ASC-075287668-2887-01

RACE, STEREOTYPES AND POLITICS 81by insisting on the moderate influence of the sea winds, which temper theArabian climate. But furthermore Ibn Khaldûn believed that the deficienciescaused by life in the harsh climatic zones could be mitigated by adherence toIslam. 18 This concept was, as Bruce Hall demonstrates, reworked in the Saharancontext to become linked to descent from Arabic Muslim lineages.First, ideas about ‘white’ Arab Islamic culture that originated in the IslamicMiddle East and North Africa were made part of Southern Saharan culturalidentity by a reconfiguration of local genealogies connecting local Arabic- andBerber-speaking groups with important Arab Islamic historical figures in NorthAfrica and the Arabian Peninsula. Second, local Arabo-Berber intellectualsrewrote the history of relations between their ancestors and ‘black’ Africans in away that made them the bearers of Islamic orthodoxy and the holders of religiousauthority in the Sahelian region. 19The political dominance of these Arabo-Berber groups, partly originating inecological advantages, was thus legitimated by a claim on Islamic cultural andreligious heritage, handed down in particular lineages of Arabo-Berber origins.Thus, religion, behaviour and descent were primal traits of ‘race’. Bruce Hallsummons this reasoning up as: ‘To be “Black” is to be a son of Ham; to be“White” is to be a bearer of “true” Islam’. 20 At present, the link between lineage– temet in Tamasheq – and a racialised Muslim identity is still made in NorthernMali, where the Ifoghas claim to be bearers of true Islam through descent fromthe prophet, while local imghad groups counter this claim by stressing anidentity as ‘true Berbers’, against ‘Arab invaders’. 21 This conception of race asdefined through, first, belonging to a lineage; and second, the status quality ofthis lineage, is strikingly parallel to developments in Europe since the 15 th centuryas described by Pierre Boulle. According to Boulle, the term race becameused first by the Italian and French nobility to differentiate between olderfamilies and the newly ennobled. The difference was perceived to be one ofmoral character and (older) lineage. 22 How far these Arabo-African and Europeandiscourses are connected is a difficult but most interesting question. It isalso strikingly similar to the way an ‘Arab national’ identity is construed in1819202122Ibn Khaldun 2005 2nd, 1967: 58-62. The story of the curse of Ham is known in theMuslim world. It is even very likely that it was through Arabic texts that the linkbetween this qur’anic and biblical story, and the origin of races came into Europeandiscourse. The link between “curse” and “black” is explicit in Arabic as both arederived from the same Arabic root: SWD.Hall, B. 2005: 30.Ibid.: 57.Klute, G. 2004.Boulle, P. 2002.