From: Arab World and Islamic Resources <awair@igc.org>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.arabic
Date: 28 Jul 92 23:55 PDT
Subject: 1492: A Time for Jubilation?
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1471800183:000:13975
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!awair    Jul 28 23:55:00 1992


From: Arab World and Islamic Resources <awair>
Subject: 1492: A Time for Jubilation?



MIDDLE EAST RESOURCES
A Quarterly Newsletter for Social Studies Educators
Vol. II, No. 1-2 (Spring) 1992

Published by AWAIR: 
Arab World and Islamic Resources and School Services
PeaceNet: awair@igc.org

Also available in Spanish.


	1492: A TIME FOR JUBILATION?
		by Audrey Shabbas


	ABSTRACT: The year 1492 marks the beginnings of 
European colonialism in the Americas and 500 years of 
persecution and slaughter of the indigenous peoples here. 
1492 also marks the end of Arab/Islamic civilization in Spain 
and the expulsion of Spain's Muslims and Jews. We can see 
this persecution in the Americas as an extension of the 
Catholic Church's campaign against non-Christians in 
Europe. While we rethink the past 500 years of the history 
of the Americas, we should also look at what happened in 
Europe and how our conception of Western civilization came 
to be created.

---------------------------------------------------------------

A great national debate is growing around the 500 year 
anniversary of Columbus's "discovery" of America. The 
U.S. Congress has established a Columbus Quincentenary 
Jubilee Commission which has selected San Francisco as the 
central site of America's celebration on Columbus Day, 
October 12, 1992. The traditional rationale behind this event 
is exclusively Eurocentric, ignoring the brutal realities of the 
subjugation and colonization of the indigenous peoples 
whom this expedition encountered.

Usually absent from our history books are some important 
facts. When Columbus landed here, he found that the 
Arawak and Taino peoples he encountered were remarkable 
(by European standards) for their gentleness, their 
hospitality, and their belief in sharing.

Some modern theoreticians propose that Columbus called 
these people "Indios" not because he thought he had found 
India, but because he felt them to be "people of God."

"They are gentle and comely people," Columbus  wrote. 
"They are so naive and so free with their possessions that no 
one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you 
ask for something they have, they never say no. To the 
contrary, they offer to share with anyone. . . They willingly 
traded everything they owned. . ."

Columbus, however, did not let his admiration prevent him 
from taking many of these "gentle and comely people" back 
to Spain in chains. "With 50 men," he wrote, "we could 
subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

Columbus and his men came to plunder and they did. He set 
in motion what Bartolome de las Casas, a friar who fought 
for half a century to save the native people from the 
conquistadores, called "the beginning of the bloody trail of 
conquest across the Americas."

Columbus built Puerto de Navidad, in Haitithe first 
European military base in the western hemisphere. From 
here, Columbus's men roamed the islands in gangs looking 
for gold and committed brutalities of every sort, taking 
women and children as slaves for sex and labor.

In 1495, he and his men rounded up some 1,500 Arawak 
women, men and children and selected the fittest 500 to load 
onto ships. Some 200 died en route to Spain; the remaining 
300 were put up for sale by an archdeacon.

There was organized resistance to colonialism, even then.  
Virtually the entire island of Haiti rose in revolt, but the 
people were no match for the weapons, cavalry and dogs of 
the conquistadores. They were quickly defeated. Many 
succumbed to European diseases. And the conquest of the 
islands - Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Antilles, the 
Bahamas - and the slaughter of its people raged on.

De las Casas reports how the Spanish constructed low, wide 
gallows on which they strung up the people, their feet almost 
touching the ground. Then they put burning green wood at 
their feet. Thirteen Arawak people were hanged at each such 
ceremony, he said, in memory of "Our Redeemer, and His 
twelve Apostles."

The Arawak and the Taino people are all but gone. But the 
struggle continues. Today, indigenous peoples are still 
battling for land and self-determination. From Big Mountain 
to Akwesasne to Oka to the Black Hills to Guatemala to the 
Amazon rainforest - and to Palestine, an ocean away - 
peoples are fighting for the right to live on their land, to 
speak their languages, to practice their religions, to govern 
themselves and to live with dignity.

