Walter Mignolo - Islamophobia and Hispanophobia

Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-KnowledgeVolume 5Issue 1 Othering Islam Article 3

9-23-2006

Islamophobia/Hispanophobia: The (Re)Conguration of the Racial Imperial/ColonialMatrixWalter D. MignoloDuke University, [email protected]

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Recommended CitationMignolo, Walter D. (2006) "Islamophobia/Hispanophobia: The (Re) Conguration of the Racial Imperial/Colonial Matrix," HumanArchitecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge: Vol. 5: Iss. 1, Article 3.Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/humanarchitecture/vol5/iss1/3

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ISSN: 1540-5699. Copyright by Ahead Publishing House (imprint: Okcir Press). All Rights Reserved.

HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

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We have been invoked to respond to theincreasing culture of fear and rejection of the

specter of Islam that unfolded in recent yearsmainly in Europe and the U.S., but also in theRussian Federationthat is to say, in the re-gions of the world where the so-calledJudeo-Christian spirit is entrenched in the

Walter D. Mignolo is William H. Wannamaker Professor and Director for the Center of Global Studies and the Humanitiesat Duke University. He is an active member of the project modernity/coloniality/decoloniality and has been exploring thedecolonial option as an epistemic and political avenue to overcome the limits of modern and Western epistemologyfounded in the Greco-Latin legacies and Western Christianity and its reincarnation in Secular philosophy and sciences.Among his recent publications: The Idea of Latin America (2005), received the Frantz Fanon Award from the CaribbeanPhilosophical Association in 2006. Co-editor with Madina Tlostanova of Double Critique: Knowledge and Scholars at Risk inthe Post-Socialist World (2006). In collaboration with Arturo Escobar, Globalization and the Decolonial Option (2007). Co-editedwith Margaret Greer and Maureen Quilligan, The Black Legend. Discourses of Race in the European Renaissance (2007).

Islamophobia/HispanophobiaThe (Re) Configuration of the Racial

Imperial/Colonial Matrix

Walter D. Mignolo

Duke University

[email protected]

Abstract: There are enormous historical and social differences in the imperial making of Islamo-phobiathe fear and the hatred toward a powerful and widespread religionand Hispanopho-biathe fear and hatred toward secular subaltern forces with mixed religious beliefs thatemerged in the seventies in the U.S. without the extended political connections or support fromLatin America. We need to understand how the imperial imaginary constructs phobias in themind of civil society, but at the same time be aware that on the other side of the imperial/colo-nial phobias potent de-colonial forces are at work, among Moslems and within Hispanics in theU.S., and Indians and Afros in South America (or the Latin America of the white population fromEuropean descent). There are enormous differences, but we have overcome the belief in abstractuniversalism and that the proletariat or the multitude will provide one single solution for thewretched of the earth. It so happens that the wretched of the earth know that if they are proletar-ian or part of the multitude, they are also imperial/colonial wretched, that is, racialized beingsbeings marked by the colonial wound, that is to say, the lower rank in the human scale of beingthat, built by Christian theology during the Renaissance, were reactivated and maintained bysecular philosophy during and after the Enlightenment. Islamophobia and Hispanophobia, itseems to me, are entrenched in the colonial horizon of modernity. However, de-colonial projectsare at work, all over the world. Unveiling and uncovering the imperial foundations and repro-ductions of phobias (Islamic or Hispanic) are ways of de-colonizing (and de-naturalizing) whatimperial rationality convinced us to be real, and that the real is accountable by only one rational-ity. The racial matrix holding together the modern/colonial worldmatrix is unfolding andupdated in what we are witnessing today as Islamophobia and Hispanophobia.

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government and in the media. There is noneed to review the transformation of subjec-tivities and social consciousness in the Westwhere Islamophobia has been mainly locat-ed after 9/11. Literature, the mainstream me-dia, independent media, etc., have respond-ed profusely to the event. Islamophobia inthe Russian Federation, however, is notnourished so much by the collapse of thetwin towers but by the conflict with Chech-nya that, of course, precedes 9/11. We havehere the traces of two interrelated and at thesame time singular histories. And we shalltreat them in their singularity rather than tosubsume Islamophobia in Russia to a uni-versal Western history. Both histories, how-everas in that of Christianity, i.e., WesternChristians (Catholics and Protestants) andEastern Orthodox Christianity in Russiahave a common origin and a moment of di-vergence. Although I am not familiar withthe particularities of Islamophobia in theRussian Federation,

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I think it is importantto have it in mind to avoid the mirage thatwhat happens in the West (that is, WesternEurope and the U.S.) happens all over theworld. Another approach would be to takeinto account Islamophobia in South Asia andin East Asia, where Christianity made in-roads but is not the dominant religion. I will

limit my observation, however, to the localeswhere Christianity became increasingly hos-tile to Islam at the same time that it increasedits complicity with Judaism and with theState of Israel.

In the United States, the specter of Islamat a global scale has been accompanied bythe rising specter of Hispanophobia. Inter-estingly enough, Samuel Huntington hasbeen the ideologue that connected both intwo influential books timely published. Thefirst one, that is more well-known,

The Clashof Civilizations

(1995), was published afterthe collapse of the Soviet Union. The secondone,

Who Are We

?

The Challenges of AmericasNational Identity

(2004), was published after9/11 which gave the U.S. an excuse to inten-sify the politics of national security. A chap-ter of Huntingtons second book was pre-published with the title The Hispanic Chal-lenge. How are these two historical se-quences and social imaginaries linked in theimperial global designs? Neither of the twohistorical sequences and social imaginariesare objective or natural happenings butinvented and placed in a map of global de-signs. How then does the Western imperialimaginary manage to connect Islamophobiaand Hispanophobia as a challenge (or athreat?) to the West and to the U.S. respec-tively? I suggest some answers to thesequestions in the following pages.

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There is a common history that linksWestern and Eastern Christians. The divi-sion between Rome and Constantinople, be-tween Western and Eastern Christians, iswell known in the history of Christianity.Eastern Christianity unfolded collectively inGreece, the Balkans, and Eastern Europe.Western Christians (or Christendom) werelocated in the territory that eventually be-came secular Europe. The differences be-tween both were based on languages, theo-logical principles, and political projects. Re-ligious divisions and distinctions were

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See Madina Tlostanova in this volume.Originally printed in Trans-Cultural Trickstersin Between Empires: Eurasian Islamic Border-lands in Modernity. In

Culture of the Differencein Eurasia: Azerbaijan-Past and Present in the Dia-logue of Civilizations

. Baku, April 19-21, 2006,Texts the Reference. Academie de la Latinit.Edit by Candido Mendes. Rio Janeiro:UNESCO/Universidade Candido Mndes,2006, 217-253. Also relevant for my argumenthere is her Post-Socialist Eurasia in Civilizationof Fear:

Another

Christianity and

Another

Islam,in

Hegmonie et Civilisation de la Peur.

