Abdullah Hakim Quick – Islam in Spanish – New Muslim Corner
AI: Summary ©
The Prophet Muhammad's final form of Islam was the final form, taught throughout history, and was a great opportunity for leaders to accept it. The spread of Islam across various regions and the rise of Islam in North Africa have led to struggles with acceptance of the new Roman Empire. The cycle of rule lasted several years, with the majority of Muslims exited or killed, and the Atlantic Union was a major success for the region. The art program in Puerto Rico and a new coffee factory in Colombia have opened up major successes for the region.
AI: Summary ©
Alhamdulillahi rabbil alameen, wa salli wa sallim ala
sayyid al awwaleen wa al aakhireen, nabiyyina muhammadin
wa alihi wa sahbihi, wa barak wa salam.
All praise is due to Allah, Lord of
the worlds, and peace and blessings be upon
our beloved Prophet Muhammad, the Master of the
first and the last, and his family, his
companions, and all those who called to his
way to the Day of Judgment.
As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullah.
Alhamdulillah, this is the continuation of our New
Muslim Corner, and the intention of this session
is really to have a place where people
who are interested in Islam, those who have
recently embraced Islam, or those who are reviving
their faith, can come in a comfortable atmosphere
and take on different topics and even ask
questions that they may not get a chance
to ask in public events.
And this week is a special class because
of a journey that I took last weekend,
and the importance, sort of a debriefing, you
know, for the community here.
And again, Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him,
was, we are taught, the last of a
series of messengers.
Messengers and prophets came to every nation and
every tribe.
Prophets came to China, India, Africa, Europe, South
America, the Middle East, all over the world.
Every major nation and tribe, at one point,
received a messenger who taught them the belief
in one God, and that humanity is one
family.
So this is the concept of Tawheed.
And also that knowledge itself should not be
broken up into religious knowledge and secular knowledge,
but knowledge is also united.
So this united concept was being taught in
its final form by Prophet Muhammad ibn Abdullah
over 1400 years ago in the Arabian Peninsula.
Again, this is the final form of Islam.
We don't believe that this is the first
form, because you can find monotheism throughout the
world.
And he taught the belief in the Creator.
He broke down the difference between races, tribes,
classes of people.
And because of that, he was attacked.
And his followers were insulted, and sometimes tortured.
And so they were forced to migrate, and
we have been studying his life, and we
saw the migration to a city now called
Medina.
And after a period of struggle and interchange
with the people of Arabia, Islam had spread
all over the Arabian Peninsula.
And the Prophet, peace be upon him, sent
letters to kings.
The great empires at the time, there was
the Roman Empire, Byzantine, that's the Greek Orthodox,
Constantinople.
There was the Persian Empire, it's the Saned
Dynasty.
There was also the great Aksumite Empire of
Ethiopia.
And according to the historians at that time,
the fourth of the great powers was in
China.
So these four powers of the world, letters
were sent to the kings and other people
as well.
And it basically was an invitation to accept
Islam.
That the final form had come, and this
was a great opportunity for these leaders to
accept.
And many of the leaders were neutral, some
were positive, and they actually accepted as in
the case of the Ethiopian ruler, Najashi, Asuma
Asama Najashi.
Some were hostile.
So in the case of the Persian Empire,
the Persian Shah or the leader, he tore
up the letter and he started hostilities.
The Roman Emperor also started hostilities, and 100
,000 warriors came down to the northern part
of Arabia.
In the life of the Prophet.
And so the Prophet, peace be upon him,
he mobilized the forces.
They went north to meet the Romans, but
the Romans changed their mind.
And what they found out is that the
Byzantine Empire had become corrupted.
And the people wanted a way out.
And so after the death of the Prophet,
peace be upon him, they continued the struggle
with the Roman Empire and they defeated them.
They defeated the Persians also on the eastern
side.
And after a short period of time, Muslims
entered into North Africa.
So this would be the 7th century.
And this is the city of Cairo.
And at that time, their leader, Amr ibn
al-As, one of the great companions, led
the Muslims in.
And surprisingly enough, according to non-Muslim historians,
the major population in the country was made
up of what was called Coptic Christians that
were following the Byzantine Roman Empire.
And there were also Aryans.
Aryan Christians were those who refused to accept
the concept of Trinity.
But they were still Christians.
And the Coptics and the Aryans looked at
Muslims as a friendly force.
And they looked at the Romans as a
foreign force that had subjugated them and were
forcing them to change their way of life.
