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

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An African origin of the Proto-Semites would make the evidence of an African background to the early Arabs comprehensible. George Mendenhall believes he has identified the “earliest identifiable Arabic-speaking social group,” viz. the Midianites, an important political entity that came into existence suddenly in the 13th century BCE in northwest Arabia. Mendenhall argues that this highly sophisticated culture spoke a language which is an archaic ancestor of modern Arabic. 29 This is significant, if true, because as David Goldenberg documents, “Kush is the ancient name of Midian” and “the people of Northwest Arabia (Midian) were called Kushites.” 30 This would make the earliest identifiable group of Arabic-speakers Kushites. If, as Jan Restö suggests as well, the Priestly author(s) of the Hebrew Bible offers us the earliest attempt at a systematic description of peoples living on the Arabian peninsula around the 7th century BCE, 31 these peoples in general are there identified as Kushites (Gen 10:7) too. 32 The Classical authors called the whole region from India to Egypt, both counties inclusive, by the name Ethiopia. 33 Kushites were the dominant ethnic group in Syro-Palestine in late 8th and 7th African Roots of Semitic Languages,” in Silvia Federici (ed.), Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and Its “Others” (Westport, Connecticut and London: Praeger, 1995) 175-96; Joseph H. Greenberg, "African linguistic classification," in Joseph Ki-Zerbo (ed.), General History of Africa, Volume 1: Methodology and African Prehistory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1981) 292–308. On the Africa vs. Asia AA Origin dispute see Daniel P. Mc Call, “The Afroasiatic Language Phylum: African in Origin, or Asian?” Current Anthropology 39 (1998): 139-143. 28 A number of scholars postulate an African origin of the Semitic linguistic family and its speakers: See e.g. Gregorio del Olmo Lete, Questions of Semitic Linguistics. Root and Lexeme: The History of Research (Bethesda, Maryland: CDL Press, 2008) 115; Edward Lipiński, Semitic Languages: Outline of a Comparative Grammar (Leuven: Uitgeverij Peeters and Departement Oosterse Studies, 1997) 42-43; Faraclas, “They Came Before the Egyptians” 190; A. Murtonen, Early Semitic (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1967), 74; George Aaron Barton, Semitic and Hamitic Origins: Social and Religious (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1934) 8; idem, “The Origins of Civilization in Africa and Mesopotamia, Their Relative Antiquity and Interplay,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 68 (1929) 303-312. On the other hand, some scholars postulate a Levantine origin of Proto-Semitic. That is to say, a group of African AA speakers migrated northeast into the Levant and there evolved the Proto-Semitic language, maybe as early as the 8 th millennium BCE. See Peter Bellwood, First Farmers: The Origin of Agricultural Societies (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005) 209; Igor M. Diankonoff, “The Earliest Semitic Society,” Journal of Semitic Studies 43 (1998): 209-219; idem, “Earliest Semites in Asia,” Altorientalische Forschungen 8 (1981)23-70 (the former article by Diankonoff [1998] is a modification of his views expressed in this latter article [1981]). 29 George E. Mendenhall, “Arabic in Semitic Linguistic History,” JAOS 126 (2006): 17-26; The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman et al, 6 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1992) 4:815 s.v. Midian by George E. Mendenhall; idem, “The Syro-Palestinian Origins of the Pre-Islamic Arabic,” in Studies in the History and Archaeology of Palestine, vol. III (Aleppo University Press, 1988) 215-223. 30 David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) 28, 54. See also Jan Retsö, The Arabs in Antiquity: Their History from the Assyrians to the Umayyads (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) 139. 31 Retsö, Arabs in Antiquity, 212. Fred V. Winnett similarly saw the genealogies of Gen. 10:7 as Arabian genealogies which “contain information of considerable value for the reconstruction of early Arabian history.” He assumes these genealogies reflect the political and tribal situation in 6 th cent BCE Arabia. Fred V. Winnett, “The Arabian Genealogies in the Book of Genesis,” in Harry Thomas Frank and William L. Reed (edd.), Translating and Understanding the Old Testament. Essays in Honor of Herbert Gordon May (Nashville and New York: Abingdon Press, 1970) 173. 32 Regarding the genealogies of Gen. 10:7 Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1984) 511 notes: “It is certain that the majority of the names describes peoples in Arabia,” not Africa. 33 E.g. Strabo, Geography, Book I, Chapter 2, §§ 24-40; E. A. Wallis Budge, A History of Ethiopia, Nubia and Abyssinia (According to the Hieroglyphic Inscriptions of Egypt and Nubia and the Ethiopian 6
