From: cscheiner@IGC.ORG (Charles Scheiner)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.mexican
Subject: 1492: A Time for Jubilation?
Date: 30 Jul 92 19:50:46 GMT
Organization: IGC


/* Written 11:55 pm  Jul 28, 1992 by awair in cdp:mideast.genera */
/* ---------- "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 Haiti - the 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