Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (6 page)

The advent of Islam created an entirely new situation in race relations. All
the ancient civilizations of the Middle East and of Asia had been local, or at
most regional. Even the Roman Empire, despite its relatively larger extent,
was essentially a Mediterranean society. Islam for the first time created a truly
universal civilization, extending from Southern Europe to Central Africa,
from the Atlantic Ocean to India and China. By conquest and by conversion,
the Muslims brought within the bounds of a single imperial system and a
common religious culture peoples as diverse as the Chinese, the Indians, the
peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, black Africans, and white
Europeans. Nor was this coming together of races limited to a single rule and
a single faith. The Muslim obligation of pilgrimage, which requires that every
adult Muslim, at least once in his lifetime, must go on a journey to the holy
places in Mecca and Medina, brought travelers from the remotest corners of
the Muslim world, covering vast distances, to join with their fellow believers
in common rites and rituals at the very center of the Islamic faith and world.
The pilgrimage, probably the most important factor of individual, personal
mobility in pre-modern history, combined with the better-known forces of
conquest, commerce, and concubinage to bring about a great meeting and
mixing of peoples from Asia, Europe, and Africa.

At different times and places, Muslims have responded to the challenge of
racial encounter and cohabitation in a variety of ways. These responses are
reflected, in sometimes striking contrast, in both old and recent literature.
One view of Muslim racial attitudes, widely accepted in the modern West, is
expressed in a famous passage in Arnold Toynbee's Study of History, documented, like so much in that massive work, with a personal experience:

For instance, the Primitive Arabs who were the ruling element in the Umayyad
Caliphate called themselves "the swarthy people," with a connotation of racial
superiority, and their Persian and Turkish subjects "the ruddy people," with a
connotation of racial inferiority: that is to say, they drew the same distinction that we draw between blondes and brunettes but reversed the values which we
assign to the two shades of white. Gentlemen may prefer blondes; but brunettes
are the first choice of Allah's "Chosen people." Moreover, the Arabs and all
other White Muslims, whether brunettes or blondes, have always been free
from colour-prejudice vis-a-vis the non-White races; and, at the present day,
Muslims still make that dichotomy of the human family which Western Christians used to make in the Middle Ages. They divide Mankind into Believers and
Unbelievers who are all potentially Believers; and this division cuts across every
difference of Physical Race. This liberality is more remarkable in White Muslims today than it was in the White Western Christians in our Middle Ages; for
our medieval forefathers had little or no contact with peoples of a different
colour, whereas the White Muslims were in contact with the Negroes of Africa
and with the dark-skinned peoples of India from the beginning and have increased that contact steadily, until nowadays Whites and Blacks are intermingled, under the aegis of Islam, throughout the length and breadth of the Indian
and the African Continent. Under this searching test, the White Muslims have
demonstrated their freedom and race-feeling by the most convincing of all
proofs: they have given their daughters to black Muslims in marriage."

The Arabs, that is to say, as swarthy whites, felt superior to the fairerskinned peoples to the north of them but were entirely free from any feeling
of color prejudice directed against their darker southern neighbors. Prejudice
against those of fairer skin, clearly, is felt to be no more than an amusing
paradox. What counts is prejudice against those of darker skin, and since this
is lacking, the Arabs and Islam may be pronounced free from infection.

Similar views are expressed in a number of other writings, and date back,
it would seem, to the nineteenth century, and more especially to the American
Civil War, which brought the linked issues of race and slavery into sharp focus
before world opinion. The freedom of the Islamic world-as opposed to
Western Christendom-from racial prejudice and discrimination rapidly became commonplace.

The Middle East is an ancient land of myths in which the mythopoeic
faculty-the ability to create myths, to believe in them, and to make others
believe-has by no means died out. It would be wise to subject any widely
held assumption regarding this area to critical scrutiny.

Even the reader whose acquaintance with Arabic literature goes no further
than The Thousand and One Nights may feel some doubts about the validity
of this picture of an interracial utopia. His doubts might begin at the very
beginning-with the framework story. King Shahzaman, it will be recalled,
left home to visit his brother King Shahriyar but turned back to collect something which he had forgotten. Arriving unexpectedly at his palace at midnight,
he found his wife sleeping in his bed and attended by a male black slave, who
had fallen asleep by her side. The king, enraged by this sight, killed both
offenders with his sword as they lay in bed and then resumed his journey to
visit his brother. There the situation was even worse. While King Shahriyar
went hunting, not only his wife but twenty female members of his household
came out and were (to repeat the Victorian translator's discreet usage) "attended" by twenty male black slaves:

The King's wife, who was distinguished by extraordinary beauty and elegance,
accompanied them to a fountain, where they all disrobed themselves, and sat
down together. The King's wife then called out, 0 Mes'ood! and immediately a
black slave came to her, and embraced her, she doing the like. So also did the
other slaves and women; and all of them continued revelling together until the
close of the day.°

