New World Moors

In October 2005, more than five hundred years after Granada fell and America was conquered, and almost four hundred years since the order was given to expel the Moriscos from Spain, the New York Times published an intriguing article about the number of Chicanos who undergo DNA testing to find out whether they might have Jewish ancestry. It turns out that 10 percent of those who take the test show “Semitic ancestry strongly suggesting a Jewish background.”1 These would be the crypto-Jews (commonly known, as we saw in chapter 1, by the originally pejorative label Marranos), living in disguise in the relative safety of the outer edges of the Spanish Empire for centuries. Upon unearthing their buried roots, many Marranos revert—not convert—to their ancestors’ faith. Leaving alone the astounding powers of DNA testing and what it can do to bring down nefarious myths about race2 or to help people seek membership privileges (such as benefits to people of Native American descent, or citizenship in Israel on the basis of a Jewish gene),3 what particularly struck me was a passing note in the article that the results of some people tested turn out to “suggest North African Muslim ancestry.” For a Hispanic to rediscover his or her Jewish heritage would make some sense, given that the Jews are now successfully assimilated in the United States and most Western societies, and it might be a matter of pride to associate oneself with this once-marginalized community. Many Hispanics in the United States are, in some ways, what the Jews used to be, and reclaiming one’s Jewish heritage might strike a blow at the essentialist ideologies of Anglo-Saxon supremacists.4 So imagine the surprise that must hit those who find out that they are not Jews but North African Muslims, the Moors of old! The year 2005 was certainly not a good time to find out that one is Muslim—at least not in post-9/11 America.

Yet, despite this prevailing anti-Muslim climate, Hispanics—and not just Chicanos—have been discovering Islam and, like their peers in the African American community, converting, or reverting, in the last few years. Indeed, the conversion story of Malcolm X has almost become a parable or template for all minorities not just in the United States but also, increasingly, in Europe, where, in a remarkable historical twist, Arab prisoners are inspired by Malcolm X’s redemption saga. Quite a few African Americans and Latinos have been influenced by Islam to change their ways and find a higher calling in the message of social justice that Islam conveys. Less than six weeks after 9/11, the New York Times reported an expert’s opinion that around 25,000 people in America convert to Islam every single year, the vast majority of whom are African American.5 Latinos convert in fewer numbers, but many, the paper reported in another article, “are drawn to Islam as a way of reaching back to what they consider their true culture, the world of Islamic Spain that existed for more than 700 years after the first Muslim conquests in the eighth century.”6

Hispanics’ identification with Islam and Arab culture is not a recent phenomenon. As far back as 1959, Fidel Castro commented that Latin Americans “have lighter or darker skin. Lighter skin implies descent from Spaniards who themselves were colonized by the Moors that came from Africa. Those who are more or less dark-skinned came directly from Africa. Moreover, nobody can consider himself as being of pure, much less superior race.”7 Not only that, but, according to Hisham Aidi, one of the most astute observers of the dynamic cultural exchanges between the West’s minorities, Arab and Islamic cultures, and the African American tradition, José Padilla (found guilty in 2007 of conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism, after a Kafkaesque judicial process); Hiram Torres, a bright Yale student who dropped college for Pakistan; and other Latinos were part of a large contingent of African American and Latino Muslims volunteering to fight for Muslim causes in Bosnia, Chechnya, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. Even the firebrand leader of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, started urging his fellow Venezuelans to “return to their Arab roots.”8 Such statements not only prove that Spain’s methodical attempts to cleanse its newly acquired territories from Moorish presence have failed, but they also reveal that the cultural heirs to Spain in the New World are embracing their Moorish heritage as a badge of honor.

It may be tempting, and to some extent not untrue, to say that the reasons for such identifications and conversions are the solid sense of belonging, meaningful social solidarities, and the fulfilling rituals of faith that Islam provides to alienated people from all races and backgrounds. There is also the element of reconnecting with one’s origins in the Old World, whether such origins are real or imagined. All this is fairly obvious, but what interested me as I read about Hispanics’ DNA testing and reverting/ converting is their attempt to resist the dominant Anglo-Protestant ideology that has kept them in the margins, much as Muslims and Arabs in Europe resist their confinement in social ghettos. For Chicanos or Hispanics to find out that they are Jewish or even Muslim is to connect with more than a race, for such vital affiliations make them part of glorious legacies, ones that included both a great degree of cultural achievement and a history of heroic resistance to disenfranchisement, systematic marginalization, and the constant threat of expulsion. Connecting with one’s Moorish or Jewish heritage is to be united with kindred spirits who endured and survived discriminations of the worst sort because they found themselves in a world not of their making. For Jews and Muslims share more than common religious rituals or mutual hatred born of struggles over land and politics; they also share the history of being second-class citizens in Europe.

The post-Andalusian condition that emerged out of the Reconquista—the long process whereby the Iberian Peninsula was gradually reconquered from Muslims, was shaped and defined by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, and then mutated over time into a variety of ideologies and idioms—has been adept at both producing Otherness and, paradoxically, punishing the Other for not being the Same. As I suggested earlier, this almost-willed ambivalence that defines the West’s liberal project is worth contemplating, if only in passing, because one might argue that this unresolved ambiguity—the call to be the same and different at the same time—is at the heart of the global crisis today. Minorities serve the vital political function of uniting nations, but to identify a minority group is also to launch a crusade to assimilate it into the mainstream, to make it an undifferentiated mass. As imperfect and unfinished as the project was, Spain depended on its war against Islam, on the conversion of the defeated Moors, and finally on the expulsion of Jews and Moriscos to create and consolidate a sense of its identity, an element that was crucial in its early expansionist ventures.

I suggest that Hispanics today are the Anglos’ Moors, just as the Jews were Europe’s Muslims for much of that continent’s history. I am not in any way suggesting that these situations are exact mirrors of each other or that the situation of the Moors in late-medieval and early-modern Spain is similar to that of minorities in other places and later centuries. Not only are the historical conditions vastly different, but also history, in its details, never repeats itself. The criteria for national membership in sixteenth-century Spain are not those of people living in twenty-first-century secular Western states. By drawing the analogy between Moors and non-Muslim minorities in modern history, I am mostly interested in the paradigm: the categories that determine the main culture and its outsiders, and how social groups are placed in relation to dominant national ideologies. It is the political, social, and above all symbolic function of the Moor—Europe’s quintessential Other and its perennial outsider—in the modern West that I find consistent throughout modern history. If, as John V. Tolan concludes in his study of the image of Islam in medieval Europe, the “Saracen (and more generally the non-Christian, be he Jew or Cathar or, in the centuries that followed, an African animist or an Inca priest) was different, was inferior, precisely because he refused the universal message of Christianity,”9 the Moor is now anyone who remains outside the Western economic, cultural, and political consensus. The Moors are those not sufficiently assimilated into Western societies, those who still cling tenaciously to their ancestral ways and languages.