9eme Col-loque International, Academie de la Latinit. Al-exandria, Avriel 13-17, 2004. Textes de Referenceedite par Candido Mndes. Rio de Janeiro:Unesco/Universidad Cndido Mndes, 2004,389-412. Much of what I say here about historiesand cultures in Russia/Soviet Union, its colo-nies and relationships with Western capitalistempires, I owe to other publications and person-al conversations with Madina Tlostanova.

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complemented by ethnicity. The Slavic peo-ples are defined by their linguistic attain-ment of the Slavic languages. They inhabit-edsince the 6th century, about a centurybefore the emergence of Islamwhat is to-day Central Europe, Eastern Europe, andthe Balkans, while in the West Latin lan-guage became the trademark of Christianityand inhabitants ethnicity. Anglo-Saxons oc-cupied the territories to the west of Slavicpeoples. For the people inhabiting thenortheast of the Mediterranean Sea (fromGreece to Spain) there is not a single namebut several: Hispania, Gaul, Italia (originallyVitalia). Thus, Western and Eastern Chris-tians in religion and the variegated ethnici-ties that embraced Christianity in its variousEastern and Western versions all confrontedthe other religions of the book, Judaism andIslam.

Wide ranges of both Islamic and Chris-tian traditions defined a variety of interrela-tions, conflicts, and cooperations in the longstretch from India, to Central Asia, the Cau-casus, Eastern and Western Europe, wherepeople of Islamic or Christian beliefs, per-suasions, and institutions interacted. Allthat began to change, radically, toward theend of the fifteenth century and the begin-ning of the sixteenth century. That changewas introduced by Western Christians ex-

pulsion of the Muslims from the lands ofChristendom in Garnhata in 1492. This sin-gular event did not affect, immediately, thewide range of relations between Christianand Muslims from Spain to Central Asia andIndia. There was no CNN at the time to havesimultaneous coverage of the immediateconsequences of the events, as there was nophotographer in Granada at the very mo-ment that Christians raised the flag over theAlhambra!

The conflict between Christianity andIslam became more focused in the IberianPeninsula. The rapid rise of Castile from aKingdom to a world and capitalist empirere-mapped the long history of conflicts be-tween Muslims and Christians. It is to thisradical qualitative transformation that wemust turn our attention.

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Tariq Alis opening of

The Shadows of thePomegranate Tree

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describes a week in earlyDecember of 1499, when Cardinal Franciscode Cisneros gathered in his house, in Toledo,a group of selected knights. A few days afterthat meeting, the knights with a few dozensof soldiers began the ride to Garnhata.

1

London: Verso, 1993.

Source: The March of the Titans: A History of the White Race. Chapter 23 (http://www.stormfront.org/whitehistory/hwr23.htm). The preface reads, The invasion of Western Europe by a non-White Muslimarmy after 711 AD, very nearly extinguished modern White Europecertainly the threat was no less se-rious than the Hunnish invasion which had earlier created so much chaos. While the Huns were Asiatics,the Moors were a mixed race invasionpart Arabic, part Black and part mixed race, always easily distin-guishable from the Visigothic Whites of Spain.

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When the knights and soldiers arrived, theyentered into the houses of the Muslim elitesand confiscated their libraries. The next stepwas to make a pile of books in the centralplaza except, as Cardinal Cisneros ordered,a few books on medicine, astrology and ar-chitecture. At the end of the day, when allthe books were piled up, one of the soldiersignited the fire. Toward the end of the open-ing chapter, the story is told of a beggar whojumps into the pile and immolates himself.What is life without knowledge are hislast words. The opening chapter closes withCardinal Cisneros walking around the ashesand celebrating the final victory.

The novel tells the story of the increas-ing persecution of Muslim families in thefollowing two decades. An additional aspectof the narrative relevant for my argument isone of the final chapters of the novel when anew character is introduced. An unnamed,red-headed, young and merciless Capitanleads one of the most violent scenes at thisend to the novel, when the last Moors are ex-pelled. The unnamed Capitan is describedas a rootless soldier at the service of Carde-nal Cisneros. The novel does not end hereand has a closing chapter, parallel to andsymmetric with the opening one. In the clos-ing chapter we find that the rootless Capitanis someplace else several years later, nolonger in Garnhata, walking through hills ofthick vegetation. He is not walking alone.An unnamed local guide is accompanyinghim. They stop at some point at the top of ahill, looking down and in admiration of thespectacle of an urban center, a majestic citybuilt over and surrounded by water. Doyou know the name of this fabulous place?the Capitan asks his assistant. The city isnamed Tenochtitlan and its King is Mocte-zuma It is a very rich nation, CapitanCorts (Epilogue, 244), says the local guide.

Tariq Ali underlines, at the beginningand end of the novel, a structural and heter-ogeneous moment of history setting thestage for the foundation of the modern/co-lonial racial matrix. Islamophobia today, Icontend, is the accumulation of meaning in

building the rhetoric of modernity, from theexpulsion of the Moors to the war in Iraqand the conflict with Iran. Isnt this too bigof a claim, you may be wondering? Howev-er, and paradoxically, the end of the novelpre-announces what cannot be predicted atthat point: the emergence of Hispanophobiafive hundred years later. Lets see.

1.

In the sixteenth century, Christian theol-ogy offered a frame and a conception of

thehuman

that took a particular turn in relationto co-existing civilizations (often called em-pires), like the Mughal and the Ottoman Sul-tanates, the Russian Tzarate, or the Incanatein the New World. Christian theologicalclassification overruled, with time, all theothers and served as the basic structure forthe secular classification of races in the late18

th

and 19

th

centuries.In 1526, shortly after Charles I of Castile

and V of the Holy Roman Empire came topower, Babar (one of the descendents ofGenghis Khan) was on the road toward thefoundation of the so-called Mughal Sultan-ate. His son Akbar was the Sultan of the Mu-ghal Empire from 1556 to 1605, during al-most the same years that Elizabeth I reignedin England and Philip II, son of Charles V,reigned in Spain (1556-1598). Suleiman theMagnificent extended his period of domi-nance and the preeminence of the OttomanSultanate (1520-1566), co-existing with thereign of Charles as Holy Roman Emperor(1519-1558) and King of Spain (1516-1556).While the Mughal and Ottoman Sultanatesco-existed during the sixteenth century withthe emerging Spanish Empire, the Incanatein Tawantinsuyu and the Tlatoanate inAnahuac were destroyedthe formeraround 1548, twelve years after FranciscoPizarro set foot in the lands of Tawantin-suyu, and the latter in 1520, a few years afterHernn Cortsthe merciless red-headCapitanmoved from the coast of Veracruzto Tlaxcala and finally to Mexico Tenochtit-

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lan. Last but not least, the Russian Tzaratewas on its way to imperial expansion, afterMoscow was declared the Third Romearound 1520 and Muscovite Russia endedtheir tributary dependence with the GoldenHorde.

