Prophet Muhammad and the Black Arabs - Dr. Wesley Muhammad

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‘grain of truth’ underneath all of the apologetic accretions [Hongxun, 1985; Sushalo, 1971: 42-43 (Dyer, 1981-1983: 563); Stratanovich, 1954: 52-66 (Dyer, 1981-1983: 563)]. One quite fascinating piece of this grain of truth is no doubt the remarkable description of the turbaned Muslim who appears in the Emperor’s dream and who turns out to be the Prophet Muhammad himself (See Endnote 1). Singularly arresting is the description of his color: black gold. What could this possibly mean and what is the source of this very eccentric Chinese description of Islam’s prophet? Black gold, one of several ‘colored golds’ used for jewelry, is gold with a black oxidide layer resulting from a cobalt component and heat treatment. As eccentric as such a description may seem vis-à-vis the popular, though late, Arabic/Persian description found in the more central Muslim lands according to which Muhammad is ruddy white, this Chinese description actually is curiously consistent with an earlier Arabic description, a description, we should add, that is more in agreement with the ethno-cultural context of Jahili and early Islamic Arabia [on which see Reynolds, 1992; Berry, 2002]. The most common description of the Prophet in Arabic sources of the ninth century, the date of the earliest extant Arabic Islamic literature, is abyad [Muhammad, 2011: 2 n. 9]. This term usually means ‘white’ in contexts not related to human complexion. In the latter context, however, by antiphrasis abyad frequently means black [Stewart, 1999: 119; Shivtiel, 1991:336]. But in Classical Arabic there are several distinct ‘blacknessess’ or ‘shades of blackness’ [al- Asyuti, 1992, II: 574; al-Tha‘labī, 2006: 81-82]. Abyad is a particular shade or ‘type’ of blackness. According to the important Syrian hadith scholar and historian of Islam, Shāms al-Dīn Abū `Abd Allāh al-Dhahabī (d. 1348), When Arabs say, ‘so-and-so is white (abyad),’ they mean a golden brown complexion with a black appearance (al-hintī al-lawn bi-hilya sudā’). And if they are speaking of the color of the people of India, they say: more or less dark brown (asmar wa ādam). And regarding the blackness of the people of Takrur they say aswad, intensely black, and similarly all those whose complexion is overwhelmingly black are called aswad or shadīd al-udma.. [al-Dhahabī, 1981, II: 168] Abyad, the most common descriptor of Muhammad, is, like this black gold, a black complexion with a golden-brown undertone and it is a complexion free of blemish or dark patches [al-Asyuti, 1992, II: 574; Ibn Manzur, 1955-1956, IV: 209; al-Zabīdī, 1965, XVIII: 251-253]. Abyad, like the black gold analogy, also suggests a ‘black luminosity,’ viz. a black complexion that is imbued with a luminosity or glow [Muhammad, 2010a: 23-25]. This is the ideal of beauty in early Arab society [al-Zabīdī, 1965, XVIII: 251; Ibn Manzur, 1955-1956, VII: 124; Muhammad, 2011: 245; contra Badawī, 1973], and gave rise to the metaphoric use of coal (another ‘black gold’) to describe Ethiopian blackness. See e.g. the words of the epigrammatist Ascelepiades (fl. 300-270 B.C.E.) who wrote concerning a certain Didyme: 4
Gazing at her beauty I melt like wax before fire. If she is black, what is that to me? So are coals, but when we burn them, they shine like fire [Anth. Pal. 5.210]. This association of ethnic blackness with coals alit is relevant here, not only because ‘black gold’ is a common metaphor for coal, but also because in Arabic coal is euphemistically called abyad [EI 2 s.v. Lawn]. It should be noted here that in early Arabic society a beautiful, clear and luminous blackness was distinguished from an ‘ugly’ blackness, blemished by excessiveness due to scorching [Ibn al-Faqīh al-Hamadānī, 1996: 199; al-Dimashqī, 1923:274]. It is thus unsurprising that we find in this Hui myth the black gold complexion of the Prophet in implied contrast to the black and generally evil appearance of the demon. There is an alternative version of this myth of the Chinese Emperor’s dream that is relevant also: One night the Emperor Tai Zong of the Tang dynasty dreamt that a roof beam of his golden palace was collapsing. The roof beam nearly smashed his head, but it was intercepted and pushed back by the right hand of a man. The man wore a green robe, and a white turban was around his head. He had a towel draped over his should and a water kettle in his left hand. He had deep eye sockets, a high nose bridge, and a brown face. [Li and Luckert, 1994: 237; Benite, 2004: 83] While this version of the myth continues in a way similar to the above, our attention is drawn to the description of the turbaned Muslim, Muhammad: here he is brown complexioned. This too is consistent with what we find in the Classical Arabic tradition. In two reports on the authority of the famous Companions Anas b. Mālik and ‘Abd Allāh b. ‘Abbās the Prophet is described as having a “beautiful brown-complexioned (asmar) body” [See sources in Muhammad, 2011: 20]. Asmar is a color term denoting a dark brown, short of black [Borg, 1999: 129; Stewart, 1999: 111-112; Vollers, 1910: 88]. Thus, the two descriptions of the Arabian prophet that feature in the central and most wide-spread myth of Chinese Islam – indeed the defining myth – precisely correspond to the two descriptions we meet with in the early Arabic literature. But this general description of Muhammad as a very dark-skinned Arab more or less completely disappears from the Arabic literature of a later period and is replaced by what will become the orthodox and popular description of Muhammad: abyad musrab bi-humra, ruddy white-skinned [see Muhammad 2011:25-28]. Being that the black-skinned Muhammad completely disappears from the Arabic Islamic tradition and is almost totally forgotten, and that the ruddy-white Muhammad becomes universally recognized throughout Muslim and non- Muslim literature and iconography, how is it that Chinese Islam clung to this black Arab Muhammad for so long? The Chinese myth is difficult to date, but a printed version of it was probably in circulation in the late Ming period (ca. 1622), certainly by the early Qing [Leslie, Daye and Youssef, 2006: 144; Leslie, 1981: 55; Garnaut, 2006; Benite, 2004: 84]. However, as Anthony 5
Page 1 and 2: 1. Introduction Prophet Muhammad an
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Page 13 and 14: Ibn al-Faqīh al-Hamadānī. (1996)
Page 15: Stratanovich, G. (1954) “Vopros o

Prophet Muhammad and the Black Arabs - Dr. Wesley Muhammad

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