Christianity may have been transmuted into more secular conceptions of national identity, and the Saracens, or Moors, may have acquired new characteristics over the centuries, but the paradigm defining proper membership in a community has remained remarkably consistent. Resistance to national languages, racially coded concepts of nationalism, and immigration policies that do not take into account unfair global economic policies turn Muslim and Hispanic immigrants and other minorities into vulnerable communities in Western liberal societies. The criteria for exclusion are vastly different in our era of globalization and multicultural tensions than they were for Moors and Moriscos under Spanish rule in earlier centuries, but the value of minority groups as sacrificial elements in a nation’s quest for national unity has retained much of its power. A nation’s unifying principles may change, thereby shifting the status of minority to any entity that remains outside of the new mainstream consensus, but the vital function of minorities in creating a sense of identity and solidifying the dominant regime has remained essentially unchanged since Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand consciously tied their hold on power and the strength of their emerging nation to the unity of faith.

It may be well to recall that the Moor was not the only scapegoat against whom Castile tried to unify a number of independent kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula and thereby to create the sense of national identity crucial to empire building and the conquest of the newly discovered continent of North America. Moorishness, as Renaissance Europe and Othello make clear, remained an indeterminate category, one defined solely by its difference from the nascent concept of European identity. Emily Bartels explains:

While blackness and Mohammedism were stereotyped as evil, Renaissance representations of the Moor were vague, varied, inconsistent, and contradictory. As critics have established, the term “Moor” was used interchangeably with such similarly ambiguous terms as “African,” “Ethiopian,” “Negro,” and even “Indian” to designate a figure from different parts or the whole of Africa (or beyond) who was either black or Moslem, neither, or both. To complicate the vision further, the Moor was characterized alternately and sometimes simultaneously in contradictory extremes, as noble or monstrous, civil or savage.10

Michael Neill, echoing Bartels’s description, elaborates by saying that

insofar as [the term Moor] was a term of racial description it could refer quite specifically to the Berber-Arab people of the part of North Africa then rather vaguely denominated as “Morocco,” “Mauritania,” or “Barbary”; or it could be used to embrace the inhabitants of the whole North African littoral; or it might be extended to refer to Africans generally (whether “white,” “black,” or tawny Moors); or by an even more promiscuous extension, it might be applied (like “Indian”) to almost any darker-skinned peoples—even, on occasion, those of the New World. Consequently when Marlowe’s Valdes refers to the supine obedience of “Indian Moores” to “their Spanish Lords” (Faustus, 1.1.148), it is usually assumed that the two terms are simply mutually intensifying synonyms, and that the magician means something like “dusky New World natives.” But Moor could often be deployed (in a fashion perhaps inflected, even for the English, by memories of the Spanish Reconquista) as a religious category. Thus Muslims on the Indian subcontinent were habitually called “Moors,” and the same term is used in East India Company literature to describe the Muslim inhabitants of Southeast Asia, whether they be Arab or Indian traders, or indigenous Malays. So Valdes’s “Indian Moores” could equally well be Muslims from the Spanish-controlled Portuguese East Indies. In such contexts it is simply impossible to be sure whether Moor is a description of color or religion or some vague amalgam of the two, and in the intoxicated exoticism of Marlovian geography, such discriminations hardly matter.11

Both Bartels and Neill note that the Moor category extended to Asians. In his The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, & Discoveries of the English Nation (1589), Richard Hakluyt reported the account of an anonymous Portuguese adventurer who had gone to China and found Moors so far removed from their origins that they had only a rudimentary notion of their belief: “They could say nothing else but Mahomet, my father was a Moore, and I am a Moore, with some other wordes of their Alcoran, wherewithal, in abstinence from swines flesh, they live until the divel take them all.”12 Describing the people he had met in China, the Dutch traveler Jan Huyghen van Linschoten wrote, in his Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies (1598), that “those that dwell on the Sea side . . . are a people of a brownish colour, like the white Moores in Africa and Barbaria, and part of the Spaniards, but those that dwell within the land, are for color like Netherlanders & high Dutches.”13 Because of the interaction between Muslims from the Philippines (later called Moros by Spanish colonialists) and the Hui Chinese in the Shandong Province in the fifteenth century, the contemporary scholar Mansur Xu Xianiong was told by a Chinese Communist official in 1989 that he was a Moor!14

As is obvious in chapter 1, and indeed through much of this book, the Moor served as a foil for an emerging European consciousness. Patricia Seed has noted that the term Europe was rarely used before the fifteenth century, proving that the impetus for a European identity, traversed as it was by growing national singularities, was expansionism and colonialism.15 Around the time the Moriscos were being expelled from Spain, Europeans were beginning to define themselves as white. For example, Samuel Purchas, author of Hakluytus Posthumus; or, Purchas His Pilgrimes (1625), used whiteness as a distinguishing feature of the nascent settlement as early as 1613 and so excluded darker-skinned people from membership.16 If the First Crusade against Islam united Europe around a Christian identity, the defeat of the Moors in Spain and the expulsion of the Moriscos in the early seventeenth century created a new European consciousness, one that gave more depth to the eighth-century Andalusian priest Isidore Pacensis’s term Europenses, which itself was forged out of the defeat of Muslims in France. Thus, Europe would grow to believe in its cultural and racial distinctiveness and would use such exceptionalism to shape its relations with non-Europeans.

But let’s focus on New Mexico for a moment. The more I think about this culturally intriguing southwestern state, the better I can decipher the ghostly presence of the Moor in its history and traditions. The capital of the state was named after the fortress of faith, the castrum founded in 1491 and built by the army on the edge of Muslim Granada before its surrender to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. Santa Fe’s “name, design, and general aspects,” writes Mercedes García-Arenal, would later become the model for a new architecture blending the styles of holy war and modernity, including in the Americas. (The city of Santa Fe, whose patron saint and protector, the Virgin of the Rosary, is also known as the Conquistadora, obviously stands as the triumph of the Spanish over the Indiansas-Moors.) The people’s hospitals (hospitales-pueblo), founded by Vasco de Quiroga, would be named Santa Fe, just as numerous towns and cities would be designed on the model of the provisional city built next to Granada. In fact, in 1541, Quiroga and the viceroy Antonio de Mendoza tried to change the name Valladolid de Michoacán to Santa Cruz de Granada.17

The conquest of the Indians was simply an extension of the Crusades launched against Muslims in earlier centuries, culminating in the surrender of Granada in 1492 and the forced conversion of Muslims, and then, as was shown in chapter 1, the persecution of the converted, whether the converted were sincere in their conversion or not. In his book La Herencia medieval de México, Luis Weckmann makes the connection between Moor and Indian, in the eye of the conquistador, unambiguous:

The Hieronymite friars referred to the inhabitants of Hispaniola as “these Moors.” In the initial years in New Spain the term “mosque” was used to name the indigenous places of worship and the term “alfaqui” to refer to the indigenous priests. . . . Martín Vázquez calls Cholula a “Moorish pueblo.” . . . Castilblanco had fourteen “mosques,” or places of worship, and many more existed in Tlaxcala and Tenochtitlán, whose largest temple “with exquisite stonework and wood (has) ‘zaquizamíes,’ meaning ‘alfarjes.’” The conquistadors were not surprised at finding in New Galicia—as mentioned in the second Anonymous Report—“women branded (that is, marked with a branding iron) on the chin like Moorish women,” nor at finding “mosques” in Florida and Chícora (Hernando Soto) or in New Mexico (Castaño de Sosa).18

The defeat of the Moors in Granada and the Aztecs in Mexico set in motion an assimilationist ideology, using conversion and education as vehicles to sever the ties of Moriscos and indigenous peoples of New Spain from their past. Language and grammar books were deployed for this specific purpose. Some, such as Hernando de Talavera, the liberal and first archbishop of Granada, and founder of the first seminary in Europe, allowed for the coexistence of local customs; others, such as Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros, preferred a policy of conversion through outright coercion. The University of Granada, for instance, was established with the aim of converting the Moriscos at home and educating the missionaries among the indigenous populations.19 With the Christianization of the state, the provincial council of Seville (1512), convened in a city with a heavy Muslim and Jewish population, would become the model for later American councils; but the modelo granadino is even closer to our purposes, for it was in this old Nasrid territory that state-church relations in the New World would be worked out, especially in the 1554 synod of Guadix, which outlined new norms for the newly converted Old Christians and ecclesiastical reforms. The Guadix provisions inspired the first provincial council of Mexico, in 1555, presided over by Alonso de Montúfar, second archbishop of Mexico, who had been born and raised in Granada and had taught in Seville and at the newly established University of Granada. Both the Guadix and Mexico conferences emphasized the teaching (indoctrination) of Morisco and Indian children and adults, paying special attention to religious education; the practice of sacraments; and vigilance against the temptation of the natives to slide back into their old beliefs.20 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent have explained that the evangelical efforts of Jesuits focused primarily on the children of Moriscos and Indians, for as a 1525 policy by King Charles V cynically put it, if children were made Christian, it would be easier for their parents to follow suit, because parents would otherwise have to lose their children.21

The formal annexation of the “kingdoms and provinces of New Mexico” into the Spanish Empire, on April 30, 1598, by Juan de Oñate, was described by Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Oñate’s captain, as an act of “baptism” for the province’s “barbarians” in the epic poem Historia de la Nueva Mexico (1610). The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico are compared to the Moors, discovering the error of their ways and miraculously seeing the light of Christian truth. The poem is also a propaganda piece. The new conquistadors are compared to the brave Spaniards “who hurl themselves, / Into the famous land of Barbary, / To capture the dispersed Moors.” The Moor was ever present, as noisy plays making use of harquebuses were staged during the Oñate expedition to terrify the natives:

A solemn feast that did endure

For a whole week, in which there were

Tilts with cane-spears, bullfights, tilts at the ring,

A jolly drama, well-composed,

Playing at Moors and Christians,

With much artillery, whose roar

Did cause notable fear and marveling

To many bold barbarians who had

Come there as spies to spy on us,

To see the strength and arms possessed

By the Spaniards. . . .22

The staged defeat of the Moor was thus a warning to natives; it was a dramatic preemptive strike.

The specter of the Moor haunted the Iberian New World. As in the home country, the Moor—like the Jew, the heretic, and even the Lutheran—was a disruptive element that had to be kept away from Spain’s overseas bonanza. As I noted in the introduction, Spain’s policy toward Muslim immigrants to the New World amounted to a form of Islamophobia, although the meaning may have been slightly different in the sixteenth century than it is now, for however fierce Spain’s fear of Islam may have been, it was more doctrinal than racial, closer to classical anti-Semitism than to newer forms of racism.23 In 1501, Muslims, Jews, heretics, and recent conversos were forbidden entry to America; only “Negro slaves or other Negro slaves who have been born in the possession of our native Christian subjects” were granted an exception, which is how African converts to Catholicism (known at that time as Ladinos) arrived in the New World. Muslims first arrived as “slaves, merchants or sailors.” By 1517, Muslims and Jews were practicing their faith so openly in the Caribbean that, on July 22 of that year, Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros “delegated his powers as general Apostolic Inquisitor to the Bishops of Santa María of the islands of Santo Domingo and Conception,” because the practices of Muslims and Jews were “offensive to our Christian religion and evangelical law, and a grave scandal to Christian believers.” On September 15, 1522, the Spanish king Charles V published a law decreeing that “no recent convert to our holy faith, be he Moor or Jew, or children of such, may go to the Indies without our special license.” On February 25, 1530, another law was issued to punish, primarily through a fine of one thousand pesos, those who transported slaves to America without obtaining a license, particularly if such slaves were Berbers, Moors, Jews, or mulattoes. The same caution against transporting “white Berber” slaves was reiterated the following year, on December 19, 1531. In 1539, the Spanish king issued a decree strongly prohibiting “the transfer to the West Indies of sons and grandsons of persons burned at the stake (quemados), Jewish or Moorish abjurers (reconciliados),” Jewish conversos, and Moriscos. Five years later, in 1543, Charles V went further and decreed the expulsion of Muslims already settled in America, “impos[ing] a new penalty of 10,000 maravedíes upon those who disregarded the law.”24 On July 13, 1556, yet another law, issued to the Spanish rulers of the New World (Indies) to repatriate to Spain all Muslims—including converts and their children—began by expressing frustration over the failed attempts to rid America of Muslims: “Be it known to you that we are informed that Berber slaves and other free persons, recently converted Moors and their sons, have gone, and each day continue to go, to those parts, [though] we have decreed that under no condition should they go, on account of the many annoyances which seem, from practical experience, to follow those who have gone.”25

As more restrictions were placed on Muslim slaves, especially those from the eastern Mediterranean, the price of non-Muslim slaves from Africa understandably went up. By 1559, the tone of desperation was becoming palpable, as the Lutherans were added to the list of people denied entry. On July 13 of that year, a decree issued in Valladolid by order of His Majesty appealed for increased vigilance:

It is fitting that wherever our Catholic faith has recently been established great vigilance be observed that no heresy be sown or found. And if such be found, it should be exterminated, destroyed and punished with vigor. Thus I beg of you, each and every one in our dioceses, archbishoprics and bishoprics, to be on the alert to inform us and let us know if any Lutherans, Moors, Jews or those who may follow any heresies have gone there, and finding such, to punish them. We send the same warning to our viceroys, presidents, judges of our royal courts in these parts, and to any of our governors there, that they give you all the support and help that you request and need.26

