Muslims in Mexico and Latin America

Alex Zaldivar unwisely dismisses the AP report on Mexican Americans converting to Islam. The AP report is a serious one. The questions are: how widespread is this conversion and who and what is behind it? Coincidentally there is a well-documented article in the Houston Chronicle (6/30/02) from San Cristobal de las Casas entitled "Mayans convert to Islam. 300 new Muslims in Mexico were evangelicals". This area of Chiapas has long been the scene of disputes between Catholics and Protestants ("Evangelicals"). The conversion of Catholics to Protestantism throughout Latin America has been a continuing process. Protestants were seen as hard-working and successful. The conversions to Islam are a new phenomenon. Some black slaves brought to Brazil were Muslims. Since many Spanish and Portuguese Jews came to the New World to avoid persecution, the heritage remained with them, sometimes in strange combinations. There has been a revival of Moorish culture in Spain, especially in the Granada area, and one family mentioned in the article converted to Islam in 1996 under the tutelage of missionaries from Spain. One of these, Esteban Lopez, said the Mayas had been abandoned by the Mexican government. The Muslims, who arrived in 1995 at the time of the zapatista FALN revolt, helpèd the Evangelical Indians to establish a new market in San Cristóbal de las Casas as the first step to conversion. There are 300 Muslims in Chiapas and several hundred others in Mexico, according to Omar Weston, head of the Muslim Center in Mexico City. There are said to be one million in Brazil and 300,000 in Argentina.

The afore-mentioned Esteban López and the other Spaniards are members of Murabitun, a largely European group of converts to the mystical Sufi strain of Islam. A previous posting referred to the Sufi tradition, which is at odds with mainstream Islam. Reputedly anti-Jewish, the Murabitun is active in many countries, including South Africa and England. In Chiapas and elsewhere the Muslims have founded madrassas where children study the Koran and Islamic teaching in Arabic. The madrassas distract children from studying Spanish and other subjects which could better their lot.

This brings us back to the two original questions. How real is all this? The organizers naturally boost the numbers of converts, but certainly something significant is going on. The second question is: what or who is behind all this? Islam stresses equality, sobriety and discipline, and this is one reason why American blacks converts improve their lifestyle, but Protestantism does the same thing. A deeper reason is that Christianity is basically pacifist, and Islam is not. Who pays for all this? Some money must be coming from Arab sources, possibly al-Quaeda. It this part of a scheme to turn Mexico into a base for anti US activities, once the aim of Berlin and later of Moscow? Who knows? It is certainly a matter which calls for careful study.

Ronald Hilton - 7/1/02