ĭifferent explanations have been advanced to account for this intriguing phenomenon, known as “the other September 11 effect”-the primary effects being anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant backlash and infringements upon civil liberties. The Muslim population in Spain is also growing, due to conversion, as well as immigration and intermarriage. Several analysts have noted that in the United Kingdom, many converts are coming from middle-class and professional backgrounds, not simply through the prison system or ghetto mosques, as is commonly believed. In Europe, an Islamic center in Holland reported a tenfold increase and the New Muslims Project in England reported a “steady stream” of new converts. In the US, researchers note that usually 25,000 people a year become Muslim, but by several accounts that number has quadrupled since September 11. At the first world congress of Spanish-speaking Muslims held in Seville in April 2003, the scholar Mansur Escudero, citing “globalization,” said that there were 10 to 12 million Spanish speakers among the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims. In Latin America, Europe and the US, for example, there has been a sharp increase in conversion to Islam. In the age of the “war on terror,” such expressions from the Western world of affinity with the Arab world are not confined to statements of political solidarity. Brazil’s largest trade union federation strongly denounced post-September 11 US intervention in Colombia, Venezuela and the Middle East, praising the protest movements that have appeared against US and Israeli “militarism” and calling on Brazilian workers to join in the struggle “against Sharon’s Nazi-Zionist aggression against the Palestinian people” and in support of the intifada. In less contentious terms, Brazil’s left-leaning President Lula da Silva will visit the Middle East in early December 2003 to seek “more objective” relations with the Arab world, to call for an “independent, democratic Palestinian state” and to launch a common market with the Arab world as an alternative to the North American market (particularly with many in Arab countries boycotting American products). “They can’t stand that someone like me was elected.” “They call me the monkey or black,” Chavez says of his domestic and international opponents. Linking the war on Iraq to Plan Colombia and to the Bush administration’s alleged support for a coup against him, the erratic Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez has repeatedly urged his countrymen to “return to their Arab roots,” and attempted to mobilize the country’s mestizo and black majority against white supremacy. Some refer rather quixotically to a Moorish past. With the launching of the “war on terror,” and particularly with the invasion of Iraq, political leaders and activists in Latin America have been warning of a new imperial age and again declaring solidarity with the Arab world. Moreover, nobody can consider himself as being of pure, much less superior, race.” Those who are more or less dark-skinned came directly from Africa.
Lighter skin implies descent from Spaniards who themselves were colonized by the Moors that came from Africa. In his famous 1959 speech on race, the jefe maximo underlined Cuba’s African and Moorish origins. Castro, in particular, made a philo-Arab pan-Africanism central to his regime’s ideology and policy initiatives. Throughout the past century, particularly during the Cold War, Latin American leaders from Cuba’s Fidel Castro to Argentina’s Juan Peron would express support for Arab political causes, and call for Arab-Latin solidarity in the face of imperial domination, often highlighting cultural links to the Arab world through Moorish Spain. Let us be Moors…we who will probably die by the hand of Spain.” Writing at a time when the scramble for Africa and Asia was at full throttle, Martí was accenting connections between those great power forays and Spanish depredations in Cuba, even as the rebellion of 1895 germinated on his island. “Let us be Moors…the revolt in the Rif…is not an isolated incident, but an outbreak of the change and realignment that have entered the world.
“ Seamos moros!” wrote the Cuban poet and nationalist José Martí in 1893, in support of the Berber uprising against Spanish rule in northern Morocco.
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