By 1570, the Spanish king was recommending tolerance toward Indians who had “embraced the faith (secta) of Muhammad,” although the policy of excluding “Berber slaves” and Moriscos from Spanish dominions kept being reaffirmed until at least 1578.27 Spain wanted docile subjects, not troublesome Muslims. As Rafael A. Guevara Bazán noted in a 1971 essay, Islam was such a powerful vehicle of contest that the first European to spot American land, Rodrigo de Tríana (or Rodrigo de Lepe) converted to Islam upon his return to Spain “because Columbus did not give him credit, nor the King any recompense, for having seen—before any other man in the crew—light in the Indies” (spotting light and land were considered two different matters).28 In fact, reports (no doubt exaggerated) had it that, to object to Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros’s reforms in the 1490s, “more than a thousand friars quitted the country and passed over to Barbary, preferring rather to live with the infidel than conform.” Later, under the reign of Philip II in the sixteenth century, “unpaid garrison soldiers in the African ports were reported to be deserting to the Muslims.”29 The New World, if one were to believe the procession of royal decrees and restrictive immigration policies crafted in the sixteenth century, was crawling with Muslims and Morisco illegal immigrants.

Although I had visited several times before, my new appreciation of New Mexico’s history made my trip there in 2005 feel like a sort of homecoming, particularly given that Esteban the Moor, the first non-Indian to enter that territory, a fellow native of Morocco, is proudly reclaimed by Moroccan scholars not only as a long-lost compatriot and brave explorer but also as a martyr. Abdelhamid Lotfi, author of a study on Islam in America, dedicates his book to Mustafa Zemmouri, the Arabic name for Esteban, thus: “To the memory of my countryman, Mustafa Zemmouri, martyred in Hawikuh, New Mexico, in 1539, who opened the vast territories of the American Southwest.”30 Esteban made famous the Moroccan coastal town of Azemmour, occupied by the Portuguese in 1513. It was from there that he was shipped to Portugal and sold in the slave market, before ending up in the New World and joining Pánfilio de Narváez’s expedition to the “island” of Florida, in 1527–1528. This “black Arab” (negro alárabe) belonged to Andrés Dorantes, who was also part of the expedition. Both, together with Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, survived the harrowing adventure, ending up, in 1536, in San Miguel Culiacan, on the Pacific coast of New Spain. So impressed was New Spain’s first viceroy, Granada-born Antonio de Mendoza, with Esteban’s intelligence and enterprising spirit that he purchased him from Dorantes and sent him back to explore the northern region with the Franciscan Marcos de Niza in 1539. It was then that Esteban sent back word that he had found Cibola, one of the seven fabled cities—the biggest and wealthiest in the world. By having diffused this myth, probably learned in the Iberian Peninsula, he contributed to the later expedition financed by Francisco Vázquez Coronado, which led to the discovery of the Grand Canyon of Colorado.31

Moorish connections keep unfolding. The seven fabled cities that Esteban was supposed to have found grew out of the myth of the Seven Cities on the island of Antilia, the place on the western horizon where the Portuguese, led by seven bishops, had fled upon the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors in 711. Eventually, the geography shifted, though the Seven Cities remained across the Atlantic; but by the end of the sixteenth century the name disappeared from the maps, and survives only as the name of a village (Sete Cidades) on the island of San Miguel in the Azores. (Culiacan itself, the Pacific town from which the Cibola expedition started, had been founded by Nuño de Guzmán in 1531, during a failed quest for the Seven Cities triggered by information from his Indian slave Tejo.)32 It was thus that the bearded Esteban, leading 300 men and many women, entered the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh in 1539, where he was arrested and killed for reasons that are not quite clear. He would have been “martyred,” to use Lotfi’s expression, if he had been the victim of a possible misunderstanding, as a Ladino or Morisco slave leading a reconnaissance mission on behalf of white Christians being caught in the crossfire of colonial wars. How ironic it would have been if Esteban had lived to see Francisco Vasquez de Coronado (1510–1554), the military leader of the failed expedition, rename Hawikuh Granada the following year because the Zuni pueblo reminded him of the Moorish quarter of the Albaicín (near the Alhambra) in that Spanish city!33 This is yet another example of how Spaniards, in fashioning the New World and waging war on Native Americans, treated the latter as embodiments of the Moor.

By being a Morisco, a convert to Christianity, Esteban not only bridged the Muslim and Catholic worlds, the worlds of the conquistadors and the Moors, but also, with his black skin color, blurred the color lines that sometimes separated North and sub-Saharan Africans. Even more fascinating, and surely confusing to the natives dealing with their own shock of discovery, Esteban the Moor was considered part of the white culture, since a Pueblo saying has it that “the first white man our people saw was a black man.”34 Of course, Esteban’s skin color was not white, but he certainly expands the category of Moorishness to West Africa, the main source of slaves in the New World. In 1940, on the occasion of the Coronado Cuarto Centennial, the scholar Rayford Logan made the case, against those who wanted to highlight Esteban’s Moorish or Arab identity, that the Moor was in fact a Negro in the North American sense of the word. It’s not as if such fine skin-color distinctions would have mattered much in 1940: “Even if the Cuarto Centennial officials had made Estevancio [Esteban] a Moor rather than a Negro,” Logan wryly reflected, “he might have suffered in Texas in 1940 the fate that he met in New Mexico in 1539.”35

If this were the case, then, why did Logan write an essay arguing for the blackness of Esteban? What does it matter if Esteban were black, Arab, or negro, in the Spanish sense of being dark skinned, not necessarily black? Such fine racial distinctions, when viewed in the larger history of Africans in America, appear rather trivial, for to be Moorish meant being Muslim, whether one was black, white, or any color in between. As the historian Michael Gomez explains, “The long and extensive interaction between North and West Africans, bond and free, both in Africa and al-Andalus, was such that the distinction between ‘black’ and ‘white’ Africans was often devoid of biological meaning, though it was maintained as part of very real social conventions.” Still, slave traders and holders could distinguish between sarracenos negros (black Muslims), azenagues (Tuaregs), “blackmoor” captives, negros de jalof (commonly known as Wolofs, an ethnic group found in today’s Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania), and particularly the infamous mandingas, Mande-speaking slaves (from the Senegambian and Sierra Leonean regions) whose enterprising spirit and rebelliousness across Spanish America got them associated with the “black devil” in Mexico, Venezuela, and Rio de la Plata.36

Actually, an exotic system of racial classifications, well documented by G. Aguirre Beltran, emerged in Latin America to somehow make sense of the multiple racial mixings. Profiles of individuals “subjected to prosecution by the Sacred Tribunal of the Inquisition” in Mexico included “differences of tegumentary hue” and “certain other anatomical characteristics,” such as “the form and color of the hair of the head and beard; thinness, thickness, and prominence of the lips; form of the nose; color of the iris; and, on occasion, bodily morphology and facial breadth.” America had its own Moriscos, often the outcome of white and mulatto mixings. There were, for instance, two types of Moriscos in Mexico: mulatos moriscos and the typical, Spanish-looking whites classified as bermejo moriscos. And to make sure that certain mulatos moriscos in servitude didn’t pass for white, they were sometimes branded “with hot irons in places where the insignia of servitude could not for a moment be hidden.”37