And so it was a popular revolt in
a sense.
And the Muslims were able to overcome the
Romans.
And so this is sort of what that
part of the world looked like.
It shows the spread of Islam.
And so you'll see that within a hundred
years, the green, the dark green color, Islam
had spread to all of these regions.
And this is something which never happened before.
It's not a large conquering army.
It's not weapons of mass destruction.
There's no major means of communications.
But because of the message and because of
the corrupt conditions in these empires, Islam spread
rapidly.
So you see North Africa.
It went right across North Africa.
And it is reported that one of the
Tabi'i or followers of the followers, Uqba
ibn Nafiyah, he actually rode his horse to
the Atlantic Ocean.
And he looked across and said, if I
knew there was land across you, I would
take the message across.
And so the whole of North Africa at
the time had come into Islam.
This is a condensed map.
And this is Amal Abbas entering into Cairo,
into Cairo, Egypt.
And then right across, the Muslim forces went
right across.
And the people who were the indigenous at
the time were the Amazigh.
They're called Amazigh.
But the word that became popular from the
Romans was Berbers.
But Berber is not really a good word,
although they're known by this.
But their name is Amazigh.
So they are the original inhabitants of this
area.
And of course, their civilization goes back thousands
of years because they're connected to the Sahara
Desert and then to other parts of Africa.
So this is ancient society.
And they began to enter into Islam, especially
when an individual named Musa bin Nusayr.
And this is a picture of him on
the right.
He was sent from Damascus, Syria, to be
the governor of North Africa.
I'm giving you a condensed version of a
long history.
And so Musa, whose father was originally a
Christian, because bin Nusayr means the son of
a Christian, and his father was a Christian
who embraced Islam.
And so he had a sensitivity about him,
and he allowed the Berber people to come
in completely upward mobility, and they saw in
Islam liberation.
And so, but north, across the straits there
in the north, which is the Iberian Peninsula,
it is called Spain and Portugal.
In that part of the world, according to
all of the historians, the population itself, the
Vandal population and the Gothic, they were being
subjugated by a leader by the name of
Roderick, who represented the Roman Empire.
So really, it was a struggle in this
region between monotheism and Trinitarianism.
That's really what the struggle was.
It's not an ethnic struggle.
Because in Spain itself, surprisingly enough, from back
in the year 586, there were Jewish people
who had fled the area of now Palestine,
Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar, and the Babylonians.
They fled that area 586 BC.
They were living in Spain, and they kept
their belief in one God.
There were also the Christians who refused to
accept the Trinity, who were living there as
well, and they were suffering under terrible taxes.
And so, one of the Christian leaders, whose
name was Ilyan, or Julian, he lived in
a place called Ceuta, and Ceuta is the
tip of Morocco.
It's right where Morocco meets Gibraltar, that point
right in the tip.
He was a Christian, but he was allowed
to maintain his faith, and he lived underneath
the rule of the Muslims.
And he wanted his daughter to have an
education, a top education, so he sent her
to a city called Toledo, which is in
Spain.
And according to our records, she was raped
by Roderick, and Julian, he wanted revenge.
So he went to Musa bin Nusayr.
And Musa bin Nusayr said that we have
no business to go across the straits.
We don't need this territory.
We have enough territory, because North Africa really,
maps do not do justice to the African
continent.
This map also, it's sort of squeezed because
of the PowerPoint, but maps do not do
justice to this area.
It's a huge area, very fruitful area.
Most of the Roman agriculture was in North
Africa, not in Italy.
Their best coliseums were actually in North Africa
as well, and you can still go to
Tunisia and Algeria and see Roman coliseums.
So finally, Julian, he convinced Musa to go
across, that he was sincere, and he needed
to liberate this territory because the people who
believed in one God were crying out for
help.
So Musa then sent, this is his daughter
there in the picture, so Musa sent his
general, that's the Iberian Peninsula, and he sent
his general Tariq ibn Ziyad, Tariq ibn Ziyad,
very famous person.
He was a Berber, he was not an
Arab, and a great leader, fluent in the
Berber language and in Arabic as well, and
he led his forces across, and they met
the Trinitarian forces.
They were outnumbered, they had about 17,000,
and the Trinitarians had about 100,000.
But the Muslims were successful, and they defeated
the Trinitarians, and everywhere Tariq went, the people
opened up their doors, everywhere he went.
And he was so popular that the area,
you'll see on the map where it says
Gibraltar, right?
