Op-Ed: Columbus' fear of Islam, rooted in Europe’s Crusades, shaped his view of Native Americans (via latimesopinion)
In all that has been written about Columbus — from his being the first Italian American to the progenitor of a continental genocide — one of the most crucial aspects of his biography is missing: A primary force behind Columbus’ Atlantic crossings was a fear and hatred of Islam.
As a teenager, he took to the Mediterranean as a sailor’s apprentice. Some of his first maritime voyages brought him face to face with the awesome power of the Ottomans in the Aegean and of other Muslim states in North Africa. He later sailed down the coast of West Africa where the region’s powerful Muslim kingdoms impressed upon him that Islam was everywhere, surrounding Christendom.
Later, when he first saw the scarves of a group of Indigenous women, he thought they were related through trade or some other form of Eurasian contact to what he termed Moorish sashes. Such stated equivalences between Islam and Native America would continue. A couple of decades after Columbus, Hernán Cortés too wrote that the Aztecs of Mexico wore “Moorish robes” and that Aztec women looked like “Moorish women.
This largely forgotten history matters. An anti-Islamic worldview was the mold that cast the European understanding of race and ethnicity in the Americas, as well as the concept of warfare in the Western Hemisphere. It, therefore, needs to be a part of any understanding of the history of the Americas and, regrettably, of Native American history.
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