Is THEM Guilty of Shirk? - Dr. Wesley Muhammad

Muslim and thus was an advocate of the rights of ahl al-bayt, the Prophet‘s Hashmite relatives and ‗Alid
descendents. He fulminated in his poetry against the ‗Abbasid abuse of the tombs of the Shiite Imams and
their living descendents of his day. Unlike the Umayyads who were pure Black Arabs, the Abbasids were
‗whitened‘ through miscegenation with Persian and Byzantine concubines. They thus developed an antiblack,
anti-Arab sentiment. Ibn al-Rumi thus writes to the Abbasid caliph:
―You insulted (the family of the Prophet Muhammad) because of their blackness (bi-l-sawad),
while there are still deep black, pure-blooded Arabs (al-„arab al-amhad akhdar ad‟aj). However, you
are white - the Romans (Byzantines) have embellished your faces with their color. The color of
the family of Hashim was not a bodily defect („aha).‖ (Abu al-Faraj al-Isbahani, Maqatil altalibiyyin,
759)
The Arabs were well-known for their blackness. In fact, Ibn Manzur tells us in his Lisan al-Arab that the
phrase ‗aswad al-jilda‘, black-skinned, idiomatically meant ‗khalis al-‗arab,‘ pure Arab because, he says,
―the color of most of the Arabs is black (al-udma).‖ You thus cannot deny the racial implications of the
metaphor ‗black sheep‘ for the Arabs.
There is also no denying that the ‗white sheep‘ reference is a reference to the ethnic whites who converted
to Islam. In the hadith itself the Persians are specifically identified. The Persians were/are a proud, racist
Indo-Aryan people. Empirius (ca. 200 CE; Against the Ethicists, 43) claimed that of all whites the Persians
are associated with ―the whitest and the most hook-nosed.‖ In Classical Arabic tradition the Persians and
Byzantines were recognized and the ‗whites‘ of the empire. Al-Dhahabi points out in his Siyar a’lam alnubala’,II:168:
―Red (al-hamra‟), in the speech of the people of the Hejaz, means white-complexioned, and this
is rare among them. Thus the meaning of the hadith ‗a red man as if one of the slaves.‘ The
speaker is saying that this is the complexion of the Christian slaves captured from Syria, Rome,
and Persia.‖
Whites, Persians in particular and Turks a little later, gained ascendency in the empire through the
misnomered ―Abbasid Revolution.‖ It was actually a ‗Persian Revolution‘, as documented by a number of
scholars. The consequence of this revolution is that the Arab-Islamic kingdom of the Umayyads was
replaced by a largely Non-Arab, Persianized kingdom. Al-Jahiz observed that the Abbaisid empire was
Persian (‗ajamiyya wa Khurasani) and the Umayyad was Bedouin Arab (Bayan, 3:366) and al-Dhahabi
lamented:
―We rejoiced that [the reins of power] passed to [the Prophet‘s family, i.e. the Banu
Abbas]…nay, it was a tyrannical Khurasanian (Persian) regime which arrived.‖ (Siyar, 4:58)
These Persians introduced into Islam, among other things, a virulent anti-black, anti-Arab racism that
shaped the Abbasid caliphate and life in the Abbasid empire in general. That this ‗black sheep/white
sheep‘ metaphor alludes to this Black Arab/White Persian demographic of the empire was known by at
least some within the empire. See e.g. the case of Khaydar b. Kavus Afshin (d. 841), the Persian general of
Caliph al-Mu‘tasim. He only superficially converted to Islam and dreamed to see the restoration of his
land, his people, and their religion, Zoroastrianism, which he called the ‗white religion‘. He mocked ‗the
black religion‘ Islam and the Black Arabs, and would kill a black sheep every Wednesday by cutting it in
half and would then walk between the two parts. This ritual aptly illustrates the method used by the
Persians to topple the Umayyad dynasty: divide and conquer.
61