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Comment by BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 | Hacker News Reader

The Reconquista had finally driven out the Moors from Spain in 1492 - 26 years before Cortez entered Tenochtitlan and began the dismantling of indigenous religion. The Spanish Catholics were the Wahhabis of the day.

Thought Experiment: If the Iberian Moors were still in power in 1518,would we today be calling Latin Americans "Arabs"?

Similarly, popular opinion in Israel likes to call Palestinians "Arabs" because they adopted the language of their conquerors.

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> Similarly, popular opinion in Israel likes to call Palestinians "Arabs" because they adopted the language of their conquerors.

That's not a practice imposed by the Israelis. The (genuine) Arabs, as you would expect, favored themselves. So, everywhere in their empire, social climbers claimed to be Arabs.

When you read about the history of the region, the luminaries who appear tend to be Persians, but this is obscured.

Just as Persians, Syrians, Egyptians, etc. were "Arabized", in turn Turks and Mongols were "Persified".

> in turn Turks and Mongols were "Persified".

How?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turco-Persian_tradition

> The Spanish Catholics were the Wahhabis of the day.

I don’t understand this comparison.

> If the Iberian Moors were still in power in 1518,would we today be calling Latin Americans "Arabs"?

This assumes the Moors would have ventured to the Americas in the first place. At the very least, they didn’t have the same incentives as the Spanish to do so.

Spanish colonialism in the new world was largely an extension of the reconquista abroad. The Spanish crown used wealth from conquered territories to placate and balance the power of Iberian nobility. With the conquest of the canaries and the fall of Granada, the only obvious place to continue that system was North Africa, which would have brought the Spanish crown into direct conflict with the kingdom of Portugal.

Then Columbus returned with news of a route to the indies that avoided the increasingly powerful Ottomans. The war machine just got pointed in a new direction until the realities of the new world eventually caught up.

A moorish kingdom would not have had the same approach to the new world, even if someone had discovered it.

Hmm, but was the reconquista really a capitalist venture?

No, it wasn't capitalist as we'd understand it. Spain was very much a medieval kingdom, but there were elements of capitalism in Italian financing that became important towards the mid 15th century and especially during the new world conquests. That's something Wickham has opinions on.

That's an interesting juxtaposition. I was going to comment on another (insightful!) comment here about how "the only indigenous-majority country is Greenland" brings up just how Americas-centric (plus the commonwealth...) the term "indigenous" is in the first place, and this is a great illustration of that IMO. Hopefully we can all agree that applying the term even to the British Isles gets really tough, and it gets downright impossible if you try to do it to somewhere like Palestine.

And it's no mystery why it has such big sway today in commonwealth countries as opposed to the relatively-minor importance it has in Latin America... In case anyone wasn't aware, the British Empire (and early US!) were definitely the baddies. I just recently found this quote by Jacob Howard, the liberal abolitionist senator who drafted the first sentence of the US's 14th Amendment, that I think shows how deep the assumption of animosity ran:

      I am not yet prepared to pass a sweeping act of naturalization by which all the Indian savages, wild or tame, belonging to a tribal relation, are to become my fellow-citizens and go to the polls and vote with me.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_M._Howard#Speech_on_the_...

On another note: you likely know this, but Columbus only got funding for his voyage because the monarchs were doing their victory-lap after finally conquering the last stronghold of the Iberian Moors, Granada. So it's all quite connected, not just by chance.

It's semi-common knowledge among nerds that the Islamic Golden Age isn't appreciated enough in western culture beyond "someone presumably was on the other side of the Crusades", but this is making me consider how the age of discovery's push for colonization might've been driven/inspired by a feeling of jealousy and inferiority compared to the rapid growth of the Islamic emirates...

> "the only indigenous-majority country is Greenland"

Mongolia? Kazakhstan? Kyrgyzstan? Korea? Indonesia? Madagascar? Egypt?

Do the Greenlanders of today predate or postdate the Vikings?

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