Juan Cole makes an interesting point in light of Mamdani campaigning partly in Arabic.
Because so many Arabic speakers have immigrated to the United States since the end of the old Nazi-like immigration quotas in 1965, many Americans may think of Arabic as recent language in the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Because he thought he was going to land in Muslim-ruled Asia, Columbus brought along interpreters on his voyage, including Luis de Torres, who knew some Arabic. De Torres was of Jewish heritage, but by then all Jews and Muslims in Spain during the reconquista had been forced to at least pretend to convert to Catholicism. It is likely that the first words a European said to a Native American chieftain in Cuba were “as-Salamu `alaykum,” Arabic for “peace be upon you.”
Wait a moment…but farther north, the first Old World greeting a Native American would have heard might have been in Old Norse. But they were white, so American audiences would be unsurprised.
Alternatively, the first greeting might have been an axe to the face, because Vikings might have exercised raiding extincts, rather than trying to be neighborly. (Columbus turned out to be rather nasty himself — first contact, no matter who it was, could be ugly.)
Of course, those Norwegian settlements proved to be temporary, and Scandinavians did a poor job of colonization until the 19th century, when my great-great-grandparents finally made it over the Atlantic. Muslim settlers had a better record.
Hundreds of thousands of Arabic-speaking Muslims fled Spain rather than convert. While most went to North Africa, it is clear from the genetic record that many covertly went to the New World:
“Oteo-Garcia and his colleagues conclude . . . that the Arab and Berber heritage is much higher in Latin American than in contemporary Valencia, which shows that a lot of Moriscos must have exited to the New World (even though that was supposedly against the law at the time). They write, “One final point, highlighted by the survival of North African-related ancestry in substantial proportions until the seventeenth century, is the widespread presence of such ancestry in present-day South Americans ”
Karoline Cook points to the way Moriscos were perceived by Spaniards in the New World as having useful artisanal skills, such that they sought to bring them over. Some were brought as slaves and never sent back.”The territories of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California thus had Arabic-speakers, many of them crypto-Muslims, for generations — throughout the 1500s and 1600s. One Arab woman from a crypto-Muslim community in Spain who married a Spanish gentleman and was taken to Mexico City, Maria Ruiz, ended up being tried by the Inquisition in the late 1500s for having retained her Muslim beliefs.
Isn’t it curious how Americans avidly gobbled up the idea that Leif Erickson and his merry band were early European visitors to the Americas, but this is the first I’ve heard of Arabic-speaking brown people adapting and thriving in these continents in the sixteenth century?
The first you heard of this? I read many years ago about the crypto-Muslims in Collumbus’s crew. The Reconquista ended in 1492 with the capture of Granada. This meant that all of the peninsula was in the hands of the “Catholic Monarchs”, Ferdinand and Isabella. Also, they expelled Jews, or forced conversion, at the same time. Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, and needed a crew for a risky adventure. Desperate people seeking desperate solutions.
We have been supporters of Juan Cole for years. He provides more insight into the middle east than any other news agency.
And, this is a very concisely informative article for us geezers and everyone:
https://www.juancole.com/2025/11/living-without-trumpian.html
By Beverly Gologorsky | – the angle of falling light – a novel
Living without a Net in a Trumpian World: The Fate of the Aging
Tomdispatch 11/07/2025
Also, that article points out just one of many areas where the tRUMP cult cockroaches are prosecuting a war on history.
@ ^ shermanj : Then there’s their war on Climatology and the global consquences & implications of that..
Let’s be more conclusive. tRUMP has ALSO started:
1 war on Indigenous Peoples’ Day
2 war on paper straws
3 war on ‘windmills’
4 war on electricity
5 war on science
6 war on education
7 war on working people
9 war on escalators
and more
Trump. his acolytes and backers have declared War in Humanity. That is all you need to say
The first certain mention of Arabic speaking in the U.S. in Juan Cole’s piece is Lebanese immigrants from 1880. The examples you cite are all in Latin America — not the U.S.
It’s interesting that Juan Cole conflates Muslim and Arabic there, even as his first example of Arabs in the U.S. are the Maronites, very much not Muslims.
The black African populations being enslaved weren’t speaking Arabic at home. Likely some spoke Arabic for trade, and some small number for liturgical reasons having recently converted to Islam, but at home it would have been any of various African languages.
Morisco is a Spanish term that denotes people of Moorish and Jewish heritage that were forced to convert to Catholicism. The Maronites are Catholics from the Levant.
I learned about the Morisco in Spanish class in jr. high.
Tethys, not quite. Your Spanish class (history, presumably) was a bit loose.
