Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

34 // DAVID M. GOLDENBERG
mon thread binding all these accounts together is the linkage of blackness and
slavery.
A few examples from the Muslim authors will suffice. From Ibn Khaldun
(fourteenth century) quoting "genealogists" with whom he disagrees:
Negroes are the children of Ham, the son of Noah, and.. .they were singled
out to be black as the result of Noah's curse, which produced Ham's color
and the slavery God inflicted upon his descendants.
And from Tabarl (ninth century) quoting others:
[Noah] prayed that Ham's color would be changed and that his descendants
would be slaves to the children of Shem and Japheth.
Or quoting the father of Ibn 'Ata' (647-732):
Ham begat all those who are black and curly-haired Noah prayed that
the hair of Ham's descendants would not grow beyond their ears, and that
wherever his descendants met the children of Shem, the latter would
enslave them. 48
The obvious meaning of "hair not growing beyond the ears" is made explicit in
The Book of the Zatij:
Ham was most beautiful in face and form, but God changed his color and
that of his progeny because of the curse of Noah. [Noah] cursed Ham
blackening his appearance and that of his progeny; and that they be made
slaves to the sons of Shem and Japheth. This narrative is widely found in
history books, as is recorded in the "Book of the Gold Ingot" (Saba^ik adhdhahab).
When the prophet of God (Noah) partitioned the earth among his
sons, Africa belonged to Ham. He begot sons who are the Negro, whose
hair does not go below their ears, as we see them. 49
The persistence of this linkage of slavery with blackness in the Islamic world
