Islamophobia & Anti-Blackness: A Genealogical Approach

The year 1492 marked a major  turning point in the trajectory of Western Civilization. Elementary age children are taught this as the year Columbus famously crossed the Atlantic. An equally significant event that year, was the Spanish conquest of al-Andalus–a Moorish province on the southern Iberian peninsula established eight centuries earlier–and more importantly, the last major Muslim stronghold on the European continent. Critical race scholars have argued that these two events would not only shift the geopolitical balance of power from the Orient to the Occident, but fundamentally alter conceptions about religious and racial identity.

According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, of the University of California, Berkeley, the expulsion of the Moors from continental Europe marked a transition from an age of imperial relations between Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of European colonial expansion throughout the known world. The “discovery” of “godless” natives in the Americas would also inspire the great debates between Las Casas and Sepúlveda in 1550 on the nature of the human soul. Such a geopolitical and philosophical shift, Maldonado-Torres argues, would lead to a Eurocentric, re-categorization of humanity based upon religous—and ultimately racial—differences.

Maldonado-Torres has proposed that anti-black racism is not simply an extension of some historical bias against blacks, but rather, is an amalgam of old-world Islamophobia linked to the history of the Iberian peninsula, and to the notion of souless beings embodied in popular  conceptions about the indigenous natives of the Americas.

These beliefs would contribute to an ideological basis for, and justification of, colonial conquests in the name of cultural and religious conversion, as well as pave the way for the enslavement and human trafficking of sub-Saharan Africans.