From: Charles Scheiner Date: 29 Jul 92 19:22 PDT Subject: 1492: A Time for Jubilation? Message-ID: <1563600176@igc.org> /* Written 11:55 pm Jul 28, 1992 by awair in cdp:mideast.genera */ /* ---------- "1492: A Time for Jubilation?" ---------- */ From: Arab World and Islamic Resources 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