The Empire of Necessity (26 page)

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Back in Spanish America, the viceroy of Peru, upon learning of the loss of the
San Juan Nepomuceno
, used the case to make a suggestion that colonial officials had been making for nearly three centuries: he urged the Crown to prohibit the importation of West African Muslims to the Americas. Slaves who followed the teaching of Mohammed “spread very perverse ideas among their own kind,” he said, meaning Africans in general.

“And there are so many of them in this realm.”
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19

MOHAMMED’S CURSED SECT

The viceroy didn’t say what he thought those “perverse ideas” were. Rarely did Spanish bureaucrats and Catholic theologians go into details when they discussed the problem of Muslims in America. They didn’t have to. Islam was too familiar, too deeply pressed into the very identity of the Spanish people, to need explaining. Everybody knew what they were talking about when they were talking about Islam. The long, long fight against the religion in Europe gave rise to many of the beliefs that Spaniards took with them when they crossed the ocean to found their empire in America, and it played a fundamental role in shaping the institution, slavery, that made that empire possible.

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Spaniards called their war against Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula, starting in 722 and ending in 1492, the
reconquista
, or reconquest. The word is deceptive for it implies a return to the old and a restoration of what was. The fact is, prior to the arrival of Islam, Iberia was a fractious place of Visigoth wretchedness on the margins of Christendom. Al-Andalus, as Arab and Berber Muslims called the land, was the true restoration, returning a magnificence that had been absent since the time of the Romans. The peninsula, especially under the caliphate of Córdoba, became a center of law, science, architecture, engineering, and literature—even Christians called its gardened, fountained, lit, and learned capital, the city of Córdoba, the world’s “brilliant ornament.” The
reconquista
created something new entirely: the Catholic kingdoms of Spain and Portugal.

It is easy to think of the
reconquista
as a bloody clash of civilizations, the western front of a wider struggle between a besieged Christian Europe and an expansionist Islam. A large part of the God-sanctioned absolutism we associate with medieval Catholicism and Islam was forged during this conflict. Yet 770 years is a long time, throughout which there were sustained periods of peace. Even during the war’s most violent phases, Catholics and Muslims lived among each other, trading goods and establishing refuges of hospitality. Iberia during these eight centuries was a crucible where each of the world’s three major one-God religions—Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism—shaped the others in ways subtle and obvious.

Anyone who travels today through modern Spain can see evidence of the obvious. It’s there in the cool, clean mosquelike interiors of Catholic churches and of synagogues. It’s present in the food, of course, and in the Spanish language. The farther back in time one goes reading Spanish the more cursive the calligraphy, until by the sixteenth century it is absolutely arabesque, its flourishes and curlicues binding the two bookish cultures together. The syntax and structure of Spanish derives from Latin. But hundreds of common words come from al-Andalus, many used to describe the most primal experiences of what it means to be human and live together in a society: of pleasure and food, law and authority, trade and taxes, and will, fate, and acceptance. As such, they have something to do with this story. That is, they have something to do with slavery.

Azúcar
means sugar in Spanish and comes from the Arabic
sukkar
. Muslims introduced the sweetener to Europe and had begun to plant it in Spain in the late thirteenth century. The Portuguese and Spaniards took the crop first to the Atlantic islands, including the Azores and Madeira, and then to the plantations of the New World, which needed large numbers of slaves for cutting the cane and grinding the stalks into juice. If the West Africans on the
Neptune
had made it to the Caribbean, that’s most likely what they would have been put to work doing. The Arabic-derived
aduana
means customs, while
alcabala
and
almojarifazgo
refer to taxes, words that Spaniards used in America to regulate the importation and sale of Africans, among other items.
Azotar
, to whip, also comes from Arabic and describes a common punishment Catholic and Islamic masters inflicted on slaves.
Ahorrar
—to accumulate wealth—and
ahorrarse
—to save one’s self, including by saving enough money to purchase one’s freedom—come from the Arabic words
hurr
, which signifies free, and
harra
, which means to liberate or emancipate oneself from servitude, to be free.
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Military conquests and pirate raids were the chief sources of slaves for Christians and Muslims alike. Yet before being considered true slaves, prisoners were often considered hostages, or
rehenes—
from the Arabic
raha’in
, meaning captives used as pledges or security. It was common for Catholics to ransom Arabs or Berbers, either to obtain gold or black slaves or to free Christian ones. Muslims did the same to free Arabs and Berbers taken by Catholics.
Mulato
, a Spanish word referring to a person of mixed European and African race, is related to the Arabic
mulo
, or mule, as well as
muxālatah
, which means a “mixture of things or people of diverse kinds,” often of an illicit or forbidden nature. The obsolete
mujalata
meant business dealings between Muslims and non-Muslims, including slave trading.
²