Thus, the point of departure of my argu-ment is that current debates about whetherrace is an eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen-tury discourse, or whether in the sixteenthcentury caste was the proper system ofclassification, both assume that the classifi-cations concocted by Renaissance men ofletters or Enlightenment philosophieswere universal. My point of departure isthat the system of classification and hierar-chies during the Renaissance or during theEnlightenment was a local one in this pre-cise sense: people in India, China, Ottoman,Tawantinsuyu, Anahuac, etc., certainly werepart of the classification but none of them,except Christian theologians, had any say inthe classification. The only possibility tothose who did not participate in the imperialorganization of knowledge was either to ac-cept how they were classified or to reclassifythemselves for their own pride but with lit-tle effect on the organization of world powerthat was at stake. Let me explain.

Discourses of difference in the Europe-an Renaissance went hand in hand with dis-courses of fear.

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There is plenty of evidenceabout Christians in Spain but also in En-gland. British travelers to the Hapsburg orAustro-Hungarian Empires expressed theirstrangeness and the discomfort vis--vis theTurks. The European Renaissance could betaken as a reference period in which severalempires (a general name extended afterthe name of the Roman Emperor instead, for

example, of Sultan or Tzar) coexisted; al-though the discourses of Christianity andlater on of political theory and politicaleconomy emerged as the dominant imperialdiscourses of Western capitalist empires.Racism went hand in hand with the histori-cal foundation of capitalism as we know ittoday.

Take the Black Legend as a good andearly example of the propagation of theMuslim menace from the Iberian Peninsu-la to the Atlantic countries, north of thePyrenees. The Black Legend is, first andforemost, an internal conflict in Europe andfor that reason I will describe it as the impe-rial internal difference. But the Black Leg-end, initiated and propelled by England,shared with the Spaniards the Christian cos-mology that distinguished itself from theMuslim, the Turks and the Russian Ortho-dox. That is, the Black Legend contributed tothe reinforcement of an imperial divide thatwas already carried out by the SpanishKingdom of Charles I and the Spanish Em-pire under Philip II.

We all know it: in1492, the Moors andthe Jews were prosecuted in the Iberian Pen-insula; Indians were discovered in theNew World and massive contingents of Af-rican slaves were transported through theAtlantic. The discovery of the New Worldposed a different problem for WesternChristians dealing with Muslims, Jews andTurks: if Jews and Moors were classified ac-cording to their belief in the wrong God, In-dians (and later on Black Africans), had to beclassified assuming that they had no reli-gions. Thus, the question of purity ofblood acquired in the New World a mean-ing totally different from the one it had inthe Iberian Peninsula. Nonetheless, the factremains that with the double expulsion ofMoors and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula,the New World brought a different dimen-sion to the classificatory and hierarchicalsystem. While in Spain Jews and Muslimsidentified themselves with those racializedlabels, there were no Indians in the NewWorld. To become Indian was a long and

1

The fundamental fear we are witnessingand experiencing today, is the latest manifesta-tion of five hundred years logic of coloniality:defending the sites of power be it Christianity orthe West. On current production of fear see Bob-by S. Sayyind,

A Fundamental Fear. Eurocentrismand the Emergence of Islamism

. London/NewYork: Zed Books, 1997 and Corey Robin,

Fear.The History of a Political Idea.

London: Oxford,2004.

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painful process for the diversity of peoples,the diversity of languages, and the diversityof memories and rituals from todays South-ern Chile to Canada. And there were noBlacks either. Africans transported to theNew World from different regions of thecontinent had different languages, memo-ries and religions, but now all of them be-came Blacks in the New World. In otherwords, whatever the system of classificationin the Iberian Peninsula and in the NewWorld, that system of classification was con-trolled by Christian Theology as the over-arching and hegemonic frame of knowl-edge. Neither the Turks, nor the Mughal,nor the Christian Orthodox in Russia hadany say in iteven less, of course, Indiansand Blacks.

Lets take a closer look at this first draw-ing of the sixteenth century scenario in theMediterranean and in the Atlantic. Threefoundational articles for the logic of the ar-ticulation of race into racism at the endof the fifteenth and during the sixteenth cen-tury are: Anibal Quijanos seminal article in-troducing the concept of coloniality; (1992);Sylvia Wynters (1992); and the joint articleby Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Waller-stein (1992).

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These three articles have shift-ed radically the perspective and conceptual-ization of race/racism from the internal his-tory of European modernity (Foucault) tothe interrelated histories of modernity/colo-niality. Several common assumptions in allthree arguments are: (a) the conceptual re-configuration of previous mutual conceptu-alizations between Christians, Moors andJews; (b) the new configuration betweenChristians, Indians and Blacks in the NewWorld; (c) the interrelations between (a) and(b); andlast but not least(d) the transla-tion of race into racism that took place in thesixteenth century that was (and still is)strictly related to the historical foundationof capitalism. The link between capital accu-mulation and a discourse of devaluation ofhuman beings was absent in co-existing six-teenth centuries empires like the Mughal,the Ottoman, the Aztec, the Inca, the Chi-

nese and the emerging Russian one. Thecomplicity between political economy andpolitical theory, based on the racialization ofhuman beings, languages, places, cultures,memories, knowledge, etc., is what charac-terizes modernity/colonialitythat is, theWest and Eurocentrism. This was the nov-elty of the sixteenth century and the histor-ical foundation of the racial colonial matrixwhose logic is still at work today. The con-tent has been changing but the logic remainsquite the same. The Black Legend should beunderstood in this scenario as the historicalfoundation of a mild form of racism amongEuropean Christians and the North-Southdivide in Europe itself. But lets first explainthe translation of race into racism and thehistorical foundation of modernity/coloni-ality.

Race was a concept that referred to alineage, particularly applied to horses.Horses had, in Arabic history, a distinctionthey did not have among Christians. Thus,the fact that in Spanish dictionaries horsesbecame the primary example of lineageand still today, pure blood is an expres-sion applied to horses with distinction that

1

Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racional-idad. En

Peru Indigena

, Vol. 13, No. 29, pp. 11-20. Lima, Per. Reproducido en Heraclio Bonilla(comp.):

Los Conquistados

. Flacso-Tercer Mun-do, Bogot, 1992. En Ingls Coloniality and Mo-dernity/Rationality. En Goran Therborn, ed.

Globalizations And Modernities

. FRN, 1999. Stock-holm, Sweden; with Immanuel Wallerstein;Americanity as a concept. Or The Americas inthe Modern World-System, in

InternationalJournal Of Social Sciences

, No. 134, Nov. 1992,UNESCO, Pars, Francia. Discutido en el Simpo-sio Mundial por el 5000. Aniversario de Amri-ca, organizado por UNESCO en Pars, enOctubre de 1992, ha sido traducido a todos losidiomas de Africa, Asia, Europa y del MedioOriente, que forman parte del conjunto de idio-mas de las Naciones Unidas; French translation,De lAmericanite comme concept, ou les Ame-riques dans le systeme mondial moderne. InLes Ameriques: 1492-1992

. Revue Internationaledes Sciences Sociales

, No. 134, pp. 617-627, No-vembre. Paris, France; Sylvia Wynter 1492: aNew WorldView:; (http://muweb.millers-ville.edu/~columbus/data/ant/WYNTER01.ANT).