‘Conversos’ applies to each of those categories, but terms are Marranos for the Jews and Moriscos for the Moors; the former pre-Reconquista and the latter post-.
Ugh, pedant.
Murranos (earlier insulting term) and moriscos (later insulting term derived from the earlier term) both refer to anyone from the Levant or Northern Africa who was not Catholic regardless of their ethnicity.
We covered this quite recently John. I still side with the etymologists who don’t invoke swine to explain the term.
Marranos ≠ Moriscos, this is attested.
Your claim that “Morisco is a Spanish term that denotes people of Moorish and Jewish heritage” is demonstrably false.
(That is not pedantry, that is correction)
Bonus, to not waste a comment: http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/moriscos-marranos-and-columbus/0019328
“1492, the year of Columbus’ voyage was the same year that Ferdinand and Isabella completed the Reconquista and captured Granada. At that time Muslims and Jews were given a choice to either convert, go into exile, or face the Inquisition. Among both communities some became Moriscos (Muslims) or Marranos (Jews) who chose “conversion” to Christianity. In some cases they were actually converts, but more often only pretended to convert in order to save themselves.”
… Vikings might have exercised raiding extincts…
“instincts”, maybe?
Though even that raises some troublesome genetic questions… (At least we can agree that Vikings got lots of exercise.)
I remember that Fiorello La Guardia campaigned in Italian, probably Yiddish too.
.
And we’re just not going to look very hard at how much Arabic influenced Spanish (and Portuguese), since the Iberian Peninsula was under “Moorish” rule during the 8th century — thus creating the Moriscos. This is particularly apparant in some place names and even famous buildings, which is rather ironic for the nation that gave use something everyone should expect: The Spanish Inquisition. (Other parts of the Papal Inquisition were more successful in forcing renamings in Sicily during the Renaissance, probably because they relied on neither the Soft Cushions nor the Comfy Chair.)
Ojalá, Jaws.
“…the first Old World greeting a Native American would have heard might have been in Old Norse”
ahem
That would more likely be “Native Canadian”, though that’s not the usual term used up here, and anyway neither label was relevant in the 11th century.
Tethys@8:
Moriscos aren’t converted jews, they’re converted muslims. Spain used another term for converted jews, while generally treating both groups terribly.
Maronites are indeed Christian Arabs from Lebanon. It’s why I brought them up in the sentence after discussing Arabs from Lebanon. Calling them Catholics is I guess correct, though they aren’t Roman Catholic, which is what you normally would think of when talking about Catholics.
stevewatson@16:
“Native Canadian” isn’t a term that’s ever used. We use First Nations for the people who came overland via Beringia, Inuit for the people who stayed in the Arctic and spread from the Bering Strait region Eastwards a few times, and Métis for the children of First Nations and the Voyageurs (who were French).
The first people the Norse would have met would likely have been Dorset people, then the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq. The first were Inuit, the other two were or are First Nations. They may also have met the Thule culture — modern Inuit — but the Thule only showed up in the East as the Norse were dying out. How much the Norse and Dorset mixed with the Thule who replaced them is unclear.
@numerobis
Both terms derive from the Roman province of Mauretania, but Murrano is much older than Morisco. Oddly enough, the term Moorish predates the Moors by at least 700 years.
Priscus uses maureno in the mid-400s in regards to a Dwarf in the Court of Attila the Hun and his brother Bleda. There is also a mention of some Arian Visigothic King forcing Marranos to convert. He specifies Jewish people as one of said Marranos, but does seem to include Berber and Arab people among the forcibly converted Moorish/Marranos.
Spelling is not standardized in primary source manuscripts in any case, especially the vowels.
It is pretty common to find the same word spelled very creatively in the same paragraph, especially when the writers native language isn’t Latin.
All goes to show the complete nutty ignorance of Columbus. Arabic wouldn’t have helped much in Cipango or Cathay, just as it didn’t help in the Caribbean. As for Moriscos, Murranos and Conversos, nobody called themselves by those names. They were the terms used by the racists and opportunists tagging along with Their Most Catholic Majesties. And I couldn’t give a dried up mouse turd what the technical terms used by racists are meant to signify.
Murranos/Murrano is not a term. Marrano.
(The misspelling is telling; no native would do it)
Also, by scholars and historians.
(Also, Cipango and Cathay were the terms used by the racists and opportunists, nobody called themselves by those names ;)
Prove it John. Go read some manuscripts from late antiquity, and you will see the completely non- standardized spellings they come up with. I’m sure learning Latin will be fairly easy for you since you’re such an expert at Spanish. Vendejo
Change that V to a P.
“Prove it John.”
Sure: https://dle.rae.es/marrano?m=form