Douglas,
Thank you for this insightful post. I know there were Arabs sailors, who did 
make it to the new world. There are even stories of Arabs who escaped, and 
settled in the Blue Mountains. Thank you for taking my question seriously.

Anita


>From: Douglas Deal <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history         
>      <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Islamic Slavery (was Re: Slavery and immoral stance, etc.)
>Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 19:10:20 -0400
>
>Anita has asked several times whether there were connections of any 
>significance between Islam and Africans and the European enslavement of 
>Indians.
>
>Though not always direct, the connections are there, embedded in the 
>processes of change that shifted the focus of Western European enterprise 
>and empire from the Old (especially Mediterranean) World to the New 
>(American) World between 1400 and 1700, or thereabouts. It was the earlier 
>expansion of Islam that brought sugar production from India to the eastern 
>Mediterranean, where it was discovered by crusading Europeans, with 
>momentous consequences for the next several centuries of world history. 
>Muslim merchants also helped construct a trans-Saharan slave trade that 
>helped the West shift from a "slaves are Slavs" paradigm to a "slaves are 
>Africans" mindset once the Turks took Constantinople in 1453. Because of 
>these and related developments, Portuguese and Spanish colonizers, with the 
>technical assistance (sugar production, colonial administration, trade & 
>finance, seafaring) of Venetians and Genoans (remember Columbus?), were 
>establishing sugar plantations worked by black African slaves on Atlantic 
>island colonies (e.g., Madeira, Cape Verde, Sao Tome) before 1492. The 
>Iberian initiatives that sent ships further and further along the west and 
>central African coast and sponsored Columbus's voyages of the 1490s 
>depended in critical ways on the expertise of Jewish and Muslim mapmakers 
>and  their scientific view of the world. Ironically, 1492 was the not only 
>the year in which Columbus made his epic voyage but also the year in which 
>resurgent Christian monarchs expelled Jews from Iberia and "reconquered" 
>that peninsula by defeating the remaining pockets of Muslim power. Once in 
>the New World, the Iberian conquistadors quickly turned to mining gold and 
>silver and growing sugar--all with forced labor, first mainly Indian and 
>then increasingly African (the latter including, in many areas, significant 
>numbers of Muslims).
>
>This is a horrendously oversimplified account, but it at least hints at 
>some interesting connections between the rise of Islam and the expansion of 
>mostly Christian Europe in both the Old and New Worlds (see works by Philip 
>Curtin, Charles Verlinden, David Brion Davis, Robert Bartlett, Patricia 
>Seed, Felipe Fernandez Armesto and others for more details).
>
>Doug Deal
>History/SUNY Oswego

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