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invaded the vocabulary in English andSpanish [pura sangre inglesa, pura sangreespaola)is telling about the fact that ani-mals were classified by race and peopleby ethnicity (Greek

nous

, Latin

natio)

.Ethnicity refers to a lineage of people forwhom blood is not the only factor (and Iwonder when blood became a crucial factorto redefine ethnicity), but rather memoriesand common histories, languages, rituals,everyday practices, food, songs and musicwere elements connecting a community ofpeople through history. However, whenSpanish Christians defined race on the ex-ample of horses and added the slippage to-ward the human (

Race in [human] lineages isunderstood pejoratively

, as having someMoorish or Jewish race),

they planted theseed for the historical foundation of racism

.

Rac-ism, in other words, is not a question ofblood or skin color but of a discursive classi-fication entrenched in the foundation ofmodern/colonial (and capitalist) empires.

Race in the famous Spanish dictio-nary by Sebastian de Covarrubias, is synon-ymous with blood and implied religion;that is, the

wrong

religion. In the New Worldthe situation was different. There were nopeople of the book. Christopher Columbussurmised that the people he met in the Car-ibbean were people with no religions. Lateron, Spanish missionaries in the powerfulInca and Aztec empires had difficulties infiguring out what kind of religions werethose that were so different from the threereligions of the book they were so used to.They decided that indeed people in theTawantinsuyu and Anahuac lived in spiritu-al idolatry and under guidance of the Devil.They assigned themselves the task of extir-pating idolatry. Indians, therefore, were castaside and placed in a different category fromJews and Moors. Thus, while in the IberianPeninsula conversos and moriscos des-ignated ex-Jews and ex-Moors converted toChristianity, in the New World the termmestizo was coined to identify an emerg-ing population of mixed blood, Spanish(and Portuguese) and Indian. In the process,

Blacks in the New World lost their Euro-pean identification and relationship withthe Moors. In fact, Moor was the identifica-tion of indigenous nomadic Berber people inNorth Africa that were converted to Islamaround the 7

th

century. It came to meanMuslim people from Berber and Arab de-scent. The name itself, as is well known,comes from the Kingdom of Mauri (Mauri-tania), a province in the Roman Empire lo-cated in what is today North Africa andmore specifically Morocco. Since the Mauriwere dark-skinned people from Africa,Moor was extended to African populationsbeyond the North of Africa. As Fuche pointsout, in the growing vocabulary of the BlackLegend, Spaniards were sometimes pejora-tively designated as Moors and as Black.Shakespeares Moor of Venice is indeed aBlack person, a blackamoor (type thisword in Google and click on http://imag-eevent.com/bluboi/blackamoors, and youwill understand what I mean).

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Detachedfrom that memory, Blacks in the New Worldbecame for European Christians (from theSpaniards to the British), relegated to sla-very and as slaves their memories and spir-itual belongings were not taken into ac-count. In the New World, Blacks were notMoors but Ethiopians.

2 In the Spanish andPortuguese colonies a new word wascoinedmulatto/ato designate peopleof new breed, a mixture of Spanish andBlack.

1 In England, and in Shakespeare, the mean-ing of Moor was far from being precise. SeeEmily C. Bartelss Making More of the Moor:Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashioningsof Race in Shakespeare Quarterly. 41.4 (1990):433-452.

2 Alonso de Sandovala Creole in the Vice-royalty of Nueva Granada (today Colombia andVenezuela) published during the first half of theseventeenth century, De instauranda Aethiopu sa-lute: Naturaleza, policia sagrada i profana, costum-bres i ritos, disciplina i catechismo evangelico detodos etiopes (1627, 1647). I owe this informationto Eduardo Restrepo (a graduate student in An-thropology at UNC, writing his dissertation onthis work). For a general overview of Sandovalstreatise, see M.E. Beer, http://www.kislakfoun-dation.org/prize/199702.html.

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2.

Now we have the basic elements of theracial modern/colonial matrix. Christiansplaced themselves at the centertheepistemic privilege of Theology and thetheo-politics of knowledgeboth as mem-bers of the right religion and of the hege-monic theological discourse and as WhiteSpaniards and Portuguese. On the onehand, we have Christians and confrontingthem, Moors and Jews. On the other wehave Spaniards and Portuguese and, con-fronting them, Indians and Blacks. In be-tween the first triad, we have conversos/as and moriscos/as. In between the sec-ond triad, we have mestizos/as andmulattos/as. The first presupposed reli-gion. In the second religion is a non-existingentity and so Spaniards and Portuguese inthe New World become the substitute ofChristians in the Iberian Peninsula. When,in the late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury, the concept of race is reconfig-ured, it is reconfigured in a secular frame.Thus, skin color began to replace blood as aracial marker. Consequently, the Peninsulartriad is forgotten because it was based on re-ligions and the second triad was forgottenbecause it happened in the colonies andthat was not part of European history! Thus,today, scholars revisiting the concept ofracemost of them in England, the U.S.,Germany and Francestart in the mid eigh-teenth century. H.F. Augsteins edited vol-ume Race. The origins of an Idea, 1760-1850(1996), has evidently no idea of what hap-pened before 1760, as if the idea reallyemerged in the heart of Europe (England,France and Germany) without any relationto the European colonies since the sixteenthcentury. More to the point, and surprisinglyfunny, the first chapter from Buffons Natu-ral History is on what? On the natural historyof the horse! There is no indication, even forone second, that the origin of the modern/colonial idea of race emerged when the lin-eage of the horse was linked to Christians

undesirable human beings, Moors and Jews.This double-blindness among intellectualsand scholars from and in the heart of Europeis the (unintended) consequence of the BlackLegend. How come?

What I have said up to this point was asketchy summary of the idea of race/racismas it was articulated by Christians in the Ibe-rian Peninsula. For them Theology was themaster epistemic frame. Theology offeredthe tools to describe and classify peoplewith the wrong religion and people withoutreligion. Christianity was one among otherworld religions, but it was the right one.How was that decided? Because Christiansmade the classification on the basis of Theol-ogy as the supreme Archimedean pointfrom which the entire world could be ob-served and classified. Christians, who werealso Castilians and Portuguese in the NewWorld, were among Indians and Blacks, butCastilians and Portuguese were superior tothem. Thus, Theology allowed for a concep-tualization of Humanity for which Castilianand Portuguese were taken as the exemplarof what human beings are supposed to be.But then came Elizabeth I, and with her theenactment of a discourse of race in Englandthat was mainly directed toward the Span-iards. Of course British men of letters and of-ficers of the State did not look at the Otto-man Empire with friendly eyes. The tribula-tions of Roger Ascham at the frontiers ofWestern Christians with the Ottoman Em-pire (Reports and Discourse of the Affairs inGermany, 1550) where the presence of theTurks was disturbingly felt, are a telling signof the fundamental self-inflicted fear of dif-ference. And with respect to the New World,England was more interested in followingthe Castilian example of empire buildingthan in debating whether Indians andBlacks were human beings. Thus, the dis-course of race in England, during the Euro-pean Renaissance, does not contradict theSpaniards classificationon the contrary,they made the Spaniards the target, forSpaniards were the Moors, Jews, Indiansand Blacks. In other words, the Black Leg-

ISLAMOPHOBIA/HISPANOPHOBIA 21


end is a racial discourse internal to Europe:the racialization of the Latin and CatholicSouth in the mouth and pen of the Angloand Protestant North.

