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

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
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