centuries BCE, 34 though the Africoid presence there probably went back as far as the Natufian culture of the 10 th millennium BCE. 35 These were no doubt black or dark-skinned (though not necessarily Negroid) Syro-Palestinians. 36 Being that peoples designated as Arabs first appear in sources connected with events in Syria in the first centuries of the first millennium BCE, 37 it is not unlikely that the historical Arabs emerged out of these various groups of Arabian Kushites. 38 Chronicles) 2 vols. (London, 1928: Methuen; republished in Oosterhout, the Netherlands, in 1966 in one volume by Anthropological Publications) I: 2. See also J.W. Gardner, “Blameless Ethiopians and Others,” Greece and Rome 24 (1977): 185-193. In this connection it is appropriate to note that many of the early twentieth century European observes and ethnographers assumed the original Arabians to have been black-skinned Hamites, part of a supposed ‘black belt of mankind’ stretching from Africa to Melanesia. See e.g. C.G. Seligman, “The Physical Characters of the Arabs,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 47 (1917): 214-237; Henry Field, “Ancient and Modern Inhabitants of Arabia,” The Open Court 46 (1932): 847-869; Bertram Thomas, “Racial Origin of the Arabs,” in idem, The Arabs: The life-story of a People who have left their deep impress on the world (London: Thorton Butterworth Ltd., 1937) 353-359. 34 On the Kushite presence in the Syro-Palestine region see Roger W. Anderson, Jr. “Zephaniah ben Cushi and the Cush of Benjamin: Traces of Cushite Presence in Syria-Palestine,” in Steven W. Holloway and Lowell K. Handy (edd.), The Picture is Broken: Memorial Essays for Gösta W. Ahlström (JSOTSupp 190; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995) 45-70. William Foxwell Albright documented a district or tribe called Kush in southern Transjordan in the 19 th century BCE and a Kûàân-rÙm, “high Kushan” in Northern Syria in 13 th -12 th cent BCE. Williams Foxwell Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1956) 205 n. 49. On the Kushite presence in North Arabia see also Goldenberg, Curse of Ham, 20: “The existence of a Kushite people in the general area and references to it in the Bible have become well accepted in biblical scholarship.” Even Arabic tradition records an Arabian Kush. Ibn al-Muj§wir in his T§rÊkh al-mustabßir records a tradition according to which the southern Tih§ma was called Kush. G. Rex Smith, A Traveller in Thirteenth- Century Arabia: Ibn al-Mujāwir’s Tārīkh al-mustabßir [London: Ashgate, 2008] 83 [Eng. 109] 35 On the Natufians of Palestine see C. Loring Brace et al, “The questionable contribution of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to European craniofacial form,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 103 (2006): 242-247; Margherita Mussi, “The Natufian of Palestine: The Biginnings of Agriculture in a Palaeoethnological Perspective,” Origini 10 (1976) 89-107; F.J. Los, “The Prehistoric Ethnology of Palestine,” Mankind Quarterly 7 (1966): 53-59; Sir Arthur Keith, “The Late Palaeolithi Inhabitants of Palestine,” Proceedings of the First International Congress of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences, London August 1-6 1932 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) 46-47; idem, New Discoveries Relating to the Antiquity of Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1931) 210-211. 36 As Roger W. Anderson, Jr. notes: “The Cushites were probably dark-skinned or burnt-faced people, ones whom we would classify today as black.” Anderson, “Zephaniah ben Cushi,” 68. But Anderson wants to connect these Syrian Kushites with the Nubian rulers of Egypt’s 25th Dynasty who had some influence in the area. On the other hand Robert D. Haak has shown that this association is untenable. “ ‘Cush’ in Zephaniah,” in Holloway and Handy, Picture is Broken, 238-251. On Kushites in the area see also Israel Eph’al, The Ancient Arabs: Nomads on the Borders of the Fertile Crescent 9th – 5th Centuries B.C. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1982) 78-79. The ancient Egyptians also depicted Syro-Palestinians as having “dark hair, brown complexions and Semitic features”: Frank J. Yurco, “Were the Ancient Egyptians Black or White,” BAR 15 (Sept/Oct 1989): 26. In sum, in Near Eastern, Greco-Roman, Biblical and post-biblical Jewish literatures, Kushites are noted for their black skin. Goldenberg, Curse of Ham, 113-114. 37 Retsö, Arabs in Antiquity, 119. 38 Arabian populations in fact have a much deeper relationship to African populations. The peninsula is, in terms of geology and ecology, more appropriately seen as a part of Africa rather than Asia [Maurizio Tosi, “The Emerging Picture of Prehistoric Arabia,” Annual Review of Anthropology 15 (1986): 461-490; D.T. Potts, The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, Vol. I: From Prehistoric to the Fall of the Achaemenid Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) 9; Ali A. Mazrui, Euro-Jews and Afro-Arabs: The Great Semitic Divergence in World History (Lanham: University Press of America, 2008) Chapter Seven]. The first hominines of the peninsula were likely African migrants, Arabia being one of the first territories reached as they expanded out of Africa [Jeffrey I. Rose and Michael D. Petraglia, “Tracking the Origin and Evolution of Human Populations in Arabia,” in Petraglia and Rose, Evolution of Human Populations, 1; Michael D. Petraglia, “The Lower Paleolithic of the 7
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