And we used to say before here in
America and Canada, this building is as strong
as the rock of Gibraltar.
They don't use that statement now, times have
changed.
But what that meant, this, the rock of
Gibraltar, it's right there at the straits between
the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
But Gibraltar, from Arabic it meant Jebel Tariq,
so Jebel means mountain, and Tariq is his
name, so the mountain of Tariq, Jebel Tariq
becomes Gibraltar.
You see how language changes, right?
And so Tariq went forth, and Musa joined
him, and they were able to take over
the whole of Iberian Peninsula.
Short period of time, two years, because everybody
opened up their doors.
But they needed central leadership.
Tariq eventually left, and Musa left, went to
Damascus, and they needed leadership, and so by
the mercy of Allah, we believe a leader
came, let me get this straight, a leader
did come from Syria, there was a power
struggle in the Muslim world, and he was
the last of a great dynasty called Umayyads,
and his name was Abdurrahman ibn Muawiyah.
He was a great leader, and he united
the whole of Spain and Portugal, and he
chose as his capital Cordoba, that was his
capital, and he was a tireless leader, he
got scientists to come and they planted citrus
fruits, they planted rice, they organized the society,
and they had what is called Convivencia, where
Jewish, Muslim, and Christian lived together.
Nobody was forced to accept Islam, every child
was allowed to have a free education, and
it was a bustling society, and so because
of this, and it's now coming forth now,
people are realizing that actually the majority of
the population who accepted Islam in the next
few hundred years was not Arabs who came,
it was not Africans who came over the
straits, but it was the Spanish people themselves
who embraced Islam, and they made such progress,
especially in Cordoba itself, by the year 1000,
they had running water, they had lighted streets,
they had great universities, millions of books, and
the renaissance of Europe, Europe actually owed its
renaissance to what happened there, because the European
scholars came down and studied, took the knowledge
back, and that was the rebirth of knowledge
in Europe, after the Roman Empire had fallen
apart.
But the reality is, and one of
the great scholars, Ibn Khaldun, he looked at
history, and he said if you look at
dynasties of people in societies, you'll see that
if you have certain morality, the first generation
is strong, and if they become too rich
too fast, the next generation gets weaker, and
the next generation gets weaker.
So sometimes within a hundred years, a dynasty
could fall, and so wealth poured in.
Again, this is a hundred years, 700 years
actually of history.
Disputes between people, okay?
Division came amongst the Muslims, this is a
long history.
Division came, and they started losing their territories.
The Crusader forces came, the Crusades were not
only from Europe into the Middle East, but
there was a crusade from Germany, France, Italy,
to Spain.
There were two crusades.
So the Crusaders came and started to take
back, or to take land throughout northern Spain.
So the Muslims were divided into, at that
time this is around 1086, so the Muslims
were divided into 22 emirates, sounds like today,
the Emirates, right?
So they had 22 emirs, their leadership was
weak, and they weren't sure what to do,
and so they decided to call for help,
and they called, their leader called on al
-Mu'tamid in Seville, the city of Seville, you
see it down toward the bottom.
They called for help in North Africa, and
a great group came across.
This group is known as al-Murabitun.
Al-Murabitun were made up of North African,
West African Muslims.
They were really serious about their faith, and
the agreement was that their leader, whose name
was Yusuf ibn Tashfin, that he would come
and defend the Muslims against the Crusaders, and
then he would return.
And so he did this, but the Andalusians
were so weak that after a year, they
called him back again.
He defeated the Crusaders, and after another year
they called him back again.
And so he said, if they will not
defend the borders of Islam, then you need
to take everything.
So they became the leaders of Andalusia, North
Africa, and West Africa as well.
Their capital is Marrakesh, right?
Marrakesh.
You might know this present-day Morocco.
Okay, that was the capital of al-Murabitun.
And so this Ibn Khaldun shows what happens
to dynasties and groups.
So this cycle happened a number of times,
a number of times there in Spain.
781 years Muslims were in Spain.
How old is America?
1776, right?
So that's only 220 something years.
781 years the Muslims were there.
The majority of the population had accepted Islam.
Great achievements, science, all types of things were
happening there in Andalus.
But because of that division, squabbling, fighting over
power, tribalism, the forces of the Trinitarians, they
returned.
Okay, and this is a picture of the
Jami Mosque of Kortaba that was built by
Abdur Rahman al-Dakhil.
And then the other leaders, they also improved
on this Jami Mosque.
