanish state to remedy this breach of human rights, which happened four and five hundred years ago, although its effects continue. Henery Lea of Philadelphia has described this campaign in The Moriscos of Spain, Their Conversion and Expulsion (Greenwood Press, New York, 1968).
The Pragmatica, as it was called, was revived in 1568, to harass the Muslims around Granada, who still believed in God Alone and prayed to Him, rather than to the trinity. This forced conformity led to the so-called Alpujarras War that ruined that region in the mountains Southeast of Granada, which was devastated by Philip II's half brother don Juan de Austria. To blot out a whole region is not rational economic policy, and Spain has suffered seriously for this judicial and military arrogance, or tughyan, the third deadly sin in Islam.
The Spanish Muslims produced great philosophers during their rule in the peninsula, specially during the XIIth century with thinkers who have not been matched until this present century such as Miguel de Unamuno and Ortega Gasset. They comprised men like Ibn-Tufayl, who inspired Robinson Crusoe six centuries later in England; Ibn-Rushd or 'Averroes' in foreign dress, who revived the study of Aristotle for the new universities that were arising in western Europe like Paris and Oxford; and Ibn-Khaldun from an exiled Sevillian family who founded the discipline of sociology and the philosophy of history two centuries later.
The concept of the Zero was brought by Masiamah of Madrid from the graduate schools of the Arab Near East which he attended, to free western Europe from the abacus which the Romans as well as the Chinese used for their accounting. Al-Majriti or 'the man from Madrid (or MajrIt)' offers us our first glimpse of the present Spanish capital which was then a hill town in central Spain. MajrIti thus brought easier calculation to western Europe, as well as the astronomical Tables of Khwarizmi, a Persian scientist. Nonetheless although Toledo might have served as the basis for longitude, we now have Greenwich because the Reconquista that was coming did not know how to assimilate this broad aspect of science.
In Sicily another scientist of Spanish family, ash-Sharif al-Idrisi, made splendid world maps which are worth study today. Idrisi reported that several young men from Lisbon in what is now Portugal, discovered the island of 'Antilla' in the XIth century when they ventured out on the Atlantic from their city on the Portuguese coast. They returned, as did the Vikings from Norway and Iceland, and other sailors may have also come from Mali in West Africa - facts that are not included in our generally accepted histories, neither among Westerners nor among Muslims. Instead, we are told that Spanish Muslims were 'Moors', as if they belonged to Africa, and should go back there, or be massacred as Cardinal Cisneros and his cohorts wanted them to be. Thus today the Mexican city of Matamoros opposite Brownsville in Texas, still means 'Moor slayer', and its name has not been changed.
Jinete meaning 'horseman' or 'rider', and zanahoria for 'carrot' are the only words of Berber or African origin generally used in Spanish speech today; the remaining vast borrowed vocabulary is Arabic and Asian, and relates to cultural and scientific matters. Just as silk and paper, and later gunpowder, reached Spain as industrial processes and not mere articles of commerce, travelling 8000 long miles from China. On the other hand they never reached France, a few hundred miles to the northeast, until centuries later. Such was Islamic civilisation in its westernmost outpost.
The manufacture of tiles was important, and reflects Islamic motives. Three distinct types require three distinct methods of manufacture: concrete floor tiles for heavy traffic; ceramic wall tiles which are more delicate in design; and the red roof tiles that make Spanish roofs so distinctive.
Tiles spread their message of man's endless search for God's presence and infinity, as we see today in the beautiful sidewalks of Rio de Janerio and other Latin American cities. Some day, somewhere, some young Muslim art or social science student may compile a survey of these endless patterns, to explain their Islamic content and message for tomorrow's Muslims.
Agriculture benefitted too, bringing Middle Eastern improvements in irrigation and horticulture such as Eastern fruits: oranges, lemons, apricots and eggplants from Persia; sugarcane, bananas and rice from India.
The fall of Granada in 1492 however was not entirely innocent, with the factionalism and in-fighting that took place among the Grenadine nobles, and their love of pleasure and intrigue. The last king Boabdil treated with the Catholic monarchs secretly, yet only received exile for his pains: 'You weep like a woman over what you could not defend as a man', his mother chided him on their last view of that city at what is now called 'The Moor's Last Sigh' as they made their way to exile in Morocco.
The common people of Granada were left behind to bear the brunt of persecution and torture in Inquisitorial jails for the next century and a quarter: skilful artisans and shopkeepers described by Ibn-Khaldun and Ibn Battuta during their visits there, mule drivers and farmers whose womenfolk were rounded up and raped by don Juan de Austria's soldiers, simple, honest folk who did not merit that fate. The Mexicans were subjected to similar treatment at almost the same time, massacred in Cholula and Tenochtitlan by Cortes. Their corn goddess was turned into the Virgin of Guadalupe, a grotesque and pagan transformation that is still in effect. These are incidents which make Islamic Spain and Latin America kins.
