El Islam en América Latina: del siglo XX al XXI

Hernán Taboada Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Islam is showing a new visibility in our region, where cult centers, publications and even veiled women are not the rarity of a few years ago. Because of this and other features, we can assume that it is in Latin America where the centuries-old process of expansion and consolidation of Islam is coming to an end. As in other regions of new implantation, the growing public presence of Islam has awakened the alert of media linked to the U.S. armed forces and the Vatican, as well as the eagerness of some researchers towards a field that until now has been quite neglected.
This work intends to offer a more balanced state of the question, by means of a bibliographic survey, the follow-up of diverse materials -electronic pages, journalistic clippings-, and the generation of new reflections and comparisons.
Throughout the article we trace the statements about a pre-Columbian Islam and a colonial Islam, the particularities of Arab immigration since the late nineteenth century and the low profile of Islamic communities throughout most of the twentieth century. Then, the new visibility since the eighties of that century, the controversial figures on the number of Muslims, recent migrations, proselytism and the phenomenon of conversions are reviewed.
It can be observed that the manifestations of Islam in Latin America are not uniform and know variations that respond, among other things, to the host society. Circumstances make us think of the possibility of a strongly rooted Islam capable of offering one more example of the creative syntheses to which we are accustomed in this semicontinent of miscegenation.