The logic underlying the discourses onrace during the European Renaissance wenthand in hand with the historical foundationof capitalism as a new economic formationcould then be summarized as follows. Barto-lom de Las Casas offered a blueprint of thislogic in his classification of barbarians. Ananalysis of the logic of his classificationshows a set of underlying principles. Longafter the end of the Crusades, Christian Eu-rope continued to be under pressure fromthe expanding Ottoman Empire. The Otto-mans had impressive victories, includingthe capture of Constantinople, last outpostof the Roman Empire and spiritual center ofOrthodox Christianity. Eventually WesternChristians would mount effective counter-attacks and keep Ottoman forces out of cen-tral Europe, but for a long time the TurkishMenace would haunt European dreams. Inthe Iberian Peninsula, the racial differencebetween Christians, on the one hand, andJews and Moors, on the other, follow twodifferent principles. The Turks and theMoors were not of course the same in anyChristian mind. However, they knew thatthe Moors had an imperial Islamic past andthe Turks an imperial and bright present.Thus, calling the Turk and the Moors bar-barians was a way to construct the externalimperial difference.

By external I mean, that the differencewas with non-Western non-Christians andtherefore non-Europeans. And it was impe-rial because neither the Moors nor the Turkswere colonized in the way Indians and Blackslaves were. Moors were expelled from Eu-rope and the Turks were already in whatwould become Eurasia. The Jews were ex-pelled but most of them remained withinEurope wherein, after the 16th century theywould have a remarkable presence and atragic outcome: the Holocaust. On the char-acterization of the Jews (people without anempire or state), Christian theologians con-

structed the internal colonial difference. AsAim Csaire pointed out in his Discourse onColonialism, Jews as the internal others (thatis, marked by the internal colonial differencewithin European history itselfas distinctfrom Indians and Blacks defined by the ex-ternal colonial difference from Europeansown history) was one of the historical conse-quences of European discourse on race/rac-ism during the Renaissance. What WesternEuropeans cannot forgive Hitler for, Csaireobserved, are not the crimes against manit isnot the humiliation of man as such but thecrimes against the white man, the humilia-tion of the white man, and the fact that heapplied European colonialist procedureswhich until then had been reserved exclu-sively for the Arabs of Algeria, the cooliesof India and the niggers of Africa.1 (In-terestingly enough, to understand how colo-niality of knowledge works, we should no-tice that even Csaire forgot about the Indi-ans of the Americas.)

Internal and external are not characteriza-tions of an objective observer, from anArchimedean point of observation, who de-cides what is inside and what is outside inthe objective reality of the world! Hegelsdictum that the real is rational and the ratio-nal is real is an obvious imperial statementthat remains in the history of philosophy asthe intricate connection between a rationali-ty that corresponds with one reality: the re-ality of the imperial logic of theArchimedean point from where races andracism were constructed and continued tosurvive. Both characterizations are construc-tions of Christian theological discourses thatI am reporting in a free-indirect style. Thereis not, and cannot be, an Archimedean pointat which the observer is not implied in thedescription of his or her observation. By de-scribing the Christian point of view in a free-indirect style I am, at the same time, speak-

1 Aime Csaire, Discourse sur le colonialisme(1955). A new edition, followed by Discours surla ngritude was published by Prsence Afric-aine, Paris, in 2004.

22 WALTER MIGNOLO


ing from the perspective of those who havebeen racialized; and in doing so, I am at-tempting to de-colonize the structure andcontent of knowledge on race and racismthat has been framed by Christian theologyand by European secular science and philos-ophy. With this caveat in mind, lets thenmove to the construction of the external colo-nial difference. As you may have guessed,and that the example of Csaire makes clear,Indians and Blacks were like Jews (and asa matter of fact the comparison between In-dians and Jewsmade by Spaniards andCreoles from Spanish descentabound inthe sixteenth century). Indians and Blacks,like the Moors, were people alien to thesphere of Christianity. They werein prin-cipleexternal to Christianity. Thus, even ifthere were Black Christians coming to theNew World and, even though during thesixteenth century Indians were converted toChristianity, nevertheless, Indian Christiansand Black Christians were still considereddifferent from Spanish or PortugueseChristians. Indians became stateless peoplein Tawantinsuyu and Anahuac after the de-feat of Atahualp and Moctecuzoma. Indiansand Blacks were the target for the construc-tion of the external colonial difference.

And where shall we place the Black Leg-end in this scheme? We are back in the six-teenth century. Philip II became King ofSpain in 1556 and he would transform theKingdom he inherited from his father,Charles I, into the glorious moment of theSpanish Empire. The Hapsburg or Austro-Hungarian Empire changed its role andfunction from the second half of the six-teenth century to its demise, during WWI. Itbecame a buffer zone where the OttomanEmpire was stopped; and it became a mar-ginal region of Western Christendom nowthat the center of the world economy movedto the Atlantic, from Spain and Portugal toHolland and England. Vienna and Munichstill today conserve the garb and the magnif-icence of Imperial cities (while Moscow andIstanbul entered a process of visible decay).Elizabeth I became Queen of England in

1558; Ivan the Terrible was the Grand Princeover all the Rus since 1533 and the first Rus-sian Tzar since 1547Moscow as the ThirdRome competed with and complementedIstanbul (the second Rome) and Rome prop-er. China and Beijing were far away, butwere the center of attraction in a world thathad no center. It was Columbus and WesternChristians who dreamed of Cipango, not theChinese who desired the land of Christen-dom. For Chinese scholars and officers ofthe Ming Dynasty, Western Christendomwasif known at allin the territory of thebarbarians. It was in that scenario that Rich-ard Eden traveled from England to the lim-its with the lands of the Turk toward themiddle of the sixteenth century and wrote areport that could be considered a blueprintof the aforementioned Black Legend.

The promoter of the Black Legend em-ployed the troops already in place to de-scribe and classify people in relation to amodel or standard of Humanity and in-fringed upon Christian Spaniards, at theheight of the crisis of the Church in the mid-dle of the nineteenth Council of Trent.1 Byaccusing Spaniards of being barbarians (forthe atrocities they committed in the NewWorld), and naming them Moors, Blacksand Sarracens, no British men or women ofletters confused the Spaniards with theMoors or the Turks, much less with Blacksor Indians in the New World. The externalimperial and colonial differences weremaintained. And also the internal colonialdifference: no Englishman or Englishwom-en would fail in making the distinction be-tween a Christian and a Jew. If the previousracial distinctions were maintained, whatwas added was the internal imperial difference.

1 The nineteenth ecumenical councilopened at Trent on 13 December, 1545, andclosed there on 4 December, 1563. Its main objectwas the definitive determination of the doc-trines of the Church in answer to the heresies ofthe Protestants; a further object was the execu-tion of a thorough reform of the inner life of theChurch by removing the numerous abuses thathad developed in it.



