Islam Assignment 3

In what language were the first words spoken between Europeans and Americans?

Islam

When was an Islamic culture established in the Iberian peninsula? Who did so? When did this end? How many centuries of Muslim rule were in Spain?

711; Moors (African and Arab Muslims); lasted nearly eight centuries; By early 1492, the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Reconquista, defeating the last of the Muslim kingdoms, Granada.

What is the Inquisition?

Coerced between 300,000 and 800,000 Muslims and probably at least 70,000 Jews to convert to Christianity

What is a requerimiento? What in Islam does this look like?

A stylized legal pronouncement; it announced a new state of society; offering Native Americans the chance to convert to Christianity and submit to Spanish rule, or else bear responsibility for all the ‘deaths and losses’ that would follow. A formal and public announcement of the intent to conquer, including an offer to the faithless of a chance to submit and become believers, is the first formal requirement of jihad.

Why is 1503 significant for understanding Islam in America? What happened? What was more likely regarding enslaved Muslims than other enslaved Africans?

By 1503, we know that Muslims themselves, from West Africa, were in the New World. In that year, Hispaniola’s royal governor wrote to Isabella requesting that she curtail their importation. They were, he wrote, ‘a source of scandal to the Indians’. They had, he wrote, repeatedly ‘fled their owners’. On Christmas morning 1522, in the New World’s first slave rebellion, 20 Hispaniola sugarmill slaves rose and began slaughtering Spaniards. The rebels, the governor noted, were mostly Wolof, a Senegambian people, many of whom have been Muslim since the 11th century. Muslims were more likely than other enslaved Africans to be literate: an ability rarely looked upon with favour by plantation-owners.

After Catholicism, what was the 2^nd monotheistic religion in the Americas? What does this predate?

Islam; Protestantism

Complete these sentences: “The popular misunderstanding, even among educated people, that ___________ and ___________ are recent additions to America tells us important things about how American history has been written. In particular, it reveals how historians have justified and celebrated the emergence of the modern nation-state. One way to valorise the United States of America has been to minimise the _____________ and scale – the cosmopolitanism, diversity and mutual co-existence of peoples – in America during the first 300 years of European presence. The writing of American history has also been dominated by _______________ institutions….But when it comes to the history of religion in America, the consequences of the domination of the leading ______________ institutions…remain formidable. This ‘_____________ effect” on seeing and understanding religion in early America (and the origins of the US) brings real distortion…”

Islam; Muslims; heterogeneity; Puritan; Puritan; Puritan

Why is the forgetting of early America’s Muslims more than an “arcane concern”? (In other words, what are the consequences for today?)

The consequences bear directly on the matter of political belonging today. Nations are not mausoleums or reliquaries to conserve the dead or inanimate. They are organic in that, just as they are made, they must be consistently remade, or they atrophy and die. The virtual Anglo-Protestant monopoly over the history of religion in America has obscured the half-a-millenium presence of Muslims in America and has made it harder to see clear answers to important questions about who belongs, who is American, by what criteria, and who gets to decide.

Complete this sentence: “Zemourri [an Arab Muslim who arrived in Florida in 1527] saw far more of the present-day US, its lands and peoples, than any of the country’s ‘___________ _____________’ (2 words).

founding fathers

Complete this sentence: “West Africans brought during the late-17th and first half of the 18th century to work as slaves in Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas came from different parts of Africa, or from the West Indies, than had these earlier ‘charter’ generations. They were more likely to be ______________, and much less likely to be of mixed descent. Christian missionaries and planters in the 18th century complained that this ‘plantation generation’ of slaves showed little interest in Christianity.”

Muslims

Complete these sentences: “It is difficult to know to what extent the persistence of Arabic names related to continued religious practice or identity, but it seems unlikely to be totally disconnected….Arabic names do not necessary make one a _____________, at least not in the Maghreb [western part of North Africa] or Levant [Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan], where Arabs are Christians and Jews too. But it was the spread of Islam that brought ____________ names to _________ ___________ (2 words). So these African and Afro-American [enslaved people with Arabic names], or at least their parents or grandparents, were almost surely __________.”

Muslim; Arabic; West Africa; Muslims

What did one early 19^th-century Georgia slaveowner advocate with regards to enslaved Muslims?

Advocated making professors of the Mahommedan religion into drivers or influential negroes on plantations, claiming they would exhibit integrity to their masters

Complete these sentences: “The most persistent consequence of the Puritan effect has been a continuing commitment to producing a past focused on how the actions, usually courageous and principled, of _____________ (almost always in New England and the Chesapeake) led to the United States of America, its government and its institutions. The truth is that the history of America is not primarily an ____________ story, any more than the history of the West more broadly. It might not be a straightforward or self-evident matter what, exactly, constitutes ‘the West’. But the more global era in history inaugurated by the European colonization of the Western hemisphere must be a significant part of it.

 

If the West means, in part, the Western hemisphere or North America, _________ have been part of its societies from the very beginning. Conflicts over what the American nation is and who belongs to it are perennial. Answers remain open to a range of possibilities and are vitally important. Historically, ____________ are Americans, as originally American as _____________. In many ways, America’s early __________ are exemplars of the best practices and ideals of American religion. Any statement or suggestion to the contrary, no matter how well-meaning, derives from either intended or inherited chauvinism.”

Anglo-Protestants; Anglo-Protestant; Muslims; Muslims; Anglo-Protestants; Muslims