Rayford Logan’s concern about the politics of color may have been influenced by peculiar U.S. race politics of the period, but I have never heard of a Moroccan interested in Esteban’s pigmentation. Lotfi, whom I quoted earlier, follows his tribute to Esteban with an appreciation for African American Muslims: “To the memory of the thousands of African Muslims who made Islam the second revealed religion in the New World.” Those black Muslims, particularly ones who left an impression or who deliberately challenged slavery, racism, or discrimination, would often be called Moors because of their faith, or because of the assumption that Islam conferred on such Africans a higher degree of cultural achievement. By Allan Austin’s estimate, “there may have been about forty thousand African Muslims in the colonial and pre-Civil War territory making up the United States before 1860.”38

Such Muslims, or Moors, would leave a significant imprint on American culture, although the contribution of Muslim slaves has remained somehow obscure in the larger annals of African American history. Some Memoirs of the Life of Job Ben Solomon (1734), the account of a runaway slave who found his way back to Africa (present-day Senegal), is the “oldest text in African American literature.” Solomon’s memoirs, which included his trip to England and encounters with prominent people, including members of the royal family, were written by his English friend and amanuensis Thomas Bluett, but that should not explain why, as Austin put it, they “do not appear in any collection of African American literature.” Many Muslim slaves were educated or, at least, literate in Arabic and left a major impression on their contemporaries. In 1768, an unidentified slave in South Carolina wrote two pages of verses from the Qur’an.39 During a trip to New Orleans in 1822, Thomas Tea met a Moorish slave from Timbuktu in Natchez, Mississippi, who “lamented in terms of bitter regret, that his situation as a slave in America, prevents him from obeying the dictates of his religion. He is under the necessity of eating pork, but denies ever tasting any kind of spirits. He has one wife. He will not allow that the Americans are a polite and hospitable society as the Moors—not that they enjoy a tenth part of the comfort they do—and that for learning and talents they are far behind them.”40

Umar ibn Said’s autobiographical account, “Life,” composed in 1831 in a sixteen-page manuscript, is “one of two known autobiographies written in Arabic in the New World” (the other was by Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, in Jamaica). So impressive and famous was Ibn Said (ca. 1765–1864) that he received a letter in Arabic from a Chinese fellow Muslim in 1858. As if such racial differences mattered, white Christians tried to associate him with Moors and Arabs, not his black Senegalese ancestors. They also proclaimed him a proud Christian who had renounced his native faith of Islam (Francis Scott Key, author of the U.S. national anthem, even sent him a Bible in Arabic). But, as if to register his true Muslim beliefs, Ibn Said resisted the attempts to remake his identity by writing Islamic messages on Christian documents.41

Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, in Jamaica, was equally impressive. In 1837, Richard Robert Madden, an Irish magistrate and abolitionist who met with him, noted that “his attainments, as an Arabic scholar, were the least of his merits. I found him a person of excellent conduct, of great discernment and discretion. I think if I wanted advice, on any important matter, in which it required extreme prudence, and a high sense of moral rectitude to qualify the possessor to give counsel, I would as soon have recourse to the advice of this poor negro as any person I know.”42

In 1828, the six-foot-tall Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima (ca. 1762–1829) was “the most famous African in America.” Manumitted thanks to the intervention of the U.S. president and secretary of state, Ibrahima was outfitted with a “white turban topped with a crescent, blue cloth coat with yellow buttons, white pantaloons gathered at the ankles, yellow boots,” and “sometimes a scimitar” and sent on a tour of the country with his American-born wife, Isabella, raising money for his children and lending himself to abolitionist causes. From Cincinnati, where he arrived on April 19, 1828, to “the time he left for Liberia on February 7, 1829,” Ibrahima raised $3,500 in the Northeast to buy freedom and passage to Africa for eight of his descendants, who duly arrived the following year. So determined was the “sometime lawyer Cyrus Griffin” (who wrote a series about Ibrahima’s misfortune titled “The Unfortunate Moor”) that the freedman was a Moor that he argued that Ibrahima “had been lighter skinned when he came to America and that his hair had grown woolly only as it had grown whiter.” (Ibrahima was sixty-five when he was manumitted.) Like many a Morisco, Ibrahima promised the American Colonization Society to spread Christianity in Africa, but reverted to Islam as soon as he reached his ancestral land. Why, one might ask, did the U.S. president intervene on Ibrahima’s behalf? The man had been wrongly assumed to be Moroccan, and the administration wanted to extend a token of friendship to Morocco because, Austin says, it was “the only African Muslim nation with which the [state] department was familiar.”43

The struggle of African Muslims, amply documented in the work of Allan Austin, Michael Gomez, Sylvanie Diouf, Richard Brent Turner, Robert Dannin, and Sherman A. Jackson, shows that their resistance to slavery and oppression was a crucial link to the twentieth-century African American fight for justice and civil rights.44 Just as the Spanish monarchs had predicted, Muslims in the New World never ceased resisting their enslavement and subjugation. The Moor remained the quintessential Other among Europeans in the New World, as Richard Brent Turner explains: “Although Europeans had finally surpassed global Islam in terms of technology and military power by the time of the antebellum period in America, the image of the ‘Moor’ or the Muslim enemy was still a powerful signification for people of European descent everywhere. It explained the awe and respect that some African Muslim slaves received from some white Americans, as well as the repeated attempts on the part of whites to facilitate their return back to Africa, in order to rid America of Islam.”45

The fear of the Moor was not without justification. In 1522, machete-wielding sugar slaves, mostly from Senegambia (the northern arc of Islam in West Africa), revolted in Santo Domingo (Hispaniola); five years later, they did the same in Puerto Rico, forcing the Spanish king, Charles V, to issue more—but futile—decrees supplementing those of 1501, 1506, and 1509, banning Moors (black and white alike), together with Jews and others, from the Americas.46 Michael Gomez has traced the Moors’ presence in New York as far back as 1624, when New Netherland was established. A controversial figure, Anthony Jansen Van Salee, a freeman commonly known as “Anthony the Turk,” assumed to have been born in the Moroccan seaport town of Salé to the Dutch renegade Jan Jansen (Morat Rais) and a Muslim African woman, became “one of the largest landowners in Manhattan.” Van Salee and his wife, Gietje Reyniers, reputed to have been a “tavern girl” in Amsterdam, were branded “troublesome persons” and expelled from New Netherland in 1639, which led them to settle on a two-hundred-acre tract on Long Island (known as the “Turk’s land” in property records) and to pioneer the towns of Utrecht and Gravesend, while buying a house on Bridge Street in New Amsterdam, the capital of New Netherland. One of Anthony’s descendants later sold “a beautiful copy of the Koran,” leading one to believe that some of his troubles may have been caused by nonconformist attitudes, not atypical of slaves of Muslim origin. Anthony’s brother Abraham Van Salee was also known as “the Turk” or “the mulatto” in New York. Elsewhere, in 1753, men named Abel Conder and Mahamut, both claiming to be from “Sali on the Barbary coast” (the same Salee, or Salé, Anthony Jansen Van Salee hailed from), “petitioned South Carolina’s royal council in ‘Arabick’” for their release from illegal enslavement. Other “free Moors” claiming to be Moroccan filed a petition with the South Carolina General Assembly in 1790 for equal rights with whites. Many enslaved Muslims simply escaped and probably sought refuge among the Indians, as in the case of a man named Homady in the late eighteenth century. Finally, records show that Muslims were also involved in the Amistad insurrection of 1838.47