The Black Legend inaugurated a racializeddiscourse within, that is, internal to, Westernand capitalist empires of the West. As is wellknown, the Black Legend was part of the po-litical purpose of England to displace Spainfrom its imperial domination. What theBlack Legend does not mention is that theBritish were as brutal and greedy as theSpaniards. In fact, the Black Legend waspart of an imperial conduct as well as dis-course that we have seen at work since thenin England to the present-day United States.

3.

The Black Legend is a piece of a largerpuzzle that transcends the particular mo-ment of its origin. Similar ideas filtered intothe U.S. in the nineteenth century and in-formed very popular narratives like WilliamPrescotts History of the Conquest of Peru(1847). Notice that the book was publishedone year before the signing of the Treaty ofGuadalupe-Hidalgo that gave the U.S. pos-session of a vast territory previously belong-ing to Mexico. That is, the book was pub-lished at a moment in history when historyrepeats itself and the U.S. of the nineteenthcentury, like England of the mid-sixteenthcentury, is affirming its imperial ambitions.Imperial ambitions that had already beenmapped by the discourse on race/racismduring the European Renaissance have giv-en authority to imperial powers to repro-duce themselves and to reproduce the senseof superiority of agents in a position ofepistemic authority to classify the world. Afew decades before Prescott, Hegel in Eu-rope collected the legacies of the Black Leg-end and asserted the superiority of the heartof Europe (England, Germany andFrance)that is, the three countries that inthe nineteenth century consolidated and ex-panded Western capitalism and imperial-ism.

Hegel was clear in capturing the unfold-ing of this story when he stated, at the end ofhis introduction to Lessons in the Philosophy of

History, the three sections of Europe requiretherefore a different basis of classification(pp. 102). And he went on to offer the fol-lowing geo-political map:

1) The first part is Southern Europelooking towards the Mediterranean[] North of the Pyrenees, mountainchains running through France, con-nected with the Alps that separate andcut off Italy from France and Germany.Greece also belongs to this part of Eu-rope.

2) The second portion is the heart of Eu-rope [] In this centre of Europe,France, Germany and England are theprincipal countries.

3) The third, said Hegel, consists of thenortheastern States of Europe-Po-land, Russia and the Slavonic King-doms. They came late into the series ofhistorical States, to form and perpetu-ate the connection with Asia. In con-trast with the physical singularities ofthe earlier division, these are alreadynoticed, not present in a remarkable de-gree, but counterbalance each other.

Hegel wrote about States but neglectedto mention that the States of the heart of Eu-rope constitute the new imperialism. Heclaims that the States of the heart of Europeare pure and clean, have no connection withAfrica, as in the case of Spain and Portugal(which is why it is important for him tohighlight Italy and Greece), and no connec-tions with Asia, like the northeastern States.It was in 1853 (a few years after PrescottsHistory of the Conquest of Peru), that JosephArthur, comte de Gobineau, published thenew configuration of the discourse on race/racism, the discourse that would serve thepurpose of the new Western empires. Thattreatise was titled Essai sur lingalit des raceshumaines.

The internal imperial difference that theBlack Legend put in place had diminishedits rhetoric, through time. In Europe, En-

24 WALTER MIGNOLO


gland, Germany and France are the strongplayers of the European Union. The Latinand Catholic South still form an imperialcore. England and the U.S. had joined forces,in spite of their difference, since Ronald Re-agan and Margaret Thatcher opened theway to the fatal alliance of Tony Blair andGeorge W. Bush. Five hundred years afterthe expulsion of the Moors from the IberianPeninsula and five hundred years after theinvasion and invention of America, SamuelHuntington identified the Moors as enemiesof Western civilization and Hispanics (thatis Latinos and Latinas) as a challenge to An-glo identity in the U.S. Racism dies hard andthe specter of the Black Legend is still aliveand well, helping to diminish Spaniards inEurope and criminalize Latinos and Latinasin the U.S. If Indians were the victims ofSpaniards that the Black Legend de-nounced, Black slaves were the victims ofEngland that the Black Legend contributedto hide under Spanish barbarism.

However, none of the discourses onrace/racism went uncontested. In the firstmodernity Waman Puma de Ayala in Perin the late sixteenth and early seventeenthcentury and Ottabah Cugoano in England inthe eighteenth century, after being enslavedin the Caribbean, contested imperial racial-ization. Before Gobineau and before Pres-cott, Frederick Douglas in the nineteenthcentury published (in the U.S.) Narrative ofthe Life of Frederick Douglass, an AmericanSlave, Written By Himself (1845). HaitianAntnor Firmin published in France a well-documented study against Gobineau.Firmins book was entitled De lgalit desraces humaines (1885). W.E.B. DuBois andFrantz Fanon followed suit in the Americas;and Gloria Anzalda stood up, as a Latina,to claim for women of my race the Spiritshall speak. These voices of dissent notonly contest the Black Legend but all impe-rial discourses on race and racism (includ-ing Spaniards), of which the Black Legend isone piece of the puzzle.

IV

Lets return to the White Lands Ishowed at the beginning. As it is wellknown, the process of expelling the Moorsfrom Western Christians lands (and todayWhite Held Lands), were supported byPapal Bulls authorizing the dispossession ofpagans lands and legitimizing Christian ap-propriation (see for example the edict ofPope Nicholas V, Jan 8, 1455). Thus, whenWestern Christians arrived to las Indias Oc-cidentales on Columbuss map, they alreadyhad the experience of dispossessing peoplefrom their land and legitimizing Christianappropriation. The (in)famous Requerimien-to remains as the signpost of a long processof massive land appropriation from the In-digenous population. As it is well known,the enormous diversity of the population inTawantinsuyu and Anahuac (as well as theland in between both, named Abya-Yala) aswell as the Islands renamed the Caribbe-an, all became in spite of themselves, Indi-ans. And all of them were constructed aspeople without religion and therefore vic-tims of the Devil. There was an empty spacein their souls that the Devil took advantageof, as they were empty lands that the Chris-tians began to take advantage of.

Theology and law came together in theSalamanca school, and in the pioneeringwork of Francisco de Vitoria, Relectio de Indis(1539), the justification of Christian land ap-propriation with the recognition that Indi-ans have to keep possessions of their par-cels was discussed. In this regard, Fran-cisco de Vitoria is the direct antecedent ofJohn Lockes. The difference between both isthat Vitoria not only was concerned with therelationships among theology, law, and landpossession, but he charted the principles ofinternational law that, from then on, will gohand in hand with Western imperial expan-sion. In that regard, Vitoria is also the ante-cessor of Hugo Grotiuss (1583-1645) inter-national law and Immanuel Kants cosmo-politanism. While Vitoria devised a system



of international law to legitimize land pos-session, Grotius extended it (during the firsthalf of the seventeenth century) to the open-ing of the sea. In Mare Liberum (Free Seas) heformulated the new principle that the seawas international territory and all nationswere free to use it for seafaring trade. Gro-tius, by claiming free seas, provided suit-able ideological justification for the Dutchsbreaking up of various trade monopoliesthrough their formidable naval power (andthen establishing their own monopoly).

