Slate: “Was Columbus’ Voyage to the ‘New World’ Driven by Islamophobia?”
OCT 12, 2020 2:00 PM BY ROBERT SPENCER
Yes, the author of this article is apparently really named Rebecca Onion, but this is not The Onion, this is that renowned Leftist comedy publication, Slate. In this entire interview, Onion and interviewee Alan Mikhail both behave as if Columbus set out for the New World because of what Mikhail calls “anti-Muslim sentiment,” but both give the impression that this sentiment was a baseless prejudice, “an ideological extension the Crusades.” Mikhail discusses the fall of Constantinople (in a section not excerpted below) and the fact that “the Ottomans, or so they thought, were poised to invade.”
“Or so they thought”? In fact, the Ottomans did invade. The History of Jihad shows that after they conquered Constantinople, the Ottomans made more or less continual war against Europe, and conquered and occupied large portions of Eastern and Southern Europe for hundreds of years. Mikhail and Onion, however, give the impression that the Europeans’ fear of Islam was baseless — an irrational “Islamophobia” that right-thinking people must eschew. Nor does Mikhail mention that the Ottomans had closed European trade routes to India, which is why Columbus had the idea of sailing west to find new ones in the first place.
This article is yet another in the apparently endless series of articles marking the West’s cultural suicide. All of them are based on the assumption that the West has been uniquely violent, even genocidal, and hateful, while the (largely Islamic) East has been more sinned against than sinning, and encapsulates a wisdom and nobility that we have lost. And thus we are guilt-tripped into accepting mass Muslim migration into the West, without any attempt at assimilation, and a good deal more.
“Was Columbus’ Voyage to the ‘New World’ Driven by Islamophobia?,” by Rebecca Onion, Slate, October 12, 2020 (thanks to M.):
Tucked inside historian Alan Mikhail’s new biography of Sultan Selim, the ambitious early-16th-century ruler of the Ottoman Empire, is a riveting series of chapters about Christopher Columbus. Mikhail’s ambition in writing God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World was to restore the place of the Ottoman Empire in the global history of the early modern period. To that end, the Columbus chapters make the argument that at its inception, European exploration of the New World can be understood as an ideological extension of the Crusades—a new effort to circumvent the ever-more-powerful Islamic presence in Europe.
Because this argument is somewhat hidden inside a big biography of an Ottoman ruler, it’s not been as controversial with traditionalists as the 1619 Project’s recasting of American history around slavery, but it’s got a similar power to make you look at a major historical happening in a completely new way. I asked Mikhail to explain how Columbus came to commit himself to combating Islam, how his feelings about Muslims affected his approach to the New World, and whether the Europeans of this time could rightly be called “Islamophobic.”…
These were ideas he absorbed when he was young, but he had personal experience encountering Muslims, too, before he set off on the voyage….
Famously, he went to a lot of people to try to get them to fund his voyages. And during that process, he did cite what he saw as the existential battle between Christendom and Islam as one of the reasons for his voyages.
And this worked with Isabella and Ferdinand in part because of the politics of European rulership. They controlled property in Italy, specifically Sicily, that the Ottomans, or so they thought, were poised to invade, at various points. And of course, there were still many Muslims in Spain after the conquest of Granada; the sovereigns saw those Muslims that remained as a potential fifth column—internal enemies, maybe allies to the Ottoman Empire, the Mamluks, or Muslim powers in North Africa.
They sort of felt like Islam was breathing down their necks.
There are a lot of examples of the ways Columbus and other explorers approached the Native people in the New World, primed to perceive them in the same way they thought of the Muslims they had encountered in Europe.
Yes, well, it depends on who you’re talking about; Columbus, until the day he died in 1506, thought he’d landed in Asia. So he thought all he needed to do was find the right path in, to the Grand Khan. But even much later, way beyond Columbus’ time, in the 1580s or something, when it was clear the Americas weren’t Asia, the Spanish authorities in what is today Peru reported rumors that Ottoman ships were off the West Coast of South America. There’s zero historical evidence so far that this was true—I mean, I’m open to change my mind if somebody finds evidence!—but what I’m interested in is this idea they still seemed to have that Islam is everywhere; Muslims are all around us.
Is it possible to use the word Islamophobia to describe the way Columbus, Isabella, Ferdinand, and other Christian Europeans felt at this time? I don’t know if that’s ahistorical. What was the motivation for their animus? Anxiety about territory? Religious fear?
I didn’t use the word Islamophobia in the book. That’s a very modern term; I would be hesitant to apply it to this period. Maybe something like “anti-Muslim sentiment,” which, to be fair, is clunkier.
It’s very tricky, the answer to this question. The idea is that there’s a thread of anti-Muslim sentiment from this period, and maybe even before, to today. In some ways you can draw a throughline. But I don’t want to buy into a story about some kind of eternal “clash of civilizations,” because there are plenty of examples of Christian Europeans and Muslims having quite positive interactions at the same time I’m talking about: the sharing of ideas, the exchange of goods, diplomatic relationships, fighting on the same side of wars against other enemies. And that’s part of the book, too—to point out that the Ottoman Empire has been part of “our history.”
Why do you think it was important to highlight this angle on Columbus’ story?
As I started writing this as an epic history, curious about the Western perspective on this, I thought, Why isn’t this motivation—this crusading motivation—part of the Columbus story? I mean, if you go back to Columbus and the Spanish sovereigns we are talking about, who wanted to deny and defeat Islam, they succeeded, in that the narratives about the New World do exclude Muslims. That’s part of the legacy…. |
