Just an Umayyad

Location -- in the Turkey Mts., above Las Vegas, NM.
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Thieu and I have driven out to a rural farmworkers’ cabin in the foothills, to enjoy more intimacy.

      I feel the anger of the spirits who are stirring the dust of the Staked Plain. The wrath we feel blazing in the collective soul now bursts forth in the lightning on the mountaintops.

      In the shadows that are made by the stormclouds, the thunder is speaking in a language which has now become almost extinct. Atop the anvil crest of a thunderhead, an Apache warrior looks down with contempt on the so-called “civilization” which has dispossessed his people.

     “I shall tell you why the blood is boiling in your veins,” he proclaims with the voice of thunder. “Many years ago, so long ago that most people have forgotten, the enemies of The Prophet conquered the Iberian Peninsula. When Mullahs rose up to teach the pure truths of the Qu’oran, these Umayyads changed their religion, but still called themselves ‘Cids.’ (a dialectical pronunciation of Si´yid) They became Christian Conquistadors who terrified the decent people with warlike excesses.

      ¨There was not room in all of Spain for these conquistadores, so they built black ships and came to despoil the Pure Land. They conquered the advanced cities on Turtle Island, and burned alive anyone who resisted conversion to their religion.

      “They claimed that they were serving God, but their true aim was to enslave everyone, so that they could live like the Caliphs their ancestors had been. In the process they destroyed the knowledge of great civilizations and drove grace from the earth. They taught a stern morality of cruel abstinence, but their own lusts they did not deny. The women they conquered knew no love, but only the pain of giving birth to the children who had been conceived through rape.”

     “No wonder the Mexicans say, that it is the Devil who commands the affairs of this world!” shudders Thieu.

     “There is a curse which falls on the heads of the conquerors,” continued the Apache in the clouds. “This curse does not act swiftly like a sword, but slowly and insidiously, and eventually brings down those who in their pride thought that they were the Lords of the Earth.

     “And so it came to be,” he continues, “that just as the Umayyads were driven from Arabia and Iran, from Syria and Africa, the Spaniards who acted like Umayyads, and whose kings were actually descentents of Abu Sufiyan, found themselves driven out from many of their dominions by the English colonists. But just as the Abassids demonstrated that they could be as cruel as the Umayyads, and just as merciless to the true descendents of the Fatima, so we who were native to Turtle Island discovered that that the British-Americans could be even more ruthless than the Spaniards.

     “The Spaniards were ruthless in the pursuit of their lusts, and intolerant in the matter of religion, but their lusts could be soothed by the attention of women, and their fanaticism could be turned to advantage by los Indios who were willing to convert to their faith. The British-Americans, on the other hand, claimed to be ruled by secular laws, but their laws did very little to protect the Natives. From the villagers of Gnaddenhutten to the Ghost Dancers of the 1890's, many Natives adopted the faith of Jesus and called the Pale Invaders their brothers. But the British-Americans were colder than the Spaniards; they gunned us down even when we adopted their religion, and their hatreds were only inflamed when they looked upon the beauty of our women.

     “The new invaders invented something they called a Theory – a myth they called Manifest Destiny. They thought they had created something new – but Natives recognized it as the same old faith in human sacrifice which has haunted this land since the first pyramids were raised. They put such store in their faith that they were the most evolved thing on the earth, that when we called them brothers, it aroused the same passion of Auto-da-Fe that their Spanish predecessors had displayed when anyone had dared to doubt their Holy Trinity.

     “We learned to our sorrow that when we addressed them as brothers, we aroused their worst fears. We saw them respond in a murderous rage. It offended them to think that we were humans just like they were, created by the same God, of the same intelligence, with the same capacity for spiritual inspiration, and that we had simply made other choices. It drove them to rage to think that the institutions which had been forced upon Europe by the Christian Inquisition were not the only forms of social order, and might not even be the best. And they were horrified when they were confronted by societies in which men did not control their women. It was true that sometimes our Native men loved more than one woman, but this was never because we herded them together like cattle. Our women were powerful in their own right, and sometimes a man needed another woman that he could run to. This is how it is when you love what you cannot control. And I believe that this challenge, of learning to love what he could not control – I believe that this is what frightened the European the most.”