Spanish explorers applied their Muslim-monster template to American Indians

Evidence

European explorers used a language steeped in anti-Muslim rhetoric, which insisted that Arabs, Turks, Moors, and other Muslims were non-human. The Spaniards had a particularly strong anxiety surrounding Muslims ( Moriscos) rooted in the racial purity laws that emerged after the Reconquista. Muslims who managed to remain in Spain had to contend with the outlawing of Muslim practices, dress, and even the use of Arabic. For Spanish explorers, the people they encountered in the Americas were not people, but monsters of Plinian and medieval varieties, including Muslim creatures. Spain was “the land of perennial crusading.” Columbus believed that the Central American island he encountered was Scythia, a place long believed by Europeans to be inhabited by monstrous races. Conquerors and settlers thought of Indians as monsters, as seen in the genocidal campaigns launched against them, which included rape, torture, dismemberment, and murder. For instance, when Taino individuals failed to fulfill their obligation of producing a Hawk’s bell full of gold biannually, “they would be severely punished, up to and including their hands cut off which surely meant bleeding to death.” These crimes were in part due to the medieval mythologies in vogue at the time, including the crusading mentality, which was enforced far beyond the confines of Europe and the Mediterranean. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 568

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s guiding question on image preceding contact; also the Taino hand-cutting echoes genocidal pretext logic seen in settler-colonial theory elsewhere in the reader’s library.
• DEFINE: Plinian monsters named as the categorical ancestor of the American ‘monster’ figure—an existing checklist preconceived in Europe.