“Anyone who says that the Prophet is black should be killed”: The ...

This study has a number of implications for scholarship on Islam. First, it strongly
suggests that the common scholarly trope of the Arabian ‘swarthy whites’ be abandoned, as it has
little support in the sources and is more a figment of scholarly imagination. Secondly, while
Bernard Lewis’s study of race and slavery in Islam was ground-breaking, this study suggests that
a new interpretation of the development of the racial ethic in early Islam is desirable. 260 It seems
that we have the extraordinary case of black anti-white racism giving way to white anti-black
racism, both in the context of an articulation of Islam. 261 While the latter has been explored, the
former – black racism in Islam – has not. Such a situation is worthy of further study.
260 While Lewis acknowledges that pre-Islamic Arabia was free of an anti-Black, anti-African sentiment, he attributes
the development of these sentiments to the ‘Bedouin aristocracy of the conquests’. But these Bedouin Arabs, we have
shown, were a proud black-skinned group themselves. The beginning of anti-black racism must be sought elsewhere.
See Lewis, Racism and Slavery, 21-26; idem, “Crows,” 90. For a more recent discussion see Drake, Black Folk,
II, Chapter Five. Drake, following Lewis, also assumes that anti-black (or anti-Negro) prejudice existed among the
Bedouin conquerors.
261 On Arab racism against the ‘red’ maw§lÊ see Ibn #Abd Rabbihi, al-#Iqd al-farÊd, III: 317-328; Lewis, Race and
Slavery, 38; Goldziher, Muslim Studies, Chapter Three.
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