It was one of the wonders of the
world.
And this is important and I want to
show you that you see the arches there
with the red and white color?
So this was one of the wonders of
the world.
And finally, because of their weakness of the
Muslims, it was taken.
And when the Christians took it over, some
of the fanatical Trinitarians wanted to destroy the
whole building.
But the king, he said, you can destroy
if you want, but you can never build
this again.
You will never replace this.
So why are you destroying this?
And so they built a cathedral in the
middle of it.
So if you go to Kortaba now, you'll
see the shell of the masjid, and in
the middle is a cathedral.
Okay?
And that is the cycle of rule.
That is what happened to the Muslims.
Now, as the Trinitarians started to take over
the country, this is a long period of
time.
As they took over the country, they did
now what is called a type of ethnic
cleansing.
You see these terminologies now we're learning from
Palestine, what's happening in Palestine?
Ethnic cleansing, extermination, genocide.
Okay, this is one of the worst documented
or best documented cases of genocide in history
that you can actually see it.
There's been other terrible times, but this one
here is really documented time.
Why?
Because the Spanish then, when they took over
the territories, they made a process.
And this process of takeover culminated in what
they call the Inquisition, where they would force
you to accept their religion.
So the process began where they would take
over an area and they start like torturing
people.
And these are actual drawings of the torture
methods used.
They say like if you're a Christian that
believes in one God, if you're Jewish who
believe in one God, or if you're Muslim,
are you going to accept three?
And if you don't, they start like torturing
you, right?
So the torture methods that you see used
in the world today, they're not new.
And they actually perfected these torture methods in
a terrible way to force people out of
their faith.
And it's reported that somewhere around 2 million
Jews were exiled or exterminated during this time.
And 3 million Muslims also suffered during this
time.
Now, the worst, of course, the worst thing
that they could do to you is burn
you alive.
And it got so bad that when they
first took over the territory, they made Muslims
wear special badges and special clothes and you
had special facility.
That's apartheid, right?
Like South Africa is also what you see
happening in Palestine as well.
And so they need to classify the Muslims.
So they use this term, the Moors, Moros,
which come from Latin, which means dark-skinned
people, colored people, right?
Now, have you ever heard like even Shakespeare
wrote a book about the Moors, right?
You know, Othello, it's a famous book.
They say the Moors of Spain.
Who are the Moors of Spain?
Moors is not a language, it's not a
tribe.
It just means people of color.
You see how you take away the identity
of a group, right?
This is how you're conquering the group.
So they became Moors and Mudadjir were also
the Muslims who were like domesticated impostors.
Some of them who would just hide.
They were still Muslims, but they submitted completely
to the rule.
Then they took it another stage and they
said, if you don't accept Catholicism, we're going
to burn you alive.
So the Muslims who couldn't take, they couldn't
run away, escape, many people escaped to North
Africa and all over the Muslim world.
But the ones who could not escape, they
accepted Catholicism and they called them Morescos.
Morescos, baptized Muslim.
So on the outside, he's Catholic, but on
the inside, Muslim.
These are called Morescos.
The Jewish people were called Morenos, baptized Jews.
Now, you see this word Morenos?
You look at Latin America and South America,
I'm not going to say who it is,
but you're going to see this name Moreno
pop up, right?
People's names, right?
So you learn these terms, you start learning
names of places.
So these were Jewish people who were Catholic
on the outside and Jewish on the inside.
There's documented proof that Christopher Columbus himself was
Jewish.
And he was providing a way across the
ocean.
Part of the reason why they went, to
leave, because they wanted a new place to
live.
Not just voyages of discovery.
There's a political reason why he did that.
Also to get gold for the Spanish.
And finally in 1492, what is the date
of 1492?
Does anybody know what that means?
What does that mean to you?
Right.
Christopher Columbus discovered, I mean I know you
put your hands up, because how can you
discover a place when there's 73 million people
living there, in the Americas?
But that's what we remember this for.
You know what the important thing of that
is?
That is the year the Muslims surrendered.
They had been living in Granada, in the
south, and they surrendered to the Catholic King
and Queen, Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492.
And this is a depiction of Abu Abdullah,
who surrendered Granada to the Catholic King and
Queen.
And so the Muslims left out.
And they were refugees.
They were all over North Africa.
They were in Turkey.
They got on the boats.
And you'll see many, they call them pirates,
right?
But some of them were corsairs.