It is not surprising that community activists, including those 
active on behalf of Palestinian rights, are joining with 
Chicanos, Latinos and Native Americans to form Resistance 
500 groups across the country.

At the centerpiece of the official hoopla, replicas of 
Columbus's three ships, having sailed from Spain, will enter 
San Francisco Bay through the Golden Gate on the exact day 
of the 500 year anniversary. Greeting them will be activists 
from all over the western hemisphere who are working to 
advance the struggle of indigenous peoples today.

For those of us involved with the Middle East, there are 
other obvious connections with Columbus's mission. 
Columbus's genocidal acts may be viewed as representing 
the transfer of the Spanish Inquisition to the Americas. It 
was no accident that the year 1492 marked the European 
invasion of the Americas and the end of Arab civilization in 
Spain. And nowhere is the end of that great period seen 
more markedly than in the expulsion of that civilization's 
Muslims and Jews - an  expulsion that began that very year.

In 1469, the precipitous marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella 
joined the Christian forces of Aragon and Castile, and 
signaled the final assault on Granada, the last stronghold of 
Muslim rule in Spain. It was a campaign well planned and 
well financed. The King and Queen even convinced the Pope 
to declare it a "holy war" - a crusade. The Christians 
crushed one center of resistance after another and finally in 
January 1492, after a long siege, the Caliph of Granada, 
Muhammad Abu Abdallah (known in the West as Boabdil) 
surrendered the fortress palace of the Alhambra itself. 
Observing that surrender was a man who would make 
history late that same year, Christopher Columbus.

Although the terms of surrender looked good on paper, later 
that year the Inquisition under Ferdinand and Isabella 
brought expulsion orders to the Jews and the threat of forced 
conversion to the Muslims, who had, according to the 
agreement, until the beginning of 1495 (three years) to 
decide between living under Christian rule and exile.  In 
effect, they had to choose between conversion, death or 
exile. Spanish treasury records now show that Columbus 
found financing for his voyages - not from the sale of 
Isabella's jewels as some romanticized accounts tell, nor 
with the monies saved from "no longer having to fight the 
Muslims" (a kind of peace dividend) as other accounts will 
offer - but with the revenue from the confiscated properties 
of Muslims and Jews. 

Torture was used to force conversion to Christianity and to 
hasten the expulsions. After the Inquisitor General arrived, 
even those who had converted - "moriscos" (converted 
Muslims) and "marranos" (converted Jews) - were expelled 
(or fled to the "New World") bringing the total number to no 
less than 3 million banished over the next three centuries.

The famous Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, himself 
from Granada, said of this expulsion: "It was a disastrous 
event, even though they say the opposite in schools. An 
admirable civilization and a poetry, architecture and delicacy 
unique in the world - all were lost. . ."

It is appropriate, therefore, while rethinking the past 500 
years of the history of the Americas, that we also look at 
what happened in Europe and what has resulted from 
narrow-minded Eurocentrism -  "European History."

When studying Europe's Middle Ages why is it that we 
never include Spain  (at least not until after the 
"reconquest")?  Our libraries abound with books on the 
Middle Ages, but try to find in any of them a single word 
about daily life and customs in Spain. It is as if later 
historians, in order to justify a uniquely "European history," 
ignored the fact that a vibrant and brilliant civilization created 
by the "Others" - by Arabs, by Muslims, by Jews, by 
brown and black people - not only existed in Europe, but 
without whose contributions the region could not have 
become what it did. When we talk about "EuropeUs" 
Renaissance we never think of its beginnings in Spain 
several centuries before it reached Italy. It is as if we lopped 
off 1000 years of history - or at least amputated it from 
Europe. Nothing could be further from the truth.

How is it that Europe invented an "eternal West" unique 
since the moment of its origin? And why was this arbitrary 
and mythic construct created with an equally artificial and 
mythic Other (the "Orient")? Samir Amin and Martin 
Bernal,1  two historians who have analyzed the creation of 
this Eurocentric vision, say that the well-known version of 
"Western" history - a progression from ancient Greece to 
Rome to feudal Christian Europe to capitalist Europe - 
conspicuously omits the Arab and African roots of 
"Western" civilization. Elementary school books and popular 
opinion are as much or maybe more important in the creation 
and diffusion of this construct as the most erudite theses 
developed to justify the "ancestry" of European culture and 
civilization.