Beyond wealth, power, and social standing, Arabic loan words conjure up a fatalism associated with slave societies, feelings of destiny, doom, and luck—resignation, or not, to one’s place in society.
Mezquino
means “wretched,” a word often used to refer to enslaved peoples. The origin of
afán
, which in Spanish means “zeal” or “desire,” is more difficult to trace. According to one lexicographer, it might derive from Arabic words signifying grief or worry. It could also mean mystical extinction, a spiritual experience like what Mori, Babo, and their other Muslim companions might have felt as they began their Andean ascent at the beginning of Ramadan
. Ojalá
and
oxalá
are popular Spanish and Portuguese expressions. They originate from the Arabic
inshallah
and mean “if God wills.”
³

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If centuries of fighting and living together created a shared culture—including a shared culture of slavery—it also hardened divisions, deepened fault lines, and bred fundamentalism. There’s no one instance that can be singled out as a turning point, a moment when tolerance, at least in practice, gave way to absolutism. The Catholic
reconquista
of Iberia had long been considered a religious war, since it was fought between people of two different faiths. And after years of bloodshed, religious theorists of both the crusade and the jihad elaborated ever more complex theories of “just war” and slavery, sanctioning the captivity of nonbelievers while forbidding the enslavement of the faithful.

But, importantly, Catholic theologians didn’t argue that the goal of their
guerra buena—
good war—was the conversion of Muslims. Rather, they legitimated the
reconquista
as a just retaking of territory rightfully Christian (since the Visigoths had accepted Christ before the Arabs arrived).

The turn to empire was different. In 1492, the reconquest ended and the conquest began. In January, Catholic soldiers drove Muslims out of Granada, Europe’s last Islamic stronghold. In April, Christopher Columbus sailed to America, shortly followed by ships full of warriors who imagined themselves extending a fight that had begun in Europe. “With the completion of the conquest of the Moors, which lasted more than eight hundred years,” wrote one chronicler in 1552, “the conquest of the Indians began.”
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Catholic theologians, however, couldn’t justify waging war on Native Americans the same way they justified doing so on Muslims in Iberia, because Spain—or Portugal, in the case of Brazil—couldn’t invoke a historical claim to the land. And the fact that Native Americans, unlike Muslims, had never “known” Christ and therefore had never had the opportunity to reject him took away another pretext to subjugate them. For Spain, these facts posed, as one historian writes, a “legal and moral problem of enormous proportions,” for other European empires were challenging Iberia’s exclusive dominion over the Americas (“I wish someone would show me the clause in Adam’s will that disinherits me,” the Catholic king of France reportedly said when he heard that the pope had given the New World to the Spaniards and Portuguese).
⁴

Spain began to advance a series of religious arguments to make its case, the fine points of which were dense but the thrust of which was clear: its monopoly right to America was defended as a spiritual mission to save Native American souls. In order for the justification to work, America had to be kept pure. The Inquisition worked to purge native heresies (including those practices that reminded Spaniards of Muslim rites) while royal officials banned Jews, Jewish converts to Christianity, Muslims, and Muslim converts (who numbered as many as 400,000 people in 1609, almost 5 percent of Spain’s total population) from settling in the Americas.
⁵

One of the first royal prohibitions of this kind was issued as early as 1501, less than a decade after Columbus set foot on Hispaniola. The Crown instructed its new governor of the Americas to carry out the “conversion of the Indians to our holy Catholic faith” with “great care”:

If you find persons suspect in matters of the faith present during the said conversion, it could create an impediment. Do not give consent or allow Muslims or Jews, heretics, anyone reconciled by the Inquisition, or persons newly converted to our Faith to pass, unless they are black slaves.
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Unless they are black slaves. There lay the problem, for slavery was the back door through which Islam came to America. Of the more than 123,000 slaves brought to the Americas between 1501 and 1575, over 100,000 were from the area surrounding the Senegal and Gambia Rivers. A majority were Wolof, Fulani, Walo, Mandinkas, or other groups found in West Africa. Which meant they included Muslims.

