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ABSTRACT
This article places Columbus’s travels to the New World within a much older history of eight centuries of Muslim/Moor presence on the Iberian Peninsula. It argues that the Orientalist logics underlining the creation of the ‘New World Indian’ have a long history interpellated through figures of the Moors and other Africans whom Europeans knew for centuries before they encountered the Indigenous peoples of the ‘New World.’ This article argues for the need to bring together seemingly discrepant figures, spatialities, and temporalities in order to re/examine what we know and have yet to learn about entanglements of colonialism, capitalism, race, caste, gender, sexuality, and other social formations. Such a reading of the figure not only brings to fore unexamined relationalities but also demands that we think critically and concretely about questions of our complicity in upholding different systems of violence.
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful to Dia Da Costa and Alexandre Da Costa for giving my voice and article a space in this special issue. Throughout this process, they have shown me so much generosity by sharing their ideas, critiques, and laughter with me. Thank you. I remain very grateful.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Shaista Patel is an Assistant Professor of Critical Muslim Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, San Diego. She is an affiliate faculty in the Critical Gender Studies programme. Her work explores the intersections between white settler colonialism, imperialism, casteism, Islamophobia, and anti-Blackness in North America and South Asia.
Notes
1. These could be leaves instead of feathers. It is difficult to tell for certain given the quality of the image.
2. Bitters bottles, for example, were often made in shape of ‘Indian Queens’ with some variations according to the company. For more on these glass bottles, see Meyer (Citation2012). I also found out that on 3 February 1893, a newspaper, St. Paul Daily Globe in Minnesota drew the last Hawaiian Queen, Liliuokalani with feathers in her hair, afro-textured hair, thick lips, bare feet etc. This wasn’t the only newspaper where the Queen of Hawai’i was drawn as such. See https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn90059522/1893-02-03/ed-1/seq-1/ for the drawing.
3. In their explanation of resistance to the term ‘Indian,’ Cannon and Sunseri (Citation2011, p. xvi) write: ‘Indigenous people became Indians under a legal classification that did not distinguish between their linguistic and cultural differences, or the multiplicity of Indigenous nations at the time.’ Also see Firsting and Lasting, in which Jean O’Brien (Citation2010), a White Earth Ojibwe scholar of history, examines the strategies through which Indigenous peoples of New England were made into ‘Indians’ as a mode of being written out of existence in various white settler narratives.
4. Also see articles by Rachmi Diyah Larasati, and Sourayan Mookerjea in this issue.
5. I would like to point out that Blackamoors were not always Muslim-identified Black people. They caught the imagination of Medieval European artists and are everywhere in cultural texts. It is worth noting that about 10–15 percent of enslaved Africans brought to the ‘New World’ were Muslims.
6. I use the term ‘Europe’ here even though the idea of Europe had yet to form in the period under discussion. As several scholars of Europe have argued, there was no idea of a homogenous Europe until at least 1700. Even into the early eighteenth century only a minority of elite Europeans used the term to self-identify. According to historian Peter Burke (Citation1980, p. 25), ‘if the first context in which people became aware of themselves as Europeans was that of being invaded by other cultures, the second was that of invading other cultures, in other words discovery and exploration.’ I try to hold onto the idea of Europe in this article without reproducing it as a ‘meta Europe,’ as naturally occurring, and without intending to relay it as more than an unstable, incoherent formation that was in the process of becoming a great colonial and imperial power in the time period of concern to this article.
7. In referencing eight centuries of Muslim presence in medieval and early modern Europe, I am not invested in recuperating the figure of the Moor as a victim of Christian Europe. In fact, Tariq ibn Ziyad came to Spain as commander of the Umayyad Caliphate, and thus, as an invader. Without trying to claim any homogeneity or innocence for Muslims of Spain, all I want to highlight is the complexity and multiplicity of Europe’s Others and point out an important set of prior encounters and relations that preceded the ‘Discovery’ (read invasion) of the Americas.
8. I am primarily writing to brown South Asian and Arab Muslims here. Given my positionality, I cannot instruct Black Muslims on attending to conquest in their movements against anti-Blackness and Islamophobia especially when we brown Muslims have often, more than often, been anti-Black and exclusionary in how we have been organizing for justice for ourselves. To read on centreing of conquest in Black studies and movements, please see Tiffany Lethabo King’s (Citation2016) brilliant article called ‘New World Grammars.’
9. L.P. Harvey (Citation2005, chapter 1) draws attention to the fact that the term ‘Morisco’ is not one that Muslims used for themselves. It was a term identifying Muslim converts in the sixteenth century, a sub-Christian identity with which Muslims did not agree. Harvey notes that the term came into common use only after 1550. Until then, the more common term for converts was nuevos cristianos convertidos de moros (new converts from Moors).
10. I use the term ‘conquest’ with caution here. On one hand words such as ‘contact’ are often used to describe the encounters between Indigenous peoples and Columbus in 1492, and it sanitizes the bloody colonial violence that began in 1492. On the other, a term such as conquest implies that the project of colonialism has been successful. However, Indigenous people are here, they are resilient, and thriving and that indicates that colonialism has been a failed project. I still use the term ‘conquest’ to indicate that the encounter was a violent one and the beginning of both, colonial violence and also Indigenous peoples’ resistance to that violence.
11. There is no singular ‘golden age of Islam’ as historians also claim that the Abbasid period from 8 to 13th centuries with its primary roots in modern day Baghdad, Iraq, was also a period of extraordinary building of the Muslim Civilization. Similarly, Fatimid Caliphate rule from 10 to 12 centuries in North Africa also marked a remarkable phase of Muslim rule in the medieval era.
12. As Unangax feminist scholar Eve Tuck reminded me in personal communication, no genocide or expulsion is ever complete. Such accounts often do not take into account the agency of the colonized, of the targeted people. For example, Karoline P. Cook (Citation2016) explains how Moriscos found ways to travel and settle in the Americas in 16th and 17th centuries despite the Spanish Crown’s strict rules allowing only those who could prove they had been Catholic for at least three generations. So I reference Harvey here only to emphasize the massive scale of the expulsion rather than to assert, as he does, that the expulsion of Muslims from Spain was indeed ever total or complete.
13. Matar (Citation1999) notes that Muslims were demonized because they were feared as a supreme political and military power, especially the Ottomans, and it was because of this fear rather than any empirical evidence that they were demonized. I am very critical of the civilizational (religious, political, and socio-economic) superiority that Matar seems to grant to Muslims over the Indigenous peoples of Americas. While he does understand that the ‘Indian’ was demonized, his critique is imbued with the colonial logic that native peoples of the ‘New World’ were indeed defeatable, a morally weak, and conquerable people, unlike the Muslims.
14. See Amrita Sen’s (Citation2012) powerful comparative analysis of the two queens. Narsinga was part of the casteist Hindu and staunchly anti-Muslim empire of Vijayanagara (fourteenth to seventeenth centuries) located in present-day South India. Its capital sat in the modern day state of Karnataka.
15. It is equally important to remind ourselves, as Seth does, that the self-Other is a particular ‘grammatical feature of colonial representations’ (p. 22). Race was not available to thought in medieval Europe in the same way as we understand it today, and I have been careful to not assert a trans-historicity of race. I only try to make the very small claim that religious difference mattered and as Arjana (Citation2014) has argued, it often took form of bodily difference.