Today we do not study Islam to seek out these truths of religion and history. Our youngsters should do so however, once they have been through the schools whose textbooks misinform them about these attitudes; they need to discover our Islamic history and its ideals. Some Islamic facts concern America, especially the Latin part of it where Spanish Muslims were indentured into the building trade and left their handiwork in decoration all the way from Guanajuato in Mexico to Cordoba in Argentina.
In 1528 Bishop Juan Zumarraga ordered the codices and books of the Aztecs to be destroyed, in the same fashion and under the same laws as Cardinal Cisneros had used in Granada when he terrorised that city. Then in 1562 Bishop Diego de Landa did the same with Mayan writings in Yucatan. The Mayas had discovered the Zero just as the Brahmans had in India, and Maslamah of Madrid had taken this concept to Spain about the year 1002. Mayan astronomy was as good as anything in Europe before the invention of the telescope, so that their calendar was more accurate than ours is today. Their observatory still exists in Chichen Itza while another temple in that city displays murals of a battle with seafarers, who have been our boys from Lisbon, or Norsemen who travelled from Vinland.
What colony was founded by these overseas travellers, whether they were Norsemen, West Africans from Mali, or Andalusians from Lisbon, or even from one of Sindbad's possible travels into the Pacific, so we can recover facts that warrant investigation? Let us focus on what we, as Muslims need in order to establish Islam in America. Four regicides or killings of native heads of state complete this picture, and blacken further the Spanish conquest: the last emperor of Mexico, Cuauhtemoc was tortured and then hanged by his legs by Cortes; Nicarao, the last king of Nicaragua who left his name to his country, was literally fed to starving dogs; the Inca Atahualpa was forcibly baptised as the Spanish Muslims were, and then strangled; Caupolican in Chile, was made to sit on a sharpened stake, 'impaled' as they called this gruesome death. These vulgar assassinations were used to terrorise the native Americans, and they were attended by the Spanish clergy, who must have given these barbarous ceremonies their approval.
The conduct has led to the 'don Juan' complex in Europe, and to machismo in America, when Spanish men knew that rebelling against their church could be fatal, so they turned instead to rebel against society, which forgave and admired them. Their offspring in America were the pelado or 'peeled' (of clothes and self-respect) vagrant in Mexico; the chino de la calle or street urchin of Bogota; and the roto or 'broken' hanger-on in Chile. The Spanish state never taught the American colonies the art of governing themselves, while army rule with clerical collusion still prevents these countries from attaining a peaceful civil order.
Several dates need to be remembered for the next few years.
In 1999, seven years from now we should commemorate, and act to rehabilitate the vandalism of Cardinal Cisneros in Granada, when he burned irreplaceable books and documents, and brutalised the matrons and young girls of that city, selling them off as 'slaves'.
2002 if no attention has been paid to the terrorism that began three years earlier.
2009, to mark the 400th anniversary of Philip III's decree of Expulsion of the remaining Spanish Muslims, when several hundred thousand or as many as two million Spanish citizens were forced to leave their country, without counting their children who were often orphaned and their wives made widows and into house servants or worse.
2021, on the anniversary of the proclamation of the Pragmatica which deprived Muslims of their normal civil rights.All these dates should be recalled, and utilised for the purpose of rehabilitating Islam on the Iberian peninsula, and also to repeal any such laws that still prevail in the Americas. We should find common ground with the Mexicans and other Latin Americans, who have suffered those abuses over the past four hundred years. President Menem of Argentina, for instance had to become a Catholic before he could run for president, while Islamic names are forbidden in that country.
The Jews have received redress for the abuses they suffered in that same era, and in a formal ceremony that was witnessed by King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia earlier this year in the new synagogue in Madrid. Muslims will probably require a longer campaign for redress, but with Muslim governments now active in several countries, they should be able to obtain such rehabilitation.
The danger is still real however: the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s under the army and the church which led to the 35-year Franco dictatorship, saw men and women shot without trial, like Garcia Lorca in Granada, and often on mere suspicion, for the simple delusion that others felt they were 'communists'. This ugly war took place in this century of dictatorship. This XXIst century of the West, and the XVth of Islam, must see an improvement in this system that started simultaneously with Columbus' historic voyage to the Caribbean. As I said, the danger is still real, and we should face its reality.
Courtesy: Impact International Copyright � 1992.
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