According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, of the University of California, Berkeley, the expulsion of the Moors from continental Europe marked a transition from an age of imperial relations between Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of European colonial expansion throughout the known world. The “discovery” of “godless” natives in the Americas would also inspire the great debates between Las Casas and Sepúlveda in 1550 on the nature of the human soul. Such a geopolitical and philosophical shift, Maldonado-Torres argues, would lead to a Eurocentric, re-categorization of humanity based upon religous—and ultimately racial—differences.
Maldonado-Torres has proposed that anti-black racism is not simply an extension of some historical bias against blacks, but rather, is an amalgam of old-world Islamophobia linked to the history of the Iberian peninsula, and to the notion of souless beings embodied in popular conceptions about the indigenous natives of the Americas.
These beliefs would contribute to an ideological basis for, and justification of, colonial conquests in the name of cultural and religious conversion, as well as pave the way for the enslavement and human trafficking of sub-Saharan Africans.
Islamophobia & Anti-Blackness: A Genealogical Approach | Center for Race & Gender
So again, even more evidence to support that the Moors contributions to science and art had to be recatergorized so that it would be easier to justify colonizing. On top of that we know now that the British Empire's so called study of Orientalism has been thoroughly proven to be a false study of history done to justify expansion by painting "The East" which included Africa and North Africa
Its pretty hard to call a society or group of people as inferior if your own culture and science was literally based off theirs. Latin was the language of Christianity and Arabic was the language of Islam, we can see clearly that only Arabic authors had their identities changed into Latin (Greeks were preserved) and this professor at Berkley says that religion was what originally started the animosity that evolved into race.
The Professor shows that what what originally began as a way to discredit the Muslim Moors by Christians by changing their identities into Latin (associated with Christianity and its Clergy) to strip Muslims of their history of Science and Art, also ended up also being used to discredit Black Africans by White Christians later on for the same thing.
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