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

by Alan Mikhail

In a world of Christians Crusading against Islam, Europeans warring against the Ottomans, this bull equated the legal status of West African Muslims with that of pagans—both considered unbelievers, of course, and both now subject to enslavement by Christian Europeans. Given the history of encounters between Christendom and Islam, Muslims were the closest, most familiar, and ultimate “other” for Europeans—the political, military, and ideological enemy against whom all other enemies were measured and through whom they were understood. Because West Africa’s non-Muslims were also non-Christians, they were interpreted through the primary category of non-Christian “otherness” available to Europeans—Islam. For Christians, then, pagan equaled Muslim, making it possible for the Portuguese in West Africa to understand both non-Muslims and Muslims as part of the same conceptual category of “Muslim”—a category of person which a Christian was allowed to treat with great force and violence. The papal conjoining of Muslim and non-Muslim is what ultimately allowed both to be taken “legally” from West Africa to the New World as slaves. The repurposing of the category of “Muslim” to encompass non-Christians outside of Europe was hence a constituent element of the birth of the much-vaunted European age of discovery—an age built, of course, on Europe’s territorial conquests in West Africa and the enslavement of its people.