The Era of Arab Supremacy
A History of Mankind (372)
For Muhammad’s generation and many that followed, that Arabs were the world’s most awesome people and African blacks the worst was held as a self-evident truth.
All over, ethnic distinctions loomed large between those of more or less pure Arab blood and others: to start with, 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 slave1.
Everywhere across the Ummah, blacks were broadly considered a less developed people, partly as a result of the traumatic Yemenite wars against Ethiopians in the 6th century, and the genocidal annihilation of South Arabian Ethiopians that marked the end of hostilities.
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: the prophet, 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 telling2. 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” poets with African blood; 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 “negress slave,”3 a casual racist insult of a kind that at this time was uncommon in Europe.
