Dr. Zahir Kolia

In the standard curriculum of Western history, 1492 is the year modernity begins. It is the year Christopher Columbus stumbled upon the Americas and inadvertently inaugurated an era of global trade and exploration. But if we shift our gaze from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, 1492 signals something far darker and more foundational. It marks the fall of Granada, the final collapse of Al-Andalus, and the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula.

These two events are not separate chapters in history books. They are the same story.

This is not a story of civilizational virtue or vice. It is not about “good” Islam versus “bad” Europe. It is a story about how power reorganizes ethics, law, economy, and theology to produce a particular world order. To understand the modern world, including its economic disparities, its legal justifications for war, and its very concept of sovereignty, we must understand that the conquest of the Americas was an expansion of the conquest of Al-Andalus.

It was here, in the twilight of medieval Iberia, that Europe forged the theological grammar of world order. It was here that a unique form of militant Latin Catholicism fused with a crusading logic to produce the foundational architecture for the colonial-capitalist world-system.

For the Global South, and for the Muslim world specifically, unearthing this history is not an exercise in nostalgia for some lost golden era. It is an act of epistemic recovery directed towards material transformation. By revisiting the economic tools Europe appropriated from the Islamicate and the legal theories they constructed to drive domination, we can see that the secular international order we live in today is, at its heart, a theological project of endless conquest.

The Myth of “Reconquista” and the Theft of History

To understand how the Global South was colonized, we must first dismantle the story Europe tells about itself. A foundational myth of Spanish national identity, and by extension the Western imperial narrative, is the Reconquista.

We are taught that for 800 years, Christian kingdoms waged a heroic war of liberation to recover Spain from Muslim invaders. This narrative is a fabrication. The term Reconquista itself is a nineteenth-century nationalist invention, retroactively imposed to project a modern idea of a unified Spain backward into the medieval past.

In reality, there was no Spain to reconquer.

It is crucial to distinguish between the Iberian Peninsula, the geographic landmass now occupied by Spain and Portugal, and the modern nation-states themselves. For nearly eight centuries, the dominant power on this peninsula was Al-Andalus. This was a Muslim-ruled polity, not a foreign occupation but a vibrant civilization. When Tariq ibn Ziyad and his Berber army crossed the strait in 711 from Morocco, they didn’t wipe out a civilization — they transformed it.

Islam spread largely through gradual conversion and political integration rather than mass displacement or forced conversion. Andalus was a fusion of Arab, Berber, Visigothic, Jewish, and Hispano-Roman peoples woven together through law, commerce, scholarship, and urban life.

By framing the fall of Granada as a reconquest, Western history erases the reality that Al-Andalus was part of a wider, interconnected Afro-Eurasian economy. These subsystems formed a world-system, directing trade between regional centers that acted as exchange nodes for commercial goods, knowledge, and finance. Within this system, the northern Christian kingdoms of Iberia were not civilizational cores but economic peripheries.

The conquest of Al-Andalus was therefore not a recovery of lost land. It was the violent imposition of a new project: the erasure of the Muslim nature of the peninsula in order to invent a European Latin Christian one.

The Crusades: A Theology of Plunder

This Iberian project of erasure was not isolated. It was the western front of a much broader continental ambition. To understand the economic machinery that would later colonize the Americas, we must examine the moment when European piety first fused with a hunger for wealth beyond its borders.

We should not approach the Crusades primarily as religious wars driven by fanaticism, nor simply as geopolitical conflicts between Christianity and Islam. Instead, we must view them as the moment where European Christendom, still largely feudal and economically peripheral, attempted to violently insert itself into an already existing Afro-Eurasian world-system.

At the turn of the eleventh century, much of Europe remained agrarian, locally oriented, and constrained in its ability to generate surplus. Long-distance trade existed, but it was limited largely to luxury goods rather than bulk production. The most dynamic centers of commerce, finance, and scholarship lay elsewhere: in the Mediterranean, across North Africa, in the Western Sudan, and throughout the broader Islamicate.

