Qouting Dr. Aisha Khan author of Islam and the Americas (New World Diasporas):
“The Spanish conquistador Hernon Cortez arrived in Mexico in 1519 and referred to the Aztecs he encountered as Moors, and one priest in Cortez part said that the indigenous peoples of northern Mexico reminded him of al Arabes or Arabs, Spaniards called Aztec and Inca temples mosques and drew parallels between some Indian and Islamic rituals that involved animal sacrifice.”
As late as 1572, a Jesuit explorer informed his ruler that the natives were ‘for the most part like the Moors of Granada’. Source: Moors in Mesoamerica: The Impact of AlAndalus in the New World by Simon Shaw
“Spoken proverbially of Pedro Carbonero, who penetrated into the land of the Moors, but failed to return, and perished there with all his followers.”
Source: The True History of the Conquest of New Spain
“Eight centuries of Muslim rule left a deep cultural legacy on Spain, one evident in clear and sometimes surprising ways during the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, the chronicler of Hernán Cortés’s conquest of Meso-America, admired the costumes of native women dancers by writing ‘muy bien vestidas a su manera y que parecían moriscas’, or ‘very well-dressed in their own way, and seemed like Moorish women’. The Spanish routinely used ‘mezquita’ (Spanish for mosque) to refer to Native American religious sites. Travelling through Anahuac (today’s Texas and Mexico), Cortés reported that he saw more than 400 mosques.”
Source: Muslims of early America
“During the time of war, those Indians who were made prisoners were considered slaves, and were called Indios de guerra, just the same as when the Spaniards made war upon the Moors of Barbary, the slaves, in that case, being called Berberiscos. Then there were the ransomed slaves, Indios de rescate, as they were called, who, being originally slaves in their own tribe, were delivered by cacique of that tribe, or by other Indians, in lieu of tribute. Upon this it must be remarked that the word slave meant a very different thing in Indian language from what it did in Spanish language, and certainly did not exceed in signification the word vassal. A slave in an Indian tribe, as LAS CASA remarks, possessed his house, his hearth, his private property, his farm, his wife, his children, and his liberty, except when at certain states times his lord had need of him to build his house, or labor upon a field, or at other similar things which occurred at stated intervals. This statement is borne out by a letter addressed to the Emperor from the auditors of Mexico, in which they say that, “granted that among the Indians there were slaves, the one servitude is very different from the other. The Indians, treated their slaves as relations and vassals, the Christians as dogs.”
“In 1878, his attention as directed to its former presence at the Belvidere Museum by a notice in Baron von Sacken’s descriptive catalog of the Imperial Ambras collection printed in Vienna in 1855, wherein, among rare objects from various parts of the world, it is mentioned as follows: “No. 3—A Mexican head-dress about 3 ft. in height composed of magnificent green feathers studded with small plates of gold. This specimen was termed in the inventory of 1596 ‘a Moorish hat.”
“Guided by this note, Herr von Hochstetter with the assistance of Dr. Ilg, the custodian of the Ambras collection, found the precious relic and rescued it from an obscure corner of a show-case where it hung, folded together, next to a medieval bishop’s mitre and surrounded by sundry curiosities from North America, China and Sunda Islands.”
“On folio 472 of the ancient document, it is cataloged with other objects in feather-work contained in a chest (No. 9) and is described as a Moorish hat of beautiful, long, lustrous green and gold-hued feathers, bedecked above with white, red and blue feathers and gold rosettes and ornaments. In front, on the forehead, it has a beak of pure gold. The term Moorish, as here applied can scarcely be regarded as a deceptive one inasmuch as “Montezuma, the king of Temistitan and Mexico,” is subsequently designated as “a Moorish king” in this same inventory of 1596. (See p.9)”
“It is interesting to note the gradual changes that occur in the wording of the subsequent periodical official registrations of this “Moorish hat. In 1613 its description was faithfully reproduced. In 1621 the word “Indian” was substituted for “Moorish:” with this single alteration, the original text was transcribed in 1730.”
“The blurring of Indian and Moor was not limited to architectural expression but also arose in dramaturgy. A play entitled ‘The Conquest of Jerusalem’, organized by the mendicant orders in Tlaxcala in 1539, saw a re-enactment of an epic battle between Christian and Muslim in which Fray Motolinía informs us ‘troops from Castilla y León made up the vanguard, with real weapons and standards’ alongside Indians. In also casting the natives as Moors, the Spanish reveal much of how Islam continued to affect them in the New World.
Source: Simon Shaw Moors in Mesoamerica: The Impact of AlAndalus in the New World