King Shahzaman and King Shahriyar were clearly white supremacists,
with sexual fantasies, or rather nightmares, of a sadly familiar quality. This
resemblance in The Thousand and One Nights to certain aspects of the old
American South is confirmed if we look more closely into that work. Blacks
appear frequently in the stories that make up the Nights. Where they do, it is
almost invariably in a menial role-as porters, household servants, slaves,
cooks, bath attendants, and the like-rarely, if ever, rising above this level in
society. Perhaps even more revealing in its way is the story of the good black
slave who lived a life of virtue and piety, for which he was rewarded by turning
white at the moment of his death.10

We thus have two quite contradictory pictures before us-the first contained in the Study of History, the second reflected in that other great imaginative construction, The Thousand and One Nights. The one depicts a racially
egalitarian society free from prejudice or discrimination; the other reveals a
familiar pattern of sexual fantasy, social and occupational discrimination, and
an unthinking identification of lighter with better and darker with worse.

Both versions are impressively documented from Islamic sources. The
cause of racial equality is sustained by the almost unanimous voice of Islamic
religion-both the exhortations of piety and the injunctions of the law. And
yet, at the same time, the picture of inequality and injustice is vividly reflected
in the literature, the arts, and the folklore of the Muslim peoples. In this, as in
so much else, there is a sharp contrast between what Islam says and what
Muslims-or at least some Muslims-do.

What, then, are the realities? There is a distinction which it is important to
make in any discussion of Islam. The word "Islam" is used with at least three
different meanings, and much misunderstanding can arise from the failure to
distinguish between them. In the first place, Islam means the religion taught
by the Prophet Muhammad and embodied in the Muslim revelation known as
the Qur'an. In the second place, Islam is the subsequent development of this
religion through tradition and through the work of the great Muslim jurists
and theologians. In this sense it includes the mighty structure of the Shari'a,
the holy law of Islam, and the great corpus of Islamic dogmatic theology. In
the third meaning, Islam is the counterpart not of Christianity but rather of
Christendom. In this sense Islam means not what Muslims believed or were
expected to believe but what they actually did-in other words, Islamic civilization as known to us in history. In discussing Muslim attitudes on ethnicity,
race, and color, I shall try to deal to some extent at least with all three but to
make clear the distinction between them.

The ultimate Islamic text is the Qur'an, and any enquiry into Islamic beliefs
and laws must begin there. There are only two passages in the Qur'an which
have a direct bearing on race and racial attitudes. The first of these occurs in
chapter XXX, verse 22, and reads as follows:

Among God's signs are the creation of the heavens and of the earth and the
diversity of your languages and of your colors. In this indeed are signs for those
who know.

This is part of a larger section enumerating the signs and wonders of God. The
diversity of languages and colors is adduced as another example of God's
power and versatility-no more.

The second quotation, chapter XLIX, verse 13, is rather more specific:

O people! We have created you from a male and a female and we have made
you into confederacies and tribes' so that you may come to know one another.
The noblest among you in the eyes of God is the most pious, for God is
omniscient and well-informed.

It will be clear that the Qur'an expresses no racial or color prejudice. What
is perhaps most significant is that the Qur'an does not even reveal any awareness of such prejudice. The two passages quoted show a consciousness of
difference; the second of them insists that piety is more important than birth.
The point that is being made, however, is clearly social rather than racialagainst tribal and aristocratic rather than against racial pride.

In the Qur'an, the question of race is obviously not a burning issue. It became a burning issue in later times, as can be seen from the elaboration on
these texts by subsequent commentators and by the collectors of tradition.

The evidence of the Qur'an on the lack of racial prejudice in pre-Islamic
and the earliest Islamic times is borne out by such fully authenticated fragments of contemporary literature as survive. As in the Qur'an, so also in the
ancient Arabian poetry, we find an awareness of difference-the sentiment of
an Arab as against a Persian, Greek, or other identity. We do not, however,
find any clear indication that this was felt in racial terms or went beyond the
normal feeling of distinctness which all human groups have about themselves
in relation to others.

On the specific question of color, ancient Arabian literature is very instructive. The early poets used a number of different words to describe human
colors, a much wider range than is customary at the present time. They do not
correspond exactly to those that we use now and express a different sense of
color-one more concerned with brightness, intensity, and shade than with
hue. Human beings are frequently described by words which we might translate as black, white, red, olive, yellow, and two shades of brown, one lighter
and one darker. These terms are usually used in a personal rather than an
ethnic sense and would correspond to such words as "swarthy," "sallow,"
"blonde," or "ruddy" in our own modern usage more than to words like
"black" and "white." Sometimes they are used ethnically but even then in a
relative rather than an absolute sense. The Arabs, for example, sometimes
describe themselves as black in contrast to Persians, who are red, but at other
times as red or white in contrast to the Africans, who are black. The characteristic color of the Bedouin is variously stated as olive or brown.