El Requerimiento (http://www.ciudad-seva.com/textos/otros/requeri.htm) was adouble edged sword. On the one hand, it re-sponded to the complaints of many theolo-gians that protested the Spaniards treat-ment of the Indians and the way they tookpossession of their land. On the other hand,it served as a legal-theological document totake possession of Indians land wheneverthey did not comply with regulations im-posed by the King and the Church. And weknow how easy it is to fabricate violations ofthe rule and to criminalize the people thatthe dominant system needs to marginalizeor disposes. The Requerimiento, read in Span-ish and sometimes in Latin to the Indians,offered them the opportunity to surrenderand obey or to be captive and dispossessed.At this initial moment of the consolidationof Western empires and capitalism, throughthe emergence of the Atlantic economy, landpossession went together with theologicaland legal justifications. The sixteenth centu-ry was the turning point of what CarlSchmitt (1952) described as the nomos of theearth (we could invent the expression land-nomia in parallel to astro-nomia, the law ofthe stars): the appropriation of land (togeth-er with the exploitation of labor) to producecommodities for the global market, andwhat African political theorist, Siba NZa-tioula Govogui (1995), writing from the si-lenced half in Schmitts narrative, describesas the complicity between racism, interna-tional law and justifications for the appro-priation of land and exploitation of labor.1

That switch is what Quijano described as the

transformation of capital into capitalism(before the industrial revolution) and therole the invention of modern racism playedin that transformation. Such a turning pointtook place more radically during the seven-teenth century, when the Dutch, the Frenchand the British intensified the slave tradeand established the profitable Caribbeanplantations. While the Spaniards and thePortuguese concentrated on the extractionsof gold and silver (from Zacatecas in NewSpain to Potosi in Bolivia to Ouro Pretto inBrazil), the northern Atlantic economy con-centrated mainly on sugar, tobacco, coffeeand cotton. This distinction in economic ap-proaches is revealing of the chanting orien-tation of the economy and another explana-tion for the emergence of the Black Legend.

However, what is important for my pur-poses here is that in both economic configu-rations (extraction of gold and silver andcultivation of sugar, coffee, cotton and to-bacco), capitalism emergedas AnibalQuijano explained on several occasionsasthe happy complicity between several formsof labor (serfdom, slavery, handicraft andsmall commodity production, and reciproc-ity) and capital (forms of economic controlby currency or other means): that is, the con-junction of massive appropriation of land

1 It is interesting to notice that a sector of theprogressive and Marxist left is taking nowSchmitts book as the bible to tell the forgottenpart of the modern/colonial world, that ofSpain. But, still, this is half of the story, the storytold from the perspective of modernity. Schmittcannot be read, today, without reading the im-perial and racist dimensions of internationallaw. One can imagine that if a person, beyondbeing a political theorists trained in the West,takes seriously the inscription of his or her Afri-can body and the geo-politics behind it, s/he re-ally doesnt need to read Schmitt to understandthat law and land went hand in hand in themodern/colonial formation of capitalism, sincethe sixteenth century. See Siba NZatioula Gro-vogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1995; Carl Schmitt Les nomos de la terre. Dans ledroit des gens du jus publicum Europeaum (1952).Traduit de lallemand par Lilyane Deroche Gur-cel. Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 1988.

26 WALTER MIGNOLO


and massive exploitation of labor (e.g.,mainly African slaves) occurred in the NewWorld to produce commodities for the glo-bal capitalist market. From the Requer-imiento in the early sixteenth century to theintensification of labor and massive produc-tion of natural commodities (e.g., sugar),from the nomos of the earth to the exploita-tion of the land, the racialization of the pop-ulation in the New World (Indians andBlacks) was consolidated.1

And what happened to the Moors, inthe meantime?

Let me jump three centuries ahead andfocus on the end of the nineteenth and thebeginning of the twentieth century and thengo back to establish some landmarks in thelate eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Al-fred Thayer Maham (The Influence of SeaPower upon History, 1660-1783, published to-ward the end of the nineteenth century) iscredited with the invention of the geo-polit-ical region today known as the Middle East.We also know that England was also veryactive in inventing the region. Roger Ander-

son described it in his book titled London andthe Invention of the Middle East Money, Power,and War, 1902-1922 (1995). Up to that point(and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire),the Moors of early Christian imaginary hadbeen convertedsince the late eighteenthcenturyin part of the Orient. Oriental-ism as Moroccan philosopher AbdelkebirKhatibbi taught us in the early seventies andEdward Said popularized in the late seven-ties, was an invention of the second moder-nity dominated by England, France andGermany both in the economic, political andepistemic domains. Orientals took the placefor the new imperial powers and their intel-lectuals of Occidentals for Spanish and Por-tuguesea reminder that America wasnamed Indias Occidentales in all Spanishand Portuguese document. Indias Occiden-tales was the land of the Indians and Africanslaves. The Orient was the land of Arabs, In-dians, Chinese, Japanese and of course,Muslims. But at the time of secular nationstates (in which Immanuel Kant and GeorgeW. Friedrich Hegel imagined a cosmopoli-tan world and a world history), ethnicity(e.g., the Arabs) took precedence over reli-gion (e.g., Islam).

Another transformation relevant for myargument was the Industrial Revolution.The industrial revolution required naturalresources. Capitalism at that point addedto the production of natural products (ev-erything related to agriculture for humanconsumption) to natural resources (every-thing related to feeding the machines, to ma-chines consumption). The invention of theMiddle East was an operation to mark a ter-ritory, within the larger picture of the Orien-tals, rich in natural resources, particularlyoil. The history from the discovery of oil andthe invention of the Middle East to the GulfWar and the invasion of Iraq has been toldmany times and it is well know in its generalunfolding. Of interest for my argument arethe transformationsin the imaginary cre-ated and propelled by Western capitalistempires and the continuation of ChristianTheologians in the sixteenth and seven-

1 The history of the Requerimiento is notjust past history. It is very present. A recentevent, reported in the publication Indian Coun-try, on May 26, 2006, described an event in whichIndians claim the devolution of their land. AMay 18 event called Papal Bulls, Manifest Des-tiny and American Empire featured Oren Ly-ons, Faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation(Haudenosaunee); Tonya Gonnella Frichner,Onondaga Nation; Esmeralda Brown, of Pana-ma, chair of the Non-Governmental Organiza-tions for Sustainable Developments southerncaucus; and Yolanda Teran, Kichwa from Quito,Ecuador, and a member of Ecuadors NationalCouncil of Indigenous Women. In a similar vain,the so-called nationalization of natural resourc-es, by the government of Evo Morales, is part ofthe same history. Today the imperial struggle forthe appropriation of land continues through theappropriation of natural resources. Iraq is a casein point, but also the Caucasus and Central Asiawhere Western imperial countries have to con-tend with the Russian Federation (the successorof second-class empiresRussia and SovietUnionthat is in the process of reconstitution;cf. Tlostanova 2003, Janus Faced Empire) and Chi-na (an empire that went into recession duringthe period that the power of Western capitalistempires increased).



