In the 2 1/2 decades since the city of Berkeley proclaimed Columbus Day to be Indigenous Peoples Day, the idea has taken hold in five states and scores of American cities.
It’s particularly popular among the pseudo-intelligentsia cloistered in colleges and universities, where the choice between whether to celebrate Columbus Day or Indigenous Peoples Day has been conveniently dumbed down to a straw-man argument between celebrating the colonization and genocide of native peoples versus honoring the culture of Native Americans.
Whenever I’m confronted with the latest left-wing affront in this vein, I like to perform a thought experiment: I try to imagine what alternatives history might have been thrown our way if a given historical development did not happen the way it did. For example, let’s imagine a world in which Spain’s “Catholic Kings,” Ferdinand and Isabel, had not triumphed in 1491 in Spain’s centuries-long reconquest of Iberia from its Muslim invaders.
Instead of Ferdinand and Isabella holding court in Spain, the wayfaring Christopher Columbus might have given his TED Talk about circumnavigating the globe to Emir Muhammed XII in Granada’s Alhambra Palace. After all, he’d been giving his pitch to various crowned heads before he tried the Catholic monarchs.
The emir might have listened with equal parts fascination and skepticism to Columbus’s revolutionary idea that the empires of the East could be reached by sailing west. Talk about a disruptor! Existing trade routes would become as obsolete as bookstores after Amazon. Perhaps the emir would also have tossed the dice and backed Columbus. In turn, Columbus would have claimed the New World in the name of the Emirate.
Emir Muhammed XII was heir to a tradition of colonization. Beginning in the 7th century, the Umayyad Dynasty began the spread of Islam westward from the Arabian Peninsula across North Africa and into Spain and eastward throughout the Middle East and into South Asia. This was done not through proselytizing but rather through conquest. Instead of Western civilization spreading its tentacles in North and South America, Islamic civilization would have taken root in the New World.
Western culture had, and has, its flaws. But it also gave us the Enlightenment and the ideals it spawned of justice, liberty, equality, and reason. The Enlightenment helps explain why the West, and the West alone, has been modern history’s greatest incubator of scientific progress and human advancement based on prosaic indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, inventiveness, economic growth, social welfare, and so on. For a glimpse of how North and South America might have fared under Islamic civilization, the best guide is the United Nations Development Programme’s landmark 2002 Arab Human Development Report, published when my friend, Sir Mark Malloch Brown, ran it.
The report notes that in 2002, Spain’s GDP was larger than that of all the Arab League nations combined. It chronicles scientific, economic, literary, and human rights stagnation throughout the Arab world and cites structural barriers to human progress as a consequence of Islamic societies’ inherent stasis.
From the report, we can project the contours of contemporary North and South America under Islamic colonial rule for the past 526 years. Instead of the dynamic, multi-ethnic, religiously varied societies that span the twin continents, there would be Sharia and dwarfed economies such as those of the Arab League. Women, denied the most basic rights, would be little more than chattel. Honor killings would be routine. Religious minorities would be persecuted, and LGBT people would be jailed or executed. Academics would have their freedom constrained, far fewer books would be published and many banned, and there wouldn’t be as many patents and inventions. Doubt this? Consult the report.
That’s just the start.
The independence and freedom of nomadic tribes would also have been curtailed, just as they were as Islam spread through North Africa and indigenous people were made subservient to local emirates. Competing empires such as the Aztecs would have met similar, and possibly worse, fates than they did under Spanish colonization.
Instead, the Spanish, French, and British empires colonized North and South America, along with Dutch and Swedish influence, especially in the Caribbean. The Enlightenment arrived a few hundred years after the first colonizers and spread unevenly across the New World. But by and large, Enlightenment values shaped the histories of North and South America and created cultures where the ideals were freedom, equality, and liberty for all human beings. It has taken centuries to put these ideals into practice, and they still flourish unevenly throughout the societies of North and South America, but they are a remarkable achievement that has happened in the Americas because Ferdinand and Isabella backed Columbus.
Lacking the aspirational values of the Enlightenment, Islamic colonizers would never recognize the colonized as possessing equal human rights — not even today. The evil of slavery would have lasted a century longer. The Ottoman Empire didn’t abolish slavery until 1924, and Saudi Arabia and Yemen only banned it in 1962 because of pressure from the United Kingdom. In fact, slavery might persist today if the wealth of the New World had flowed to the Emirate of Granada instead of the European empires. The supremacy of Western civilization over the past 500 years owes greatly to the economic boost from Columbus’s opening of the New World to Europeans.
Of course, we could also try to imagine the indigenous people of the Americas never being discovered by the outside world, but that is a much more difficult thought experiment. That is because the history of humanity is one of migration, conquest, colonization, assimilation, and cultural appropriation — what used to be called the ebb and flow of civilizations. Such a world might have been dominated by Aztec colonizers from Tierra del Fuego to the Aleutian Islands. Would an Aztec Empire be preferable to what exists in North America and South America now?
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Perhaps the civilization that Columbus brought with him to the Americas is much less abhorrent than its detractors would have us believe. Look at how many people have immigrated to the Americas, and to the United States in particular, over the half a millennium since 1492. They came, and are still coming, from cultures all over the world. A million people immigrate to the U.S. legally every year.
Hence why, on Oct. 14, I’ll be celebrating Columbus’s daring voyages of discovery.
John B. Roberts II is a former political strategist and executive producer of The McLaughlin Group. His latest book is Reagan’s Cowboys: Inside the 1984 Reelection Campaign’s Secret Operation Against Geraldine Ferraro. His website is www.jbrobertsauthor.com.
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Publish date : 2024-10-10 01:15:00
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