How is it that the two thousand odd years separating Greek 
antiquity from the European Renaissance are treated as a 
long and hazy period of transition when no one is able to go 
beyond ancient Greek thought? Christianity, which is 
established and conquers Europe during this transition, 
appears at first as a not very philosophical form of ethics, 
entangled for a long time in dogmatic quarrels hardly 
conducive to the development of the mind. Indeed, rational 
throught, scientific investigations, intellectual pursuits - all 
were thought to be in conflict with theology. Europe outside 
of Spain continued with these limitations until, with the 
development of scholasticism in the the later Middle Ages, it 
assimilated the newly rediscovered Artistotelianism. With the 
Renaissance and Reformation, Christianity freed itself, 
liberating civil society from the monopoly of religion over 
thought. Arab/Islamic philosophy is treated in this account as 
if it had no other function than to transmit the Greek heritage 
to the Renaissance world. Moreover, Islam in this 
Eurocentric vision could not have gone beyond the Hellenic 
heritage, even if it had attempted to do so.

The construct in question is entirely mythic. Martin Bernal 
demonstrates this by retracing the history of what he calls the 
"fabrication of Ancient Greece." Fabricated was the notion 
that the Greeks were European. Bernal recalls that the 
ancient Greeks were quite conscious of their belonging to the 
cultural area of the ancient Orient. Not only did they 
acknowledge what they learned from the Egyptians and 
Phoenicians, they also did NOT see themselves as "anti-
Orient," which Eurocentrism portrays them as being. On the 
contrary, the Greeks claimed they had Egyptian ancestors, 
perhaps mythical, but that is beside the point. Bernal shows 
that nineteenth century "Hellenomania" was inspired by the 
racism of the Romantic movement, whose architects were 
moreover often the same people whom Edward Said2 cites 
as the creators of Orientalism. Bernal goes on to discuss 
how this impulse led to the removal of ancient Greece and 
Christianity from their Middle Eastern context - annexing 
them arbitrarily to Europe - while Amin concurs and 
explains the corollary creation of the Arab/the Muslim/the 
African as eternally Other.

The Romanticists who constructed this mythic version of 
European history ignored the primary source documents that 
told them otherwise. Thomas Aquinas, for one, had credited 
Ibn Rushd (known in the West as Averroes) with arming 
him with the arguments for dispelling the notion that rational 
thought and scientific investigation were the enemies of 
religion.3 Ibn Rushd had been expressing the views that 
enabled Islamic civilization to flourish - namely that in Islam 
there was no such conflict between faith and reason, leading 
Arab scholars to spirited inquiriers into all fields. 

But given the Eurocentric view of history, rethinking the 
history of the lands around the Mediterranean may be as 
disturbing to those who hold dearly to these myths as will be 
the rethinking of the history of the Americas. The two 
debates cannot be separated, for their context is the same, 
and only with the understanding of how this unique "eternal 
West" was created can we come to remove the "us" and 
"them" and understand the truth of our History.



1 Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review 
Press, 1989). Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic 
Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ: 
Rutgers University Press, 1987).

2 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 
1978).

3 Concurrently, this debate was also going on within Judaism 
thanks to another son of Muslim Spain, Musa Ibn Maimun (known 
in the West as Maimonides). Born in Granada and as a contemporary 
of Ibn Rushd, Ibn Maimun made the same arguments to his fellow 
Jews, sparking what became known as the "Maimonidean 
Controversy."

Copyright 1992 by Audrey Shabbas
Permission granted to reproduce or distribute without changes
or additions. Reproduction or distribution may be in either 
mechanical or electronic form, provided that this copyright
statement is included.

All of the works cited are available from AWAIR. To receive 
a catalogue, write to:
AWAIR: Arab World And Islamic Resources and School 
Services
2095 Rose Street, Suite 4
Berkeley, CA  94709
USA

E-mail requests can be sent to awair@igc.org

Newsgroups: soc.culture.arabic