The Muslim sense of superiority over fellow African slaves (a view shared by many slave owners across the Americas) and sometimes white masters was not uncommon; it reflected their cultural, religious, and even biological differences.48 In Brazil, according to Gilberto Freyre, the Portuguese, who were heavily influenced by Moorish arts and sciences, were well aware that “a brown people” like the Moors in the Iberian Peninsula could be superior to white Europeans.49 The Muslims who wanted to go back to their native lands believed that the quality of life in their homelands was better than the life they found in America. In Trinidad, for instance, prominent and industrious Muslims sought help with repatriation to their native lands in West Africa, writing three letters (dated 1831, 1833, and 1838) to the king of England and other high officials, expressing their attachment to Islam and their unwillingness to stay in “postemancipation Trinidad.”50 All three requests were denied. Still, as Gomez comments, “the Trinidadian African Muslim community registered a definitive rejection of western civilization in that they wanted neither western religion nor life under western authority. Having achieved positions of advantage in Trinidadian society, they nevertheless preferred the culture and civilization of their West African homelands. Perhaps the refusal of assimilation into a European cultural mode represents the ultimate revolt against colonialism.”51 Everywhere, Muslims represented resistance and, on occasion, contempt for the slave-holding society, earning the respect of fellow blacks, whether slave or free. The Moorish connection of slaves like Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima remained a strong motif well into the twentieth century. It was through this Moorish heritage that Muslim slaves maintained their Pan-Africanist outlook, connecting globally with fellow Muslims and keeping the memory of an increasingly distant past alive in the habits of everyday life. And it was this Pan-Africanist spirit that would connect a generation of “old Muslims” to adherents of a “new American Islam” that emerged by the turn of the nineteenth century.52

Pan-Africanist leaders such as Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832–1912), the Presbyterian missionary in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and Henry McNeal Turner (1834–1925), bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, acknowledged the vital role Islam played in medieval West African civilization, whose salutary effects upon Africans stood in sharp contrast to the injurious legacy of Christianity among people of African descent in the Americas. These sharp differences were noted by David Walker in his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (1829): “I believe if any candid person would take the trouble to go through the Southern and Western sections of this country, and could have the heart to see the cruelties inflicted by these Christians on us, he would say, that the Algerines, Turks and Arabs treat their dogs a thousand times better than we are treated by the Christians.”53

The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision by the Supreme Court, and later the Plessy v. Ferguson case terrorized African Americans (1,240 African Americans were lynched between 1889 and 1899) and encouraged them to contrast the policies of their Christian society with those of Africans in Muslim ones. In 1895, a former U.S. consul in Liberia, John Henry Smyth (1844–1908), addressed the Congress of Africa in Atlanta and repeated what Blyden and Turner had noticed, namely that blacks in West Africa “represent a very high and unique type of Mohammedanism and Arabic training. They have adopted the religion of the Prophet and made it conform to themselves. . . . They are not controlled by the Arab, the Persian, or the Turk, as to their conception of the Koran.”54 This echoes what Blyden had written in his book Christianity, Islam, and the Negro Race (1888): “In all thriving Mohammedan communities in the West and Central Africa, it may be noticed that the Arab superstructure has been superimposed on a permanent indigenous substructure; so that what really took place, when the Arab met the Negro in his home was a healthy amalgamation, and not an absorption or an undue repression.”55 In his book The Lost-Found Nation of Islam in America, Clifton E. Marsh writes that “the assertion of a distinct life-style and world view in such ways as assuming African or Arabic names, wearing African clothes, and speaking African languages is essential to becoming free.” Malcolm X told much the same thing to Alex Haley in a 1963 interview.56 At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, with its World’s Parliament of Religions, organized in Chicago to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery” of America, persecuted African Americans had the rare opportunity to see and hear the world’s Muslims, including a white convert, Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb, a former U.S. consul in the Philippines, who denounced the misrepresentation of Islam and embraced a “jihad of words” to effect change. Black leaders, such as Frederick Douglass, who attended the exposition must have paid notice.57

Islam was everywhere in the black nationalist movement. The Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey (jailed and deported from the United States in 1927 for mail fraud), a convert to Catholicism and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), was influenced by Duse Mohammed Ali, the Sudanese-Egyptian author of In the Land of the Pharaohs (1911), which made the case for Islam as a basis for self-government in nineteenth-century Egypt. Garvey’s followers, particularly writers for the Negro World, and Garvey himself made analogies between the struggles of Muslims in Africa against European colonialist powers and their own struggle for equality in the United States, as well as between Garvey’s mission and that of Mohammed, the Prophet of Islam. At one point, Garvey compared his work and that of his followers to the Prophet. “As Mohammed did in the religious world,” he said, “so in the political arena we have had men who have paid the price for leading the people toward the great light of liberty.” In 1923, the Garveyite columnist for the Negro World gave a speech in Boston titled “Islam and the Redemption of Africa.”58

Islam and identification with Moors was especially clear in the case of the Moorish Science Temple of America, established by the enigmatic American Muslim Noble Drew Ali during the epoch of the Great Migration of blacks from the South to the North and Midwest between 1913 and 1930. Noble Drew Ali, born Timothy Drew on January 8, 1886, in North Carolina (died July 20, 1929), shaped the New Negro ideology into a unique combination of homegrown Islamic doctrines and elements of Freemasonry, particularly from the Shriners, known officially as the Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. Drew Ali claimed Moroccan ancestry and issued “nationality cards” with a Moroccan flag. Blacks, in his ideology, were from Amexem (instead of from Africa) and were part of the galaxy of Asiatic races, extending from Asia to Native and Hispanic America, and all these races were Muslim. Of course, Drew Ali’s brand of Islam was bound to be attacked by orthodox and Sunni Muslims, as happened when the al-Azhar-educated Sudanese Sātti Majid Muhammad al-Qadi Suwar al-Dhahab sued Drew Ali in court for defaming Islam and agitating for the issuing of three fatwas against him in Egypt and Sudan. (The fatwas were issued around 1930, after Drew Ali’s death.) As Richard Brent Turner explains, echoing Clifton Marsh’s observation, naming was crucial for Noble Drew Ali: “Noble Drew Ali chose to connect his movement to Morocco, connecting it to the first African Muslim slaves in America. Abdal-Rahman Ibrahima—the extraordinary ‘Moorish Prince’ from Futa Jalon . . . had used a pretended connection to Morocco to gain his freedom. If this strategy for liberation worked in the nineteenth century, Drew Ali probably reasoned that it might also work for black people in the twentieth century.”59 No doubt, these “Moors” were problematic, as is evident in one Detroit police officer’s complaint: “Those fellows! he cried out. What a terrible gang. Thieves and cutthroats! Wouldn’t answer anything. Wouldn’t sit down when you told them. Wouldn’t stand up when you told them. Pretending they didn’t understand you, that they were Moors from Morocco. They never saw Morocco! Those Moors never saw anything before they came to Detroit except Florida and Alabama!”60

