When ''looking Muslim'' becomes a crime
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To summarize Karoline Cook’s work on Moriscos and Muslims who came to Spanish America I would say that it is mainly about the criminalization of Islam. Or rather that it is the stigmatization and criminalization of people who vaguely seemed to follow prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) way. I was shocked (by the absurdity of some accusations) when I read about the many testimonies that Cook presents in her work. The realities of Moriscos and Muslims in Spain and Spanish America are linked to the question of islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism that we talked about last week. An interesting thing about Moriscos is that most of them, seem to have looked physically the same as other Latino/Spanish descent people, they had latin names (for example Maria Ruiz) etc. The accusation of being Morisco often came from people who noticed details about someone’s life, their neighbours for example, and then would denounce them. This denunciation seems to have been valued by the inquisitorial authorities. Further, the author mentioned that at first the denunciation of Moriscos was based on the fear that since they are ‘’Muslim’’ they might be allied to the Ottoman Empire. About that matter Cook writes that ‘’ Morisco presence in the New World was seen as a threat to the creation of a model Catholic community…’’ Also, this ‘’polemic’’ about Moriscos and crypto-Muslims is an example amongst many others that the ‘’fear of Islam’’ and Muslims was there long before our time and that 9/11 for example, is not the cause of islamophobia, it just amplified it.
Throughout the reading, I saw many links between what is being said of the Moriscos and the testimonies given by people around them and the genocide of the Uighurs in China. Similarly to what would happen to the Moriscos, any individual who seems to be a Uighur Muslim can be arrested for absurd motives and assumptions that have nothing to do with criminal activities and neither represent a threat. For example, in China, Uighur men who wear a beard would be suspected of being terrorists and throughout the years, many of them were taken by the police and put into concentration camps. Also communicating in their dialects in a public setting is risky and they can be arrested for it, in a similar way that in the Spanish America’s context, individuals would be denounced for speaking a language that vaguely seemed like Arabic and this accusation would lead to the involvement and questioning of the inquisitorial power. I saw in the documentary In Search of My Sister that the police would cut the dresses of women when they had a certain length – this measure being a way to force women to wear more revealing clothes despite their attempt to dress modestly. Sometimes, this aggression would happen to women who were not even visibly of Muslim confession (i.e. not wearing the hijab). Also, in that documentary that follows the quest of Rushan Abbas, a Uighur activist, we see that when Chinese officials are asked about what happened to the thousands of Uighurs who disappeared without their families having no idea where they are and if they are alive or death, they deny the existence of concentration camps and they say that there can not be a Uighur genocide since the numbers show that the Uighur population is increasing.
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I really liked reading your discussion post. As you say, ''looking Muslim'' has become a crime. I appreciate how you linked the situation of the Moriscos in Latin America to the state of Uighurs in China. This reminded me of the example of France, in which a ban on the niqab and burqa in public spaces was imposed in 2010. Ever since, Muslim women who wear one of these religious coverings have been punished for it unjustly. Similarly, the abaya and the qamis are both banned in French schools. Thus, the French government is punishing people for practicing their religion, or expressing their culture.
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Thank you @pierre-augustin_habrih ! You are right, the situation of Muslims in France is also a great example of it.