God's Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World

by Alan Mikhail

the atrocities Europeans were committing against indigenous Americans were indefensible. Unfortunately, his solution for overcoming this barbarity was no less barbaric—to ship African slaves to the New World instead of enslaving the natives. He wrote scathingly of the Requirement, considering the document vile. What would happen, he asked, if “Moors or Turks came to make the same requirement?” With this rhetorical question, he obviously meant to poke fun at the Requirement’s manifest Islamic origins. “Did the Spaniards show superior proof by witnesses and truer evidence of what they declared in their requirement . . . than the Moors showed of their Muhammed?” Criticizing the Requirement and the entire project of Spanish conquest in the Americas it supported, he wrote that it was inspired by “the Mohammedan procedures that our Spanish people have had since [Muslims] entered these lands.” He added, “Those who war on [indigenous American] infidels mimic Muhammad.”