They were actually fighting the Ottoman Turks against
the Catholics.
One famous family called Barbarossa.
Barbarossa family.
This is one of the, this is a
depiction of Barbarossa.
He was actually a European who had embraced
Islam, and he became a great commander on
the sea.
Barbarossa.
There was also another one called Jack Sparrow.
And Jack Sparrow, see on the left side?
That's him.
You know the one in the middle?
That's Johnny Depp, right?
Pirates of the Caribbean, right?
This is a play.
This is a movie version of what actually
happened.
Jack Sparrow was not a clown like Johnny
Depp.
He was a great corsair, a great leader
on the ocean.
Okay?
So the Barbary pirates, it was a struggle
that went on.
It went on in the Mediterranean.
It went on, you know, across the Atlantic.
It was an international struggle of warfare that
was going on.
And in this time, they were so afraid
of morescos that what they did with the
people of Spain, they said any of moresco
people, if they look at somebody and the
person says, well, I'm a Catholic, and they
look at you and see something different.
Okay?
If they find anything that you did wrong,
if you took a bath on Thursday night,
they'll put you in jail or burn you
alive.
Do you know, does anybody know why Thursday
night?
Because that's actually Friday.
And we take a bath on Juma, right?
On a Friday.
That's our holy day.
So even if you're a Catholic, eating pork,
drinking wine, but you take a bath on
Thursday, that's too much Islam left inside of
you.
And they would burn you, they burn you
alive.
Oh, sometimes what they might do, we're not
going to burn you, we'll put you on
the boats.
And you can work as galley workers on
this boats and go across the ocean.
Okay?
And he said that anybody, any man who
had a circumcision, if they find out you
had a circumcision, they'll also put you on
the boat.
That's too much Islam left, right?
So what happened when the Spanish finally took
over, Portuguese and Spanish, when they came to
the Americas, it was actually a continuation of
their conquest.
And it went all over the world.
You'll see the Portuguese in Brazil, and you'll
see the Spanish coming in.
And when Cortes reached Mexico, he called it
El Cairo.
They were looking at this as fighting Muslims.
So this is an important point.
Because part of what they were doing was
converting the population of the Americas, that's the
native population of South America, Central America, United
States, wherever it was, convert them to Catholicism.
Remember the same Inquisition, they were carrying this
mentality with them.
And so they continued on into these areas.
And in the 16th century, the Cardinal Jimenez,
who was the Inquisitor, he actually complained in
the 16th century that Islam was being practiced
in the Americas.
He complained about this.
And there's a case in 1560 in Peru
of Lope de la Peña and his brother
Luis Solano.
They were executed because they were practicing Islam
in Peru.
So Muslims were there in the Americas.
And the same thing Muslims went through under
the Catholics, the people of the Americas also
were going through this as well.
And they were being exterminated and killed in
the same way.
And so the interaction was there between the
two.
What is the important thing?
This interaction never died.
And in the 1970s, in America, a group
of Puerto Rican teenagers who were struggling revolutionaries
in the 60s in America, struggling for their
liberation, they accepted Islam and they opened up
the first Spanish language mosque and this Latino
specific Islamic organization, Alianza Islamica.
So they opened this up in New York
City and began a movement.
And so Latino people were now coming into
Islam, especially first in the northeast corner of
America.
There was the Benu Saqqa in Newark.
There were some different groups, but Alianza Islamica
was the most popular and well known.
And these are some of the buildings that
they actually controlled in New York City.
And they were very much involved in the
Muslim society, but they were also fighting for
liberation.
They were part of a liberation group in
the 60s.
There was a black revolutionary group called Black
Panther Party, who was struggling for liberation.
But amongst the Puerto Ricans, there was the
Young Lords.
So they were also struggling for liberation.
And so this struggle continued.
And then, Alhamdulillah, in the southwest of America,
another movement now starts.
And this took shape in Houston, Texas, especially
with a Colombian family.
And this is in the area of Houston
called Alif, which was a really tough section
of Houston.
And they were able to organize themselves and
open up a center.
And in the year 2016, they had an
opening.
And people came from all over America to
this place.
And then, so this they call Centro Islamico.
And they started Islam in Spanish.
And this was online.
Now it's a different, it's a digital age
now.
So they were online.
And so because of their expertise, the brother
on the right, Mujahid Fletcher, is an expert
in film production there.
And his wife just to his right, Sakina,
she is an architect.
You know, she's a graphic artist.
