Quick Take: Were Early Muslims Horribly Racist?

Racism was not, and has never been, either a European invention or a European specialty

Racism is very old, because humans are by nature a tribal species. In its most basic form (a preference for people who look and act like oneself over people who don’t), I don’t think it can ever be made to disappear entirely. And I’m one of the most optimistic people on this subject, since I’m married to somebody of a different race.

In recent years, it’s become fashionable to blame racism on white people. As if racism is something that evil Europeans invented, like bowties or T-shirts. This approach has a long pedigree, because it serves as a cover for one’s own racism: as I described here, Albert Einstein, a pioneering virtue-signaler, kept a diary between October 1922 and March 1923, in which this Communist who famously once characterized racism as “a disease of white people” describes the Chinese as “industrious, filthy, obtuse people.”

In the diaries, Einstein notes how the “Chinese don’t sit on benches while eating but squat like Europeans do when they relieve themselves out in the leafy woods. All this occurs quietly and demurely. Even the children are spiritless and look obtuse.” After earlier writing of the “abundance of offspring” and the “fecundity” of the Chinese, he goes on to say: “It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us the mere thought is unspeakably dreary… A peculiar herd-like nation [ … ] often more like automatons than people.”

In Colombo in Ceylon, a place that rarely got the best out of colonial-minded Europeans, Einstein writes of how the locals “live in great filth and considerable stench at ground level” adding that they “do little, and need little. The simple economic cycle of life.”

Sure, Einstein. Other people are the real racists!

Of course, like everywhere else, the Mediterranean basin where the Graeco-Roman culture evolved was dominated by ethnic prejudice and, sometimes. Much the same as in China, this was mostly a form of positive discrimination with respect to members of one’s ethnic group, and rejection or, at least, a degree of suspicion with regards to others. It had nothing to do with racism as it’s currently understood.

In China, India and at least parts of the Levant and the Iranian lands, this approach always contained a vague preference for fair-skinned people over dark-skinned people, and there’s a simple explanation for it: for millennia, lighter-skinned people from the Eurasian steppes had been invading older cultures and imposing their will over them, so that aristocracies often tended to be lighter-skinned than the peasants over whom they ruled; that explains, for example, the casual racism towards “black” Indians expressed by the Turkish khagan who met the 7th century Chinese traveler Xuanzang.

This was most evident in caste-driven India but also easy to see in China, as the northern Han culture spread its control over southern regions with darker-skinned locals. The collapse of the Han Dynasty, and the division of China into a barbarian-led North and a tradition-embracing South just as the Roman Empire declined only heightened the trend: northerners widely seen as clean, virtuous Sinicized semi-barbarians eventually took over a southern state that had declined into utter ineffectiveness.

Pale faces and bodies were markers of success, of hard work and dedication, while darker-skinned people looked like the descendants of less industrious races weakened by abundance and mild winters. Thus, the bogeyman “Liu the Barbarian,” used to scare Chinese children during the Song Dynasty, was presented as having dark skin like an Indian or Malay.

In Europe, actually, this view took hold much slower: Greeks had risen as a military and cultural superpower with full awareness that they were walking on the footsteps of millenarian civilizations created by (slightly) darker-skinned Egyptians and Levantine peoples. When Rome built its empire, encompassing much of the most important regions of three continents, it first had to defeat the Semitic Carthaginians, who proved a match for them for decades.

It was only after the barbarian invasions and the subsequent collapse of the Western Roman Empire that, as in China, or India, being a pale northerner really started to become as a sign of superior status. In the 6th century, the Italian philosopher Boethius took the trouble to calculate human degrees of “darkness,” shifting from a shade similar to obscurity (“fuscus”) to absolute black (“nigerrimus”) that classified Sub-Saharans, and others, according to these minute distinctions. But few people in Europe cared about this because few people in Europe ever met a black person.

The divide created by Arab advances between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, a split that had never existed before the 7th century, contributed to this process as the two sides, Christian and Muslim, slowly hardened into opposing blocs in which interaction was limited to a very small volume of trade – by antiquity’s standards – and military encounters.

This is not simply about Europeans becoming more wary of the darker-skinned enemy, the Moor that despoiled Spain, leading to seven centuries of Reconquista. Ethnic distinctions loomed just as large, even larger, between those of more or less pure Arab blood and Berbers in North Africa and native Egyptians in Egypt. One of Caliph Umar’s first acts in power had been the emancipation of all Arabs taken prisoner and held as slaves during the earlier wars led by Abu Bakr, using this occasion to declare the legal principle that no Arab could be a slave.