Europe’s internal agricultural expansion produced population growth and demographic pressure, but its feudal structures could not absorb this surplus through productive transformation. The Crusades functioned as a solution to this contradiction. They fused theological language, including holy war, pilgrimage, and salvation, with urgent material aims: access to trade routes, bullion, land, and strategic ports.

In this sense, the Crusades were not an interruption of economic life but an early attempt to reorganize it through conquest.

This process crystallized a pattern that would define colonial modernity: religious categories were mobilized to expand into already existing world economies rather than to create something entirely new. The conquest of Al-Andalus transformed this crusading spirit from a sporadic military campaign into a permanent structure of imperial expansion. It was here that the plunder of Muslim wealth in cities like Cordoba and Seville provided the initial capital that allowed these peripheral kingdoms to fund their expansion across the Atlantic.

Beyond the “Carrier” Myth: The Islamicate Driver of the Global Economy

A persistent Eurocentric myth suggests that the Islamic world was merely a carrier society. This is the idea that Muslims were a passive conduit that simply transported goods and preserved Greek texts until Europe was ready to wake up and use them. This view is not only historically inaccurate but also obscures the reality that the Islamicate was a key driver of the pre-modern global economy. It innovated the very financial and legal technologies that Europe would later appropriate for colonial-capitalist expansion.

Before the rise of European hegemony, the world-system was centered in the East. As Janet Abu-Lughod has documented, the twelfth-century Eastern Hemisphere was a vibrant tapestry of eight regional subsystems linking the Mediterranean to the South China Sea. Europe was a periphery. It was a fractured yet fervent polity locked in a feudal crisis with limited capacity for long-distance trade.

The African Heart of Global Wealth

To understand the true source of the wealth that fueled the early modern economy, we must look to Africa. While traditional scholarship often dismisses sub-Saharan Africa as a region without historical significance, the western Sudan was part of a vibrant world economy centered on key trading hubs like Gao and Awdaghast.

Far from being peripheral, this region was the primary source of the bullion that fueled the Mediterranean economy. At its peak, more than a ton of Sudanic gold reached the Mediterranean annually. Before the plunder of the Americas brought an influx of silver, it was this African gold that sustained the economies of the Maghreb and Western Europe.

Europe’s early expansion was driven by a structural dependence on this wealth. The Afro-Eurasian oikumene – a shared civilizational space – had long integrated African production into global circulation. Europe’s problem was not a lack of ambition but a lack of access.

The Portuguese Crusade for Gold

This dependence is most evident in Portugal’s story, where the feudal crisis spurred the first decisive steps toward Atlantic expansion.

With a population of barely one million and limited export capacity beyond salt, wine, and dried fish, Portugal lacked the commercial depth of Castile or the Italian city-states. Its outward turn was driven by a fusion of economic desperation and crusading ideology.

Like Castile, Portugal framed its expansion as part of the long struggle against Islam. Seeking favour with the papacy and legitimacy as a Christian kingdom, Portuguese elites imagined their voyages as an extension of the Crusades, an attempt to attack the Islamic world in a pincer movement. That is why the Cape of Storms, long known to Muslim sailors, becomes the “Cape of Good Hope” in Portuguese hands: rounding it meant reaching the Indian Ocean and outflanking Muslim trade networks.

Their first major move came in 1415, when Portugal seized Ceuta, just 160 miles from its coast. This was both a religious strike and a geopolitical play to break the power of Castile, Aragon, and the Genoese in the Strait of Gibraltar. And it was also about gold: Portugal wanted access to West African bullion by capturing the endpoints of the trans-Saharan trade.

But reality quickly set in. Holding Ceuta was enormously expensive, requiring fortifications, garrisons, and supplies, and it didn’t deliver control over African gold, which stayed firmly within Islamicate trading networks. Ceuta became so undesirable that the Crown repurposed it as a dumping ground for prisoners – arguably Europe’s first penal outpost – and other so-called “undesirables,” including members of the Crusading Order of Christ, successor to the Knights Templar.

So in many ways, Portugal’s early Atlantic and African ventures were not the confident first steps of a rising power. They were the experiments of a small kingdom caught in a feudal crisis, trying to survive economically while waging a crusade against Islam.