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Brought by Arab and Berber merchants and clerics, Islam had spread among the people below the Sahara hundreds of years before the first slave ship sailed to America. It created a strange kind of continuity, for even as Iberian Catholics were purifying Europe of Islam, they began sailing to West Africa and finding “Mohammed’s cursed sect” spread far and wide among its black-skinned peoples. “Jalofofs, Fulos, and Mandingas,” in particular, wrote a Spanish priest in the late 1500s, were “infected with the wicked fungus of Mohammed” and “professed the false doctrine of the Antichrist.”

Belief in the “reality of Allah” and his “inaccessible mystery,” as the Qur’an writes, took diverse forms in West Africa. On one end of the spectrum was a tolerant strand that existed peacefully with animists, even combining pre-Islamic practices with Islamic rites like divination and sorcery, that in theory should have been forbidden by qur’anic law. In this sense, Islam in West Africa, especially in rural areas, looked much like the fusion of Catholic saints and Native American gods that took root in much of Spanish America. The historian Lansiné Kapa writes that West African ancestor worship could exist side by side with Islamic monotheism, with “lesser spirits” believed to derive their power from Allah. On the other end was a jihadist orthodoxy that waged war on both nonbelievers and apostates.
⁷

In both cases, West African Islam was a creed with a strong egalitarian ethos and sense of justice. Its menace was that it challenged Catholicism on its own terms, with a universal monotheism and belief in a mysterious, unseeable, and eternal god.
*
Catholics had recognized the threat in Iberia, where its theologians often depicted Islam as a profane plagiarizer, perverting the true Church’s rituals, vestments, and beliefs (like celebrating its weekly holy day on Friday—
viernes
, in Spanish
—
rather than Sunday, even though, as one Catholic priest wrote, “we know that Venus was a shameless whore”).
⁸

And they recognized the threat in West Africa. Speaking of black Muslims along the Gambia River system, a sixteenth-century Portuguese trader reported that their clerics “count months as we do.” Like Catholicism, West African Islam was a literate religion. They “write in bound books,” he continued, in which “they tell many lies.” Like Catholics, they had a clergy, but their “heathen priests go about looking thin and worn out by their abstinences, their fasts and their dieting, since they will not eat flesh of a creature killed by a person who is not one of them.” Their clerics wore robes, like Catholic priests, “with large black and white hats.” And they practiced rites similar to the Holy Mass: “They make their ritual prayers with the faces turned towards the East, and before doing this, first wash their nether parts and then their face. They recite their prayers all together, in a high voice noisily, like a group of clerics in choir, and at the end they finish with ‘Ala, Arabi.’” And “black ears … believe the lies.”
⁹

Yet unlike the Latin Catholic Mass, the Word in West Africa wasn’t just received. It was discussed in language the faithful could understand. Literacy and faith were intertwined. One eyewitness account written in 1608 by a Jesuit describes Mandinka Muslims establishing mosques and schools through West Africa where “they teach reading and writing in the Arabic script.” Books were written out and bound in cities like Gao and Timbuktu or arrived from northern Africa and Arabia, brought by “trading moors,” and included not just Qur’ans and qur’anic commentaries but scientific treatises and Arabic language versions of the Psalm of David, the Book of Isaiah, and the Pentateuch of Moses. By the late seventeenth century, Timbo, in the northern highlands of Guinea with a population of 10,000, was a respected center of learning. “Considerable attention,” wrote one American observer, “is devoted to the acquirements of knowledge,” which included law, arithmetic, astronomy, and languages. It was mostly men who had the privilege of literacy, but not always. A slaver traveling through the region said that he often had seen elderly women “at sunset reading the Koran.” Other travelers reported seeing girls learning to read.
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