It also was Arabs, to a great degree, who invented anti-black racism, something pretty much inexistent in contemporary Europe. Blacks were targeted because they were broadly considered a less developed people, and partly as a result of the traumatic Yemenite wars against Ethiopians in the 6th century, as well as the genocidal annihilation of South Arabian Ethiopians that marked the end of hostilities. But mostly they were seen by the Arabs as natural-born slaves.

The Islamic opening of large-scale slavery routes from Sub-Saharan Africa only deepened this prejudice, giving way to rather direct anti-black racism well before the turn of the millennium. This explains why scholarly debates about the physical appearance of Muhammad, the prophet, became heated and eventually filled with death threats and injunctions: Allah’s envoy, Muslim scholars eventually agreed, had certainly, most definitely been as far from black as any Arab could be.

That a judicial ruling, a fatwa, was seen as necessary to stomp the claim that the prophet was black is telling. That the claim may have been circulated by Christians as an attack, which is not clear, is less significant than the reaction to it. Earlier Arab tradition had been happy with the embrace of the “Black Raven,” an influential group of poets with African blood (being born of Sub-Saharan sexual slaves); a few centuries later, as black slaves flooded the Islamic caliphate, the idea didn’t appear so endearing, particularly when applied to the greatest Arab of all; Al-Masudi reports that, when he wanted to insult a commander, Caliph Al-Mansur (r. 754-775) called him worse than a “black slave,” a casual racist insult of a kind that at this time was uncommon in Europe.

The fact that some Christian Ethiopians identified their ancestors with the accursed biblical character Canaan, a grandson of Noah and son of Ham (of “Curse of Ham” fame), only gave this Arab-Muslim, anti-black racism a patina of theological respectability that was originally absent among (at least most) Christians, which explains the Ethiopian embrace of the character¹. The Arab Egyptian jurist Ibn Abd al-Hakam (801-871) popularized that alleged genealogy in his Arabic-language works, and this view went unchallenged until the Iraqi jurist Ibn Al-Jawzi rejected the notion in the 12^th century.

The first Arab scholar known to have expressed rejection of African blacks on account of their underdevelopment was the Abbasid court propagandist extraordinaire Al-Jahiz (776-868), Al-Hakam’s contemporary, who wrote that they were “the worst of men and the most vicious of creatures in character and temperament.”

This is going to sound harsh, but I’m quoting Al-Jahiz directly: “We know that the Zanj [East Africans blacks] are the least intelligent and the least discerning of mankind, and the least capable of understanding the consequences of actions.” Al-Jahiz also claimed that “despite their dimness, their boundless stupidity, their obtuseness, their crude perceptions and their evil dispositions, they make long speeches.”

From that point on, the flood gates were open. Muslim chroniclers wrote fanciful histories of Sub-Saharan kingdoms such as Ghana or Kanem in which the founders invariably were white Arabs or Berbers who had eventually become black after generations of concubinage with black women. Black slave soldiers were distinguished from other being called “abid” or “abd” a particularly scornful word for slave, being typically reserved for domestic ones, since slave-soldiers were called for centuries either “ghulam” or (later) “mamluk.” A hadith rejected as spurious by many specialists stated that “the black African, he steals when hungry and fornicates when sated,” and yet circulated broadly across the Ummah.

Similar stories associated blacks with mindless sexuality, including one attributed to Al-Shafii (767-820) in which the wise jurist tells a student, who was worried about a runaway, that he would find his lost slave in jail: when that happens, and the student asks the jurist how did he know, he responds that he deduced it using the Prophet’s wisdom: either the slave had been arrested for stealing or detained for fornication.

Even extremely successful blacks like Abu al-Misk Kafur (905-968), an ex-slave eunuch who rose to prime minister and de facto ruler of Egypt in 946, were subjected to frequent racial insults. These came from all quarters, including the renowned Arab poet Al-Mutanabbi (915-965), whom Kafur hired to sing his praises and ended up complaining of his lot, as a brilliant artist rejected by his Arab patrons in Syria, forced to pay obeisance to a black eunuch in Cairo for money. Al-Mutanabbi in particular attacked Kafur for the supposedly offensive body odor that he emitted, to this day the salient characteristic for which the savvy politician Kafur is remembered in Arab culture.

The Palestinian traveler Al-Maqdisi (945-991) wrote that “the Africans are people of black color, flat noses, kinky hair, and little understanding or intelligence.” The 12th century Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi described blacks as having a “lack of knowledge and defective minds” He added: “Their ignorance is notorious; men of learning and distinction are almost unknown among them, and their kings only acquire what they know about government and justice from the instruction of learned visitors from farther north.”

