(DOWNLOAD) "Created Equal: Slavery and America's Muslim Heritage" by Cross Currents ~ eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Created Equal: Slavery and America's Muslim Heritage
- Author : Cross Currents
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Education,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 68 KB
Description
On the morning of September 11, 2001, three hundred million Americans woke up to discover that there were Muslims in America. For many, this was news. For the better-read, however, it came as no surprise; they knew there had been Muslims in America for about 80 years, ever since the arrival of the Ahmadiyya movement and the foundation of the Nation of Islam, both of which radically altered the face of Black politics in the United States. But very few Americans, educated or not, were aware that there had been Muslims in the United States since long before these states were united. Still less did they realize, as they stared at the carnage on their television screens contemplating the harm which these Muslims meant to American freedoms, that the earliest Muslims in America had, in their own way, done a great deal to secure those very freedoms. All America now knows it has Muslims, but it still does not know that it has a Muslim heritage. A man named Estevanico Dorantes is often credited as being the first Muslim to enter what is now the United States, arriving in Florida in 1527. Estevanico was a Morisco--a Muslim converted to Christianity by the Spaniards and the Portuguese. In America, 1492 is remembered as the year in which Columbus re-discovered the New World, but in Spain, it is remembered as the year in which Granada fell to Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, marking an end to eight centuries of Muslim rule. All during the age of exploration, Iberia was teeming with Muslims, who came under increasing pressure to convert to Christianity both in Spain and Portugal. Estevanico came from a Portuguese enclave in North Africa called Azamor and was raised as a Muslim. In 1513, however, in his early twenties, he was both enslaved by the Portuguese and converted to Roman Catholicism. It was in this fashion that he became attached to the party of Cabeza de Vaca as a servant and went on after Florida to explore much of modern New Mexico and Arizona before being killed by Zuni natives. Everything he explored, however, he explored (at least nominally) as a Christian.