American politics is swaying towards "Trumpism," which is a term for the political ideology, style of governance, political movement, and set of mechanisms for acquiring and keeping power that is associated with Donald Trump, and his political base. In my perception, this ideology is being fueled by the Christian foundation which is just as much as a threat as the liberal paradigm of the Left. Both built upon historical fallacies that perpetually indoctrinate future generations.
The so-called Judeo-Christian roots of this country is fictitious, as it was ISLAM that has a long history in America, going back to the earliest days of the country's founding. In the past two-plus centuries, Islam and Moslem (Moorish) Americans have been intertwined with American history even going back to the Pre-Columbian era. That story is not well-known, and while admittedly that's in part because the inquisition has sought to conceal, hide and remove all traces of its Islamic roots. The univocal denial of the subject of Islamic or Moorish history is sometimes called “Islamophobia,” signifying, “a strong fear or dislike” of Islam. In fact, if you were to go to almost any thesaurus, you will find synonyms including “terror, horror, dread, paranoia,” and “anxiety.”
The first words to pass between Europeans and Americans (one-sided and confusing as they must have been) were in the sacred language of Islam. Christopher Columbus had hoped to sail to Asia and had prepared to communicate at its great courts in one of the major languages of Eurasian commerce. So when Columbus’s interpreter, a Spanish Jew, spoke to the Taíno of Hispaniola, he did so in Arabic. Not just the language of Islam, but the religion itself likely arrived in America in 1492, more than 20 years before Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door, igniting the Protestant reformation.
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.
Islam served as a kind of blueprint or algorithm for the Spanish in the New World. As they encountered people and things new to them, they turned to Islam to try to understand what they were seeing, what was happening. Even the name ‘California’ might have some Arabic lineage. The Spanish gave the name, in 1535, taking it from The Deeds of Esplandian (1510), a romance novel popular with the conquistadores. The novel features a rich island – California – ruled by black Amazonians and their queen Calafia. The Deeds of Esplandian had been published in Seville, a city that had for centuries been part of the Umayyad caliphate (caliph, Calafia, California).
Muslims thus arrived in America more than a century before the Virginia Company founded the Jamestown colony in 1607. Muslims came to America more than a century before the Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Muslims were living in America not only before Protestants, but before Protestantism existed. After Catholicism, Islam was the second monotheistic religion in the Americas.
The most visible role of Islam in the America of the Founding Fathers was perhaps in the words and actions of the founders themselves, who deliberately sought to include Islam as they established the principles of religious liberty.