Introduction There is a color line in the Muslim world. How and why? While there are multiple forms of racism based on notions of color and ethnicity that exist within the Muslim world – such...
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The difficulty in understanding pre-modern anti-black racism in the Muslim world is complicated by the seeming contradictions one faces when examining Islamic history. The clear anti-racist message of the Qur’an and Prophet Muhammad’s life is supported by the exaltation of a former black Arab slave – the famed Companion to the Prophet, Bilal ibn Rabah, to the metaphoric
vox deus and official muezzin of the early Muslim community, and later senior military commander. Yet, within that very story is another companion of the Prophet, Abu Dharr, berating Bilal with a slur for having a black slave mother. Al-Jahiz (d. 868 CE) was a famed black Arab Muslim polymath whose influence on Islamicate knowledge production is regarded as highly authoritative and historically unique. Yet, al-Jahiz also
wrote a book defending the virtues of black peoples against the anti-black discourses and practices he encountered during his time. There is also the example of blacks being enslaved for military and domestic work from
Al-Andalus/Morocco to
Ottoman lands,
Southern Iran, and even the
Indian coast. At the same time, black statesmen, generals, prominent scholars and everyday people in these very same places existed as dignified individuals and fully as themselves. Islamicate civilization in Sudanic Africa, or
Bilad al-Sudan, is a testament to the ways in which Islam in what we now call Africa flourished. Sudanic Africa attained a high level of civilizational organization in an indigenous way without a systemic external imposition of said civilization coming from so-called foreigners like Turks, Arabs or Persians.
Individuals within the interregional world-system of
Bilad al-Sudan have also consistently offered responses to the racism they faced when travelling to other lands in the Muslim world. Like al-Jahiz, scholars such as
Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti (d. 1627 CE) and
Ibrahim Niasse (d. 1975) engaged in critique of non-black Muslims who perceived them as inferior. The contradictions between what resembled a type of post-racial multi-culturalism alongside the many instances of sustained and less sustained forms of anti-black racism presents a quagmire for those who want to understand anti-black racism in the pre-modern Muslim world. It is a paradigm that is very different from the modern Western forms of anti-blackness, yet still shares with it in some theory and practice. In the modern period, the color-line hardened with the explicit and implicit importing of Western-derived theories and practices of anti-black racism. The millennia-old
indigeneity of black peoples in North Africa, the Levant and the Gulf, for example, has been erased in mainstream consciousness due to Eurocentric nationalist narratives and geographies that created binaries along the Saharan desert and Red Sea that had not existed in the same way in the past. These modern forms of anti-blackness have both added to and subsumed the pre-existing prejudices in various regions which had earlier been less systematic or even non-existent.
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