These attitudes permeated to non-Muslims living in the Ummah as well, and the famed Christian physician Ibn Butlan (d. 1066) left behind detailed musings on how the work assigned to a slave should preferably match the slave’s perceived racial qualities, recommending dark-skinned Berber women from the southwest of the Maghreb as “good for procreation and pleasure” in an advice treaty.

Similar considerations are found in the works of people who possibly never set foot on Sub-Saharan Africa, like the author of the anonymous romance about Alexander the Great entitled Iskandarnamah, or the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela who, in the 12^th century, described the region as a land of “black slaves, the sons of Ham” who “have not the intelligence of ordinary men,” and who went around naked, grazing like animals and committing incest.

Ibn Khaldun, widely admired in the West, likewise almost certainly never came close to Sub-Saharan Africa; he still lived in a region filled with black slaves and wrote that blacks were naturally submissive to slavery: “To the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings.” Along these lines, the 10^th century Iranian philosopher and chronicler Miskuyah/Miskawayh described the slaves involved in the Zanj rebellion in Iraq, decades before his birth, as errant and elusive.

The Iranian geographer Al-Qazwini (1203-1283) asserted that blacks are characterized by “weakness of intelligence,” while his fellow Iranian scholar Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (973-1050) wrote around 1030 of what he considered their primitive nature: “They are so uncivilized that they have no notion of a natural death. If a man dies a natural death, they think he was poisoned. Every death is suspicious with them, if a man has not been killed by a weapon” The Iranian scholar Nasir al-Din Tusi (1201-1274) concluded that the human races had different levels of intellectual development and that East African blacks were at the lowest level. On similar grounds, Al-Masudi classified natives of Sindh, India, as blacks, noting their dark skin and low intelligence.

I know all of this is pretty unsavory, but it must be taken into consideration when one writes about cultural perceptions. Not the least insidious component of eurocentrism is to believe that everything bad was invented by Europeans (the dark side of the equally stupid idea that everything good was invented in Europeans). The idea that other peoples were happy-go-lucky creatures living in innocence in their lands until evil Europeans came with their racist ideas and their carbon-emitting inventions is downright silly, and yet it’s widespread about people who consider themselves literate.

Along the same lines, this is not to trash early Arabs. Successful people often become insufferably arrogant. Over the wondrous (for them) 7^th century, Arabs (understandably) perceived themselves as superior to those they had come to rule. They had emerged from almost nowhere, from poor towns and isolated oases, to gain control of some of the wealthiest lands in the world, the cradle of the most ancient civilizations, still filled with decayed monuments to the greatness of the Egyptian pharaohs and the Persian kings of kings, as well as misshapen hills of clay where the massive compounds of the Sumerian and Akkadian rulers had once stood.

So, yes, the Arabs came up with theories and observations on the basis of the stuff they found out. They went to Sub-Saharan Africa and, like later Europeans, being ignorant of the specific conditions that created specific cultures, they came up with their own unadorned judgments. More importantly, they also took millions upon millions of people as slaves, kicking off a slave trade that — as I will explain in future posts — continues to this day and has been the largest and most damaging in African history, surpassing in every sense the later Atlantic trade towards the Americas.

If you know anything about professional journalism, you probably know Betteridge’s law of headlines, an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

My headline was a question mark. I will not answer the question. I leave that to you, reader. So, now you can wonder, having read all the evidence I just presented: were early Muslims horribly racist? Just don’t hurry: be very cautious with your answer, because you will then have to apply the same standard to everybody else. And if the things that early Muslims wrote, said and did were not horribly racist in your view, just keep that in mind for future accusations of racism against others.

1. OK, bear with me here because this is complicated: the identification of blackness with sin is mostly metaphorical in early Christian writings, although there are some where the metaphor is somewhat stretched: in Athanasius’ Life of St. Anthony, the spirit of fornication appears to the saint as a black boy; in other texts, the same metaphorical device linking darkness with uncontrolled sexuality is tentatively deployed. For the view that the association of Ham with blackness is first found in a 4th century Syriac text of unknown impact, see David M. Goldenberg’s “The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,” (Princeton UP, 2005). It’s worth noting that even Goldenberg argues that the blackness and slavery versions of the Curse myth were only fused into a compound narrative later, in the first century of the Islamic period. The reference was rehashed and picked up centuries later by Christian Europeans to make the same points about enslaved Africans. Various Christians narrated encounters with Satan appearing as a black man from the 9^th century on and, in 1022, the Church accused Manichaeans of worshipping an Ethiopian who was believed to be Satan. Teresa of Avila, in the 16^th century, also described how Satan tormented her as a black boy.