Muhammad_Article.349.. - Dr. Wesley Muhammad

Awf b. al-Khazraj, 106 thus a pure, very black-skinned Arab. The thousand fellow blacks, possibly
the detachment of which he was commander, were no doubt black Arabs like him. 107
Patricia Crone recently raised the question: What did the Bedouin of the Arab conquests
look like? “(H)ow should we,” she queried, “tell a filmmaker who wanted to screen the story of
the Arab conquests to depict the conquerors?” 108 A good question, though her focus was
exclusively on the dress of the conquerors. However, the cumulative evidence suggests that they
did not resemble the cast of Moustapha Akkad’s 1976 film, The Message. 109 Rather, in the context
of our discussion, K. Vollers observation in 1910 is relevant to Crone’s question:
So werden die Ausdrücke grün (akh∙ar) und Schwarz (aswad) oft identisch gebraucht. Die
khu∙ra (von akh∙ar) wird neben der sumra (von asmar) als die herrschende Farbe der
eigentlichen Beduinen genannt; ebenso heissen die Araber…aswad, Schwarz, im Gegensatz
zu den Persern (aÈmar). 110
Thus, when “The chansons de gestes routinely mention the blackness of Saracen skin,” 111 this does
indeed have “support objectif et historique,” and is not simply because the Saracens were
considered “méchants et maudits.” 112
V. The Myth of the Swarthy Whites
According to Arnold Toynbee in his tour d’force A Study of History, the Arabs of the
Umayyad period identified themselves as ‘the swarthy people’ in contrast to their Persian and
Turkish subjects whom they identified as ‘the ruddy people’. But he assures us that both are but
“two shades of white,” similar to the common blond/brunet distinction. 113 While somewhat
critical of Toynbee, Bernard Lewis shares and develops this idea of the Arabs as a group of tawny
whites. 114 Noting that Classical Arabic color terminology often carries different significances than
106 KhalÊl b. Aybak ‘afadÊ, Kit§b al-wafÊ bi-"l-wafay§t, ed. Helmut Ritter (Istanbul: Maãba#at al-dawlah, 1931-)
XVI: 618-619; Al-•abarÊ, The History of Al-•abarÊ, Vol. VI: MuÈammad at Mecca (trans. W.
Montgomery Watt and M.V. McDonald (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988) 126.
107 Contra Daniel Pipes, “Black Soldiers in Early Muslim Armies,” International Journal of African Historical
Studies 13 (1980) 87 who had to assume that, even though #Ub§da was a black Arab, the others must be African
because he felt it unlikely that Black Arabs “would band together”. There is nothing to commend this argument
which is, as Lewis remarks (Race and Slavery, 112 n. 14) “not supported by any other evidence in the rich Arabic
historiography dealing with this period.”
108 Patricia Crone, “’Barefoot and Naked’: What Did the Bedouin of the Arab Conquests Look Like?” Muqarnas
25 (2008): 1.
109 Freek L. Bakker (The Challenge of the Silver Screen: An Analysis of the Cinematic Portraits of Jesus,
Rama, Buddha and Muhammad [Leiden: Boston, 2009] Chapter Five; idem, “The Image of Muhammad in
The Message, the First and Only Feature Film about the Prophet of Islam,” Islam and Christian-Muslim
Relations 17 [2006]: 77-92) noted the film’s fidelity to Muslim tradition, but Anthony Quinn’s lead character,
Hamza, is in Muslim tradition one of the deep black (dalham) sons of #Abd al-Muããalib, MuÈammad’s paternal
grandfather. Similarly, MuÈammad’s adopted son Zayd b. H§ritha, who was a short, flat-nosed and very blackskinned
(§dam shadÊd al-udma) Arab, was well-played by the no doubt visually incongruous British actor Damien
Thomas. On Zayd see below.
110 Vollers, “Rassenfarben,” 86.
111 Strickland, Saracens, demons, & Jews, 168.
112 Contra Bancourt, Les Musulmans, I:58.
113 Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1939) 266.
114 Lewis, Race and Slavery, 19, 22.
17