Zheng He: The Lost Alternative?

Nothing illustrates the distinctiveness of Europe’s colonial trajectory more starkly than Zheng He’s voyages.

Decades before Columbus, the Ming Dynasty dispatched Zheng He (a Muslim-born admiral serving the Chinese court) on seven massive maritime expeditions reaching Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and East Africa. The scale of these voyages dwarfs the European efforts that followed. In his first expedition in 1405, Zheng He commanded nearly 28,000 men aboard over 250 vessels. His treasure ships were massive engineering marvels, spanning up to 400 feet in length.

By comparison, the ships that carried the first European explorers were microscopic. The flagship of Columbus was less than twenty yards long.

The difference was not just in scale but in intent. While other civilizations possessed the technical capacity for transoceanic travel, such as the Malians exploring the Atlantic or the Malays navigating the South China Sea, they did not articulate these voyages to a logic of global imperial conquest. The voyages of Zheng He were diplomatic and tributary in nature. The voyages of Europe were eschatological and extractive.

The Theft of the Engine: Appropriating Islamic Finance

European colonial empires were not built upon autonomous financial innovation but through the appropriation, translation, and eventual erasure of Islamic commercial law, which furnished many of the financial instruments that made imperial expansion possible.

In the eleventh century, as Europe looked outward, it adopted the commenda. This single-venture agreement became the dominant mechanism for capitalist trade expansion. However, the commenda was not a European invention. It was a direct appropriation of the Islamic qirad, specifically the concepts of mudarabah (trustee financing) and musharakah (joint partnership).

Developed in the eighth century by scholars such as Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Shaybānī, these instruments enabled investors and merchants to pool capital and risk for long-distance trade. But in their Islamic context, these tools operated within a specific ethical framework. They were based on reciprocity, suhba (companionship), and sadaqa (friendship and truthfulness). The relationships were horizontal and grounded in mutual trust and reputation rather than impersonal exploitation.

When Christian Europe adopted these forms, it stripped them of their ethical moorings. By the thirteenth century, the commenda had been transformed into a vertical and impersonal structure designed for the endless accumulation of wealth. The reciprocity of the qirad was replaced by hierarchy underpinned by profit. The tool designed to connect the Ummah through trade became the weapon used to finance the institutions that sought to plunder it.

Political Economy of Plunder

This appropriation requires us to rethink the origins of capitalism itself. Political economists Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik argue that capitalism cannot exist as a self-contained system. It fundamentally requires an external domain, a non-capitalist setting, to extract value from.

This drain theory applies equally to the roots of capitalism in Iberia. Europe did not just extract gold and silver. It sought to extract the intellectual value of the Islamicate. As the economist Ernest Mandel noted, the Crusades were an enormous plundering enterprise that transferred the wealth of the East into the coffers of the West. It was this stolen capital, managed by appropriated Islamicate financial tools, that laid part of the foundation for maritime capitalism.

Western capitalism did not arise autonomously but through a colonial relation with the Islamicate: a parasitic incorporation of Islamicate commercial practices that absorbed their technical capacities while stripping them of the ethical and juridical constraints that originally governed their use – a process that can be understood, in Marxian terms, as one of “formal subsumption.” In other words, capitalism took the tools it needed while leaving behind the moral and legal worlds that gave those tools meaning, casting them as belonging to an earlier, outdated time.

1453: The Geopolitical Trigger

If the Crusades provided the capital, the Fall of Constantinople contributed to the geopolitical impulse for Atlantic expansion.

In 1453, after a fifty-four-day siege, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II conquered Constantinople. This was not just a symbolic blow to Christendom. It was a seismic economic shock. The Ottomans secured the Bosphorus and cut off the Genoese and Venetians from the lucrative Black Sea trade routes.

With the traditional routes to the East severed or heavily taxed by a powerful Muslim rival, Europe was forced to look for alternatives. The so-called discovery of the Americas was bound up with the rise of Ottoman power. As Ottoman control reshaped Mediterranean trade, the crusading gaze that had once been directed toward the Holy Land was cast elsewhere and would eventually fall on the Atlantic, transporting with it the same theological antagonisms and the same appetite for gold.