teenth centuriesof the ancient Moors intoArab nations controlling vast amounts ofnatural resources. And what is also of inter-est here is that after WWII it was no longerLondon (only) but Washington (mainly)who took the lead in public relations andwars with the Middle East. And the situa-tion was further complicated by the exist-ence of the Soviet Union. Once again: wewitnessed during the Cold War the transfor-mationwithin the colonial matrix of pow-erof the role of the Russian (Orthodox)empire in the sixteenth century. The Eisen-hower Doctrine on the Middle East, A Mes-sage to Congress (January 5, 1957) set thestage for the triangulation between the U.S.,the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Then,the Soviet Union collapsed. CondoleezzaRice expressed her concern about lacking areason for national security after the col-lapse. And then the events of 9/11 marked,by themselves as well as by the political con-sequences of the Western media, a turningpoint in the connection between economyand racism. Metaphorically, the collapse ofthe twin towers, as the symbol of a capitalistsociety, could be seen as closing a cycle thatstarted with Cardenal Cisneros burning ofthe books, as the symbol of Islamic society.Islamophobia today, it seems to me, unfoldsin the blurry sphere of the production offears between capitalist exploitation of natu-ral resources and immigrations (mainlyidentified as Arabs and/or Moslems), to thecore of capitalist imperial countries (En-gland, France, Germany, Spain and theU.S.that is, the countries more heavily in-volved in the history of capitalism).

V

Let me close with two examples that, Ihope, will bring together all of what I saidup to this point.

In the U.S. neither Arabs nor Moslemswere visible in what became known as Nix-ons ethno-racial pentagon: that is, Whites,Hispanics, Asian-Americans, African-

Americans and Native-Americans. In theethno-racial pentagon, the grouping of peo-ple by religions (common in the sixteenthcentury Christian classification) was erased.The ethno-racial pentagon is the re-articula-tion of the secular imaginary of the late eigh-teenth and nineteenth century, when racialclassifications became scientific instead ofreligious(!) Thus, declaring whether youare Christian, Islamic, Buddhist or Hinduwas not a requirement in official forms keep-ing track of nationals as well as foreigners.As far as I know, the Nixon ethno-racial pen-tagon has not been changed in official forms.But we all know that Arabs, Middle Eastern-ers and Moslems are no longer invisible. Notonly that, the racialization of the MiddleEast created an agency that is both visibleand fearedvisible and feared as whereCommunists during the Cold War. For Con-doleezza Rice, the events of 9/11 presentedthe opportunity to justify and intensify na-tional security. For contractors and the oil in-dustry, 9/11 offered an excuse to intensifyand justify the control of authority (e.g.,what happened to Saddam Hussein) and theefforts of the U.S. to demonize MahmoudAhmadinejad. Thus, we make a general dis-tinction between interacting spheres of thesocial, such as the control of the economy,the control of authority, and the control ofcivil society. We can understand how West-ern imperial configurations (e.g., politicaland economic complicities between the U.S.,France, England and France, mainly), ad-ministers fear through the control of the me-dia. Thus, the control of the civil society isthe control of subjectivity by re-inscribing,actively, a racial matrix of power that, sincethe sixteenth century, was an imperial in-strument: control of authority, control of theeconomy, control of labor, and control of thepopulation of all those who have been in-tegrated into the Christian civilizing mis-sions of the market economy and those whobecome the rest, who cannot be integratedand that could rebel.

A global political society has alwaysbeen in the making (sometimes through

28 WALTER MIGNOLO


anti-imperial reactions, other times throughclear de-colonial projects), from the Indige-nous rebellions in the sixteenth century, tothe Black Maroons fleeing from plantations,to Indians nationalists and different mani-festations of uprisings in Africa. Today, mul-tiple and diverse configurations of politicalsocieties (in their diverse local historiesthrough the encounter with Western capital-ism and racism), are coming together inpushing a common, although diverse(pluriveral and not universal) agenda: de-linking from the magic bubble of universaltotalitarianism which means engaging in arelentless de-colonial processde-coloniz-ing authority, de-colonizing the economy,de-colonizing knowledge and being. Isla-mophobia is nothing else than the re-in-scription of racial fears to generate racial ha-tred among the sector of the population (civ-il society) that the empire needs as a bufferzone.

The second example brings us back, fullcircle, to the sixteenth century on the com-mon ground of Islamophobia and Hispano-phobia. Samuel Huntington provided thenew map of the two phobias that I indicatedat the beginning. The imperial and colonialphobias, however, shall not make invisiblethe emergence of de-colonial forces.

There are enormous historical and so-cial differences in the imperial making of Is-lamophobiathe fear and the hatred to-ward a powerful and widespread reli-gionand Hispanophobiathe fear andhatred toward secular subaltern forces withmixed religious beliefs that emerged in theseventies in the U.S. without the extendedpolitical connections or support from Lat-in America. We need to understand howthe imperial imaginary constructs phobiasin the mind of civil society, but at the sametime be aware that on the other side of theimperial/colonial phobias potent de-colo-nial forces are at work, among Moslemsand within Hispanics in the U.S., and Indi-ans and Afros in South America (or the Lat-in America of the white population from

European descent). There are enormousdifferences, but we have overcome the be-lief in abstract universalism and that theproletariat or the multitude will provideone single solution for the wretched of theearth. It so happens that the wretched of theearth know that if they are proletarian orpart of the multitude, they are also imperi-al/colonial wretched, that is, racialized be-ings beings marked by the colonialwound, that is to say, the lower rank in thehuman scale of being that, built by Chris-tian theology during the Renaissance, werereactivated and maintained by secular phi-losophy during and after the Enlighten-ment.

Islamophobia and Hispanophobia, itseems to me, are entrenched in the colonialhorizon of modernity. However, de-colo-nial projects are at work, all over the world.Unveiling and uncovering the imperialfoundations and reproductions of phobias(Islamic or Hispanic) are ways of de-colo-nizing (and de-naturalizing) what imperialrationality convinced us to be real, and thatthe real is accountable by only one rational-ity.

In sum, Tariq Alis novel, The Shadows ofthe Pomegranate Tree is indeed prophetic. Itreveals the underground of Samuel Hun-tingtons fears. By linking, at the beginningand at the end of the novel, Cardinal Cisner-os hateful campaign to expel the Moorsfrom the Iberian Peninsula with the con-quest of Mexico (the expulsion of the Aztecfrom their own lands), Ali indeed connectedtwo radical heterogeneous historico-struc-tural momentsconstitutive of the racialmatrix holding together the modern/colo-nial world. This matrix is unfolding and up-dated in what we are witnessing today as Is-lamophobia and Hispanophobia.

Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge9-23-2006

Islamophobia/Hispanophobia: The (Re) Conguration of the Racial Imperial/Colonial MatrixWalter D. MignoloRecommended Citation

Walter Mignolo - Islamophobia and Hispanophobia

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