The brother Alex, next, he is also a
film producer and whatnot.
And Mujahid's father, they took four months and
they translated the whole Quran in an audio
sense, and they put it online.
And they began to teach classes.
And they produced 500 Spanish audio books.
And they reached over 300 TV stations.
They were aired, you know, all over the
Spanish speaking world.
You can still go to the place now
online, Islam in Spanish, put it in, and
you'll still see the work that they're doing.
Alhamdulillah, just last weekend, I had been working
very much with them.
I was running tours to Spain before, to
go to Granada and Cordova.
And so I arranged that Mujahid and Alex
came with me.
And so we had been working together about,
you know, the history of that region.
And Alhamdulillah, they finally had a grand opening.
This was last weekend.
And so you can see that beautiful logo
there.
Sister Sakina was actually the one that did
this.
So they had a grand opening there.
City officials were there.
It was a major event, over 600 people
came to this event.
And this now is Diaspora Latinos.
So it's not only the more Puerto Rican
you'd find in the Northeast, but this includes
El Salvador, it includes Colombia, Venezuela, you know,
people from all over the Spanish speaking diaspora.
They came out in large numbers.
And what they did is a major achievement.
So this is inside their center now.
When you go inside, and you can see
the graphic arts that they have there.
And this in the middle is what is
called a magic wall.
Okay, so this is a cutting edge.
There's only, this is one of the first
magic walls in the United States.
Nobody, this is a digital information graphic center.
Now, remember Cordoba, the mosque, that's their building.
They transported that.
And they made the architecture inside their Islamic
center as similar to what is there in
Cordoba in Spain.
And this is the Jumu'ah prayer, which
I had the opportunity to lead.
And you can see now when you're inside
there, you are in, you know, a major
center state of the art that is there.
And it's bringing alive that spirit of Cordoba,
bringing it alive there.
This is the magic wall.
This is a big thing.
Nobody has this in America.
A Hungarian team flew in and built this.
So now it's graphic art.
So five people can work at once.
If you see a picture, you put your
finger on it, and it opens up information.
So this is the latest cutting edge in
work, graphic work that is there.
They also opened up a Colombian cafe, because
Colombian coffee is like really famous coffee, right?
And Mujahid's father used to work in the
Colombian plantations in Colombia.
He's an engineer.
And they had an exhibit there in Colombia.
And they actually showed that the original coffee
came into the Caribbean region.
They were Yemenis.
Because coffee started in Ethiopia, and then it
went to Yemen.
It was Yemenis who came across on a
boat, and they brought coffee beans with them,
and they planted them in Colombian soil.
And now you have Colombian coffee, which is
one of the best coffees in the world.
And so you can see there, you know,
symbols united under one God.
And it is a major achievement that they
have.
The brother on the left, brother Isa Parada,
he is from El Salvador, and he is
an Islamic scholar.
He is a graduate of Medina University.
The Juma last week before me was another
scholar from Guatemala, who's also an Islamic scholar.
There's a Panamanian who's an Islamic scholar.
And so this is a major breakthrough that
is happening.
Alhamdulillah, it's following that spirit of resistance that
was there in Spain.
It didn't die.
It continued on with this amazing project.
So I want to open up the floor
for any questions.
We're restricted by time a little bit, because
at 8 o'clock they're going to call
the adhan, and then we go for our
Isha prayer there.
So the floor is open for any questions
that anybody has concerning this project and concerning
Islam in Spain and Portugal.
Al-Andalus.
The floor
is open.
Yeah, so it says that, is there evidence
to show that the fall of Muslims in
Al-Andalus helped to start the Atlantic slave
trade?
It did in a sense, because when the
Muslims lost authority, that's when the European powers
came up.
And the Spanish, the Portuguese, and eventually the
British and the French, they wanted wealth.
They wanted power.
And when they realized that America was not
India, and it was fertile land, so they
needed a way to get fast, cheap production.
So they captured people from West Africa and
took them across as slaves.
So you can say in a sense that
the fall of Islam in Granada did open
up the door for what we now know
as the settler colonial project.
This is when the door actually opened up.
So 1492 is a very serious date, not
just for Columbus, because he was lost.
Questions?
Anything else online?
Yes, those who want to come back, we
will come back and finish and have some
discussion, and whatever else we can have.
And if somebody's online, if you want to
wait, you can.
But the official online broadcast will end at
this point, but we'll continue the class, inshallah,
after the Salah.
So have a safe journey home for those
who are online.