The modern world system emerged through a sustained reaction to Islamic power. It incorporated Islamic financial instruments, drew upon wealth extracted from Islamic territories, and was catalyzed by the reorganization of trade following the closure of long-standing Islamic routes. To tell the story of colonial capitalism without this political economy is to rehearse a myth.

The Theological Trap of Sovereignty

If the economy of the modern world is built on appropriated Islamic tools, its legal structure is built on a secularized Christian theology.

We are accustomed to thinking of international law as a neutral set of rules that governs relations between sovereign states. This is the Westphalian myth. It assumes that sovereignty was established in Europe and then exported to the rest of the world. But as legal scholar Antony Anghie argues, sovereignty did not precede colonialism. It was created by it.

The concept of sovereignty emerged from the dynamic of difference. It came from the need to classify, manage, and dominate people who were not recognized as equals. The key figure in this story is Francisco de Vitoria, the 16th-century Dominican theologian often hailed as the father of international law.

Vitoria confronted a dilemma: how could Spain justify conquest in lands that were neither Christian nor previously claimed?

The solution Vitoria proposed was brilliant and terrifying. He rejected the crude argument that Indigenous peoples were subhuman beasts. Instead, he argued that they were rational humans. But this humanization can be thought of as a trap.

Because Indigenous peoples were rational, Vitoria argued, they were bound by the jus gentium or the law of nations. This universal law, derived entirely from European customs, decreed that the Spanish had an inherent right to travel, trade, and preach the Gospel in Indigenous lands.

If the Indigenous peoples resisted this incursion, or if they tried to protect their borders or expel the Spanish, they were violating the law of nations. Their resistance became an act of war. This gave Spain the legal justification to defend itself and conquer them.

Crucially, Vitoria excluded Muslims from sovereign equality. If belief alone justified war, he argued, then Muslims too could wage just wars. By denying this symmetry, he ensured that sovereignty remained a Christian privilege.

Toward a New Horizon

So what does this mean for us today?

First, it requires us to reject the Westphalian myth that the nation-state system is neutral. We must recognize that the very definition of sovereignty is rigged against the Global South. As we see in places like Palestine today, the right to defend oneself is a privilege reserved for those deemed civilized by the heirs of Vitoria, while the resistance of the colonized is criminalized.

Second, it calls for a retrieval of the economic principles that Europe appropriated and corrupted. The Islamic tradition offers a model of trade based on mu’amalawhich emphasizes cooperation, risk-sharing, and social trust rather than the vertical accumulation of capital. In an era of rampant inequality and ecological collapse, these Islamic values offer a vital critique of colonial capitalism.

Finally, reworking Patrick Wolfe, we must understand that conquest is a structure and not an event. Conquest is not just a moment that happened once and ended. The fall of Granada did not end in 1492. It continues in every policy that frames the Global South as a problem to be managed, a market to be exploited, or a threat to be neutralized.

However, recognizing this structure is only the first step. If, as Talal Asad argues, modernity operates as a form of conversion that annihilates old possibilities to impose a singular secular-imperial reality, then our task is to force open new ones.

Frantz Fanon reminds us that such horizons are not given but must be made through struggle, confrontation, and ultimately what he calls love. This is not the passive love of affection or liberal tolerance. It is a radical ethic of mutual recognition forged through confrontation and an absolute responsibility to the Wretched of the Earth.

To decolonize our world is to refuse the world as it is. It is to look past the theological trap of 1492 and, through the necessity of struggle, invent a future grounded in relations beyond the colonial frame. We must move from the logic of conquest to the logic of Fanonian love, and create a humanity defined not by who we dominate but by how we recognize each other.

Dr. Zahir Kolia’s research examines how coloniality and settler colonial formations are shaped by the secular using Postcolonial and Decolonial Theory, Indigenous Studies, Critical Race Theory, Post-Secular Studies and Decolonial approaches to World/Political Ecology.