30568: LeGrace BensonRE: 30563: Labrom re 30555 Muslims in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Legrace Benson <legrace@twcny.rr.com>

Re30537; LeGrace Benson response.

Some quick notes from memory and without a Minsky fact-check:
Muslims have been present as individuals and perhaps in small communities
since the arrival of Columbus , December 1492.  According to some reports,
Jewish and Muslim Conversos immediately professed their original faiths as
soon as the set foot on the island.  This story may be apocryphal.  The
papal and royal edict to stamp out Islam wherever it should appear seems to
have been enforced with great success, so that the few hold-outs kept silent
about their beliefs as well as about their literacy in Arabic.  There are
numerous slave narratives as well as other records that show a perdurance of
Islam and its literacy in the Atlantic world, including Hispaniola. Haitian
historian, the late Jean Fouchard wrote of finding granary doors with carved
Arabic script in the twentieth century (exact date not specified), and there
is the story of the first African captive to land on Haitian soil who was
from Islamicised Senegal and fled into marronage. There is likewise a small
community off the main road to Port-au-Prince south of Cap Haïtien that
shows strong signs of continuous Muslim presence from some unspecified time
in the past to the present. A fairly recent video made there shows a
community funeral observance in which the chant is unmistakably verses from
the Q,uran. Other scholars who have visited also report such traditions as
not eating pork and of facing east for morning prayers.  One story has it
that the people of this village arrived after 1804, having heard of the
successful revolution and wishing to avoid the continued suppression by
French in Senegal.  Another story suggests they have been there since
colonial era as maroons. Motifs traceable to Islamic west African
territories appear on Vodou dwapo. The makout of Papa Zaka bears a design
that conforms to that of the Islamic magic square, much in use among west
African peoples. Visual  parallels require collateral documentation, but
here the circumstantial evidence is strong enough to require a documentable
counter-theory to explain the presence.
As for the Jews of St.-Domingue/Haiti, that may be an old presence as well.
Archaeological work of the 1930's uncovered the foundations of a synagogue
from colonial times that may have been the first synagogue in the new world.
Remember, Spain expelled Jews,including the Conversos, in January of  1492
and many were on the first boats that came to the "New World" after initial
encounters. Lisa MacAllister has done work on the image of Jews in Haiti,
especially in connection with Carnival and Rara. There is also the fact of
the Haitian state having received Jews fleeing Nazi Germany when they were
refused admittance to any other country, including the US.