Peter Lamborn Wilson has postulated that Drew Ali and his family may have met with and studied under the great Muslim reformer Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani (1838–1897) in Newark, New Jersey, when al-Afghani visited the United States in 1882–1883, an idea which, if true, “would obviously radically alter what we know about Noble Drew Ali”—and, one might add, about the legacy of the Salafiyya (nineteenth-century reform movement in the Arab world) in general. (It was from Newark, in 1912 or 1913, that Drew Ali received his prophetic calling to found a religion “for the uplifting of mankind.”)61 But Drew Ali’s movement was not without its controversies. The Bible of the Moorish Science Temple of America, a long title abridged as the Circle Seven Koran (1927), was heavily plagiarized from the Rosicrucian text Unto Thee I Grant (1925) and Eva S. and Levi Dowling’s The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (1909). Furthermore, Drew Ali’s personal life turned out not to be as exemplary as one might expect of a prophetic figure who demanded a high degree of moral rectitude from his disciples and members of the temple. But his new religion, which sponsored, according to Turner, “the first mass religious movement in the history of Islam in America,” filled a psychological and social vacuum for people who had been uprooted and were rejected by a slave society that continued to hold them in bondage.62 Despite rivalries, infighting, and harassment by the FBI during World War II (because of their kinship with the Asiatic and dark races, Muslims were suspected of being allies of the Japanese and, therefore, a national-security threat), Drew Ali and his followers persevered and survived. So convinced were they of their Moroccan heritage and so persistent were they in getting such recognition that, in 1986, the Moroccan ambassador to the United States acknowledged the movement’s “special” relationship with Morocco.63

Also around 1920, the India-originated Ahmadiyya, a heterodox and heretical movement within Islam (centered on a belief in “continuous prophecy” and in Jesus’s migration to India) founded by the self-proclaimed messiah Ghulam Ahmad (1835?–1908), was brought to the United States by Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, who preached and converted first in prison (where he had been detained by immigration authorities), then outside in a climate of open hostility to Asiatic races. In 1921, he started a magazine, The Moslem Sunrise, to give a voice to this missionary movement, whose goal, in the words of its leader Mahmud Ahmad, was “the spiritual colonization of the western world.” Although fears of Islam were rife in the popular media and imagination, Sadiq worked tirelessly to preach the color blindness of Islam. “In Islam,” he said when addressing the race problem in the United States, “no church [sic] has ever had seats reserved for anybody and if a Negro enters first and takes the front seat even the Sultan if he happens to come after him never thinks of removing him from the seat.” In the United States of the early 1920s, Sadiq noted, Jesus himself would be denied entry to the country on several legal grounds. In 1923, Sadiq returned to India after having converted “over seven hundred Americans to Islam” and established a movement that would attract accomplished jazz players Art Blakey, Talib Daoud, Yusef Lateef, Ahmad Jamal, Sahib Shihab, and others.64

On the eve of Noble Drew Ali’s death, in 1929, W. D. Fard Muhammad, probably born to a man from East India (what would later become Pakistan) and a white Englishwoman on February 25, 1891, in New Zealand, appeared in Chicago, after having entered the United States (via Canada) illegally in 1913 with an anglicized name and having joined the Theosophical Society of San Francisco, Garvey’s UNIA, and, once in Chicago, the Moorish Science Temple, “while attending the Ahmadiyya mosque on the city’s South Side.” When Fard Muhammad moved to Detroit in 1930, with its estimated 120,000 black people, to peddle exotic clothes and such, Noble Drew Ali had passed away and Fard Muhammad soon started preaching to Drew Ali’s working-class customers, establishing a movement of “Muslims” as opposed to Drew Ali’s “Moslems.”65 Officially, the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, stressing consumer discipline, education, strict dietary laws, and pride in one’s origins, was founded on July 4, 1930, but it would be Elijah Poole from Georgia, down on his luck in the cold, forbidding North, who would designate the mysterious Fard Muhammad as God incarnate after meeting him in 1931. The following year, Fard Muhammad was arrested on strange charges pertaining to a follower’s alleged sacrifice of another man, then again in 1933 for disturbing the peace. In June 1934, Fard left as abruptly as he had appeared in 1929, leaving behind Elijah Muhammad (as Elijah Poole was now known) to lead a fractious movement caught up in internecine conflict and division.

Elijah Muhammad began an odyssey south, using the assumed names of Muhammad Rassoull and Gulam Bogans, the latter being the name under which he was arrested and jailed in 1934 in Washington, D.C., for failing to register for the draft. When he was released from prison, in August 1946, he took the reins of his organization and turned it into a successful business enterprise, uplifting the status of his working-class followers considerably and attracting middle-class African Americans. By 1960, the man called the Messenger was firmly in control of an organization whose members carried identity cards similar to those issued by the Moorish Science Temple.

Like that of most minority movements, the Nation of Islam’s theology was centered on self-affirmation and reversing the dehumanizing regime of oppression that black Muslims had been subjected to for hundreds of years. If the Moors of Moorish Science were Moabites or Canaanites from Morocco who founded Mecca, the Nation’s ancestors—the lost tribe of Shabazz, creatures of a black god called Allah—were directly from Mecca. Blacks were thus the norm, whereas the “blue-eyed devils,” or white Caucasians, were invented by a “big head scientist” called Yakub, a genius who was relocated from Mecca to “the island of Pelan, or Patmos of the Aegean,” where after a six-hundred-year experiment the white race emerged to become “gods of this world” and to wreak havoc on the black races.

This narrative of racial differences was part of a long African American speculation and conversation about the nature of whites, one that is perhaps best exemplified in David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. In Walker’s account, whites are essentialized as “natural enemies,” perhaps because of their grim record:

The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority. We view them all over the confederacy of Greece, where they were first known to be any thing, (in consequence of education) we see them there, cutting each other’s throats—trying to subject each other to wretchedness and misery, to effect which they used all kinds of deceitful, unfair and unmerciful means. We view them next in Rome, where the spirit of tyranny and deceit raged still higher.—We view them in Gaul, Spain and in Britain—in fine, we view them all over Europe, together with what were scattered about in Asia and Africa, as heathens, and we see them acting more like the devils than accountable men. But some may ask, did not the blacks of Africa, and the mulattoes of Asia, go on in the same way as did the whites of Europe. I answer no—they were never half as avaricious deceitful and unmerciful as the whites, according to their knowledge.66

Walker’s views were echoed by W. E. B. Du Bois and Aimé Césaire. For Du Bois, who saw through the duplicity and cruelty of European bourgeois civilization, “there was no Nazi atrocity—concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of childhood—which the Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.”67 We have already noted that Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism, also wondered about the inability to connect Nazi atrocities with white European civilization:

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind—it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, but the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.68

To be sure, the Nation of Islam’s view of whites was shot with contradictions, but it did provide a framework through which mostly illiterate and working-class African Americans could make sense of their subjugation, of the “spooky” religion of Christianity (the Nation of Islam rejects the notion of abstract deities, heaven, and hell), of the white man’s “tricknology,” and even of the apocalyptic future which would see the burning of America (and white civilization) in a period of 390 years, followed by a cooling period of 610 years, before the continent would be resettled by 144,000 black people, all looking sixteen years old and living to the ripe age of one thousand.69

Both in his personal life and in the ideologies he espoused while a minister for the Nation of Islam and after leaving it, in 1964, Malcolm X (1925– 1965) embodied the tight connection between African American nationalist, Pan-African consciousness, and Islam as a global faith. He ultimately understood that the struggle of African Americans was part of the African, Arab, Asian, and, indeed, third-world struggle against Western imperialism. In a 1960 speech at the Harvard Law School Forum, Malcolm X affirmed this global community by saying, “We here in America who are under the Divine Leadership of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad are an integral part of the world of Islam that stretches from the China Seas to the sunny shores of Africa.”70 Malcolm X made the African American struggle global once he broke ranks with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam by founding the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) in Ghana to represent Afro-Americans in the Western Hemisphere, correcting the provincial misconception that U.S. black struggle was confined to the United States. As he explained in a June 28, 1964, talk at the Audubon Ballroom, “Many of us fool ourselves into thinking of Afro-Americans as those only who are in the United States. America is North America, Central America, and South America. Anybody of African ancestry in South America is an Afro-American. Anybody in Central America of African blood is an Afro-American. Anybody here in North America, including Canada, is an Afro-American if he has African ancestry—even down in the Caribbean, he’s an Afro-American.”71 Malcolm X was well aware that the term Moor meant “black” and that “the red, the brown and the yellow are indeed all part of the black nation” and, therefore, broadly speaking, Muslims. It was probably this inclusive philosophy of race that unsettled U.S. government officials. Indeed, so worrisome was his Pan-Africanist, anticolonial, internationalist stand “that officials within the American government seriously contemplated charging him with violating the Logan Act, which makes it illegal for American citizens to seek to influence foreign governments’ policies toward the United States.”72

In addition to broadening the definition of Afro-Americans, and possibly of blackness itself, Malcolm X, in a meeting in Paris in 1964, dismissed the philosophy of nonviolence as a “trick” put upon blacks by white people to dissuade them from rebelling and seeking their freedom and rights. Thus, in his short life, and through his global experience, Malcolm X brought the “African-derived community” of Muslims closer to the religious mainstream (while holding onto a few Nation of Islam myths, such as his last name). The quintessential “trickster” had managed, with his “jihad of words,” to address several constituencies at once, too, by achieving “a multivalent discourse, a multifaceted glossolalia that, having taken into account the history, struggles, fears, and aspirations of his people, responded with entreaties and behavior targeting specific communities of interest.”73 His assassination, on February 21, 1965, was a traumatic event that, over time, has turned him into a sacrificial prophet. For no sooner had Elijah Muhammad died, on February 25, 1975, than his son, Warith Deen Mohammed, went orthodox and founded the American Muslim Society, leaving Louis Farrakhan to oversee the old order. (Imam Mohammed passed away in 2008, and Farrakhan is seriously ill at the time of this writing.) Both organizations, connected by family and historical ties, were closer to mainstream Islam at this time than had even been possible under the reign of Elijah Muhammad and Noble Drew Ali before him. Remarkably, as the twentieth century wore on, American Islam gradually returned to its Afro-Moorish roots.74

Despite enormous hurdles, the struggle of America’s Muslims for inclusion and dignity continues in earnest. In November 2006, more than five years after 9/11, when Islam had become associated with all things un-American, Keith Ellison, a progressive African American Muslim from Minneapolis, was elected to represent that mostly white city and its suburbs in the House of Representatives. For the first time in American history, a Muslim (of African descent, it must be noted) had been elected to the U.S. Congress. This historic event was not lost on Muslims around the world—it was a shining example of the possibilities of U.S. democracy when allowed to take its course.75 Rather predictably, however, Ellison was soon accused of being un-American simply for being Muslim and for choosing to take the oath of office on Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the first English translation of the Qur’an;76 but he remained steadfast in promoting his progressive agenda in the areas of health care, immigration, and civil rights in general, including condemning anti-Semitism by joining the Congressional Anti-Semitism Task Force and visiting Israel.

This brief aperçu of the pervasive Moorish presence—physical, cultural, symbolic, and of course spectral—in America indicates that the newly “discovered” continent is, in many ways, merely a new front on which old antagonisms and religious hatreds were worked out with an almost astonishing consistency. “The great and overpowering river of anti-Islamic feelings overflowed the European boundaries and flooded the American lands,” wrote Rafael Guevara Bazán. “The conquerors were men moving to the New World in order to complete the catholicity, or ecumenicity, of the Christian faith, according to medieval theological ideas.”77 But what must be noted here, at least in regard to the clash of Islam and Christendom that sets the background to the unfolding of modern history, is that Islam worked both against and for the Moorish minority; the religion and culture that made the African, for instance, an outsider also made him a model, a rebel leader in Brazilian uprisings and the Haitian revolution, a mutineer on the Amistad, and, paradoxically, a cultural snob vis-à-vis the white master. Moorish identity, whether innate or acquired, turned out to be a powerful tool of resistance to the depredations of slavery, racism, and social exclusion.

Berbers, Moriscos (black and white), and West African slaves were not the only ones who found strength in their Moorish identity, however; Jews in Europe, and by extension in America, did so, too, thereby shedding light on a most remarkable legacy that could reduce unfounded suspicions and alleviate the escalating hatreds between Muslims and Jews in the contemporary Middle East and in the world at large. It is this close affinity between Muslims and all those deemed exterior to Christian or European purity that explains the Moorish identity of European Jews during the Enlightenment and, later, the troubling issue of nonwhite immigrants in the contemporary West.