ISLAM AND RACE IN ARGENTINA
During Spanish exploration of the Americas, Muslims (moriscos) were prohibited from the colonies. Islam, like Judaism, was understood not just as a religion but as sullying the blood. Evidence shows that many enslaved Africans transported to the Río de la Plata region were West African and potentially Muslim, particularly those trafficked illegally from Brazil. Notions of race were connected to conceptions of religion, class, and status, and people often moved between categories. Afro-Argentines melted as a category into the general populace through assimilation, intermarriage, self-reclassification, and institutionalized whitening, as well as disease and war. At the end of the 19th century, Islam became associated with immigrant “Turcos” from the Ottoman Empire, whether Druze, Maronite, Christian Orthodox, Persian, Arab, or Turkish, understood in relation to the Jewish population as “undesirables,” in terms of their economic productivity as much as their religion. A thriving literary scene grappled with the place of Arab Muslims within the Argentine body politic, in reference to Muslim Spain, as well as the politics of World War II. After a decline in religiosity, the 1980s witnessed a religious resurgence and the emergence of diverse Muslim institutions: Shiite, Sunni, Druze, Alawite, and Sufi. These institutions, along with a vibrant Islamic media, helped to organize and give expression to Muslim communities in Argentina, but they also connected them transnationally to other Muslim communities, especially across the Global South.
