Africans in the Islamic world? Is contemporary racism a function of this encounter with forces eastward, just as today the norm is to use Arab—not Roman—numerals? As far back as the eighth century, this racializing process was unfolding—or so it is said—though, as noted, enslavement in that part of the world did not only encompass Africans. One historian has contrasted the way in which “white mamluks” (European might be a more apt term to affix to this exploited humanity) were treated versus their darker brethren, though the substantial Christian ransom of the former might account for any difference.1 And, in any case, comparing the legacy of racism centuries later in North America, including lynchings and immolations, with what unfolded in what is now Iraq centuries earlier, seems once again to be an extended effort to exonerate perpetrators in London, then Washington: that is, “the Arabs made them do it.” Perhaps English anti-Semitism (or even the German variant) should be laid at the doorstep of Pontius Pilate or post-Constantine Rome, again exculpating London elites. Or, is attenuation or even the chain of causation disrupted in this instance?2
Whatever the case, the fact remains that enslavement of Africans reached a high point under the aegis of London and its descendants, not least because it was turbo-charged with emerging notions of “race” (a term with hazy roots at best in the mire of 1,300 years ago) and the shift from religion as the axis of society, which characterized the post-1492 dispensation.3 For in examining fifteenth-century Valencia, on a peninsula deeply influenced by Muslims for hundreds of years, the scholar Debra Blumenthal argues—correctly, I think—that it is “misleading to label what we see here … as ‘racism’ or even ‘protoracism.’”4
Because the Iberian Peninsula played such an instrumental role in the story of conquest, it is a focus in these pages. Thus, from the eighth to eleventh centuries, neighboring France was a center of selling of Irish and Flemish slaves, while in the ninth century the Vikings sold tens of thousands of Europeans to the Arabs of Spain.5
Moreover, during the seventh and eighth centuries, predominantly Muslim regions commanded the mightiest gold reserves in the world, not least because of their tie to Africa where this precious metal proliferated. Buoyed by this wealth, these forces ruled in Iberia, the southern Mediterranean, and due east from there. The gravity of the situation was signaled when a subsequent analyst announced gravely that back then “an Iron Curtain now divided the Mediterranean”6—featuring Muslims not Communists—which provoked a kind of angst that rivaled the sentiments of recent history when this poisonously marbled phrase was first enunciated. This difficult moment for the Western Europeans tended to provoke the kind of imprecations toward Muslims, including inventing racism, that had been thought to be peculiar to twentieth-century Moscow.
Nonetheless, the conflict on the Iberian Peninsula between Arabs and those we now call Spaniards7 was a critical factor contributing to the post-1492 apocalypse, since the invaders were constructed as “black” when there was a long medieval tradition of associating blackness with devils and of seeing dark-skinned Muslims as quasidiabolical creatures. Eerily, in pre-1492 Christian-dominated areas on the Peninsula, there was often an attempt to bar sexual relations with “Saracens” or Muslims and other non-Christians (for example, those of the Jewish community), just as anti-miscegenation statutes were a fixture in the United States, at least until 1967.8 Moreover, at times during the ninth-century reign of Alfonso III on the Peninsula, the descriptors “Moor” and “Negro” were used interchangeably,9 which did not bode well for what was to become the beleaguered continent, namely Africa.
The plundered riches of Africa notwithstanding, the Iberian Peninsula too was a target-rich environment. Sparsely defended churches and monasteries were repositories for gold, silver, and bejeweled items of all types, all poised for plucking. The bounty could also include crops, livestock, and people that could be transported eastward and southward to North Africa. Slaves were a valuable commodity and foreign women seemed to be particular prizes.10
Likewise, slavery was not unknown on the Peninsula pre-1492. In Andalusia, for example, slaves were in great demand and there was an abundant supply as a result, with many taken in raids on the Christian North or “pagans” seized in eastern Europe and imported by merchants described as being Frankish and Jewish, notably those among the latter described as “Radhanites.”11 Jewish merchants were accused of providing the ships that carried Muslim troops to the European shore and, subsequently, Muslim chroniclers alleged that this same group collaborated in the conquest and rule of the Peninsula, volunteering to serve in the garrisons of towns. Basque women were sold as slaves to Medina, and Berbers were recruited to cross the Mediterranean to protect the regime, which in turn drew Europeans into African events more closely. The ubiquity of the enslaved and their influence within the regime was pervasive. The royal court employed them by the thousands, as did the estates of the Umayyad royalty. Some slaves acquired great influence, unlike those who were to languish in North America, while, à la the Ottomans, some became eunuchs. This Almoravid imperium established an empire on the Peninsula and northern Africa in the eleventh century, which then extended its tentacles deeper into Africa, where the flow of gold (and slaves) from the Niger delta served as a precursor of the post-1492 debacle.12 Southern Spain was propelled economically as an entry point for trade with an Africa that had yet to be devastated.13
SNIFFING WEALTH, ENGLISHMEN were flocking to Iberia too,14 which brought them into closer contact with Africa and the fortunes to be made there. As early as the eighth century and continuing thereafter, Muslims, pre-1492 rulers of a good deal of Iberia, commanded the mightiest gold reserves within thousands of miles, with Africa often being the source, which then provided strength in the Mediterranean, the Peninsula, and what has been called the “Near East.”15 As more African gold began to pour into Europe via the Peninsula, increased trade resulted continentally to the point that by the early 1100s the Bay of Biscay was termed the “Sea of English,” and English pirates were detained in Galicia.16
It was in 1290 that the Jewish community was ostensibly expelled from England, though some never left. It was ironic that Oliver Cromwell’s mid-seventeenth-century embrace of this community helped London surpass the Spanish Empire in many respects. Interestingly, England was then besieged by savage anti-Jewish pogroms, leading to property seizures and expropriation of those perceived as akin to them, for example, Cahorsins, who were involved with banking; with roots in southwest France they too were associated with alleged usury,17 with some refugees alighting on the European mainland, perhaps making their way to a more welcoming Muslimdominated Iberia.
Coincidentally, the first recorded commercial treaty between Portugal and England was signed in 1294, binding London to the Peninsula and allowing England not only to capitalize upon Lisbon’s subsequent perambulations but also to counter Madrid’s thrust into Ireland by backing the Portuguese against the Spaniards. Of course, Portugal and Spain often backed different sides during the frequent conflicts between England and France, a crucial shaper of the balance of power continentally, with lethal implications for Africa and the Americas. For as this thirteenth-century trend began to assert itself, several of the West African coastal peoples had quite advanced civilizations, though their trade connections were with the interior, not the ocean, that evolved subsequently. East Africa long had been linked to a wider world, via the maritime superhighway known as the Indian Ocean.18
ENGLISH PIRATES WERE PERCEIVED regionally as a menace as early as the 1300s in the German Hanse.19 Their depredations were to prove essential to the rise of London, as the otherwise dismal archipelago leveraged its sea-bound locale. The same could be said about trade with the Iberians, which was waxing as early as the fourteenth century, and which may have brought London in touch with North Africans.20
In a continuation of a lengthy trend, Lisbon’s tensions with Castile deepened an ongoing alliance between Portugal and England. By 1380, London had dispatched an army of 3,000 lancers and archers to their ally, allowing them to confront more effectively their Iberian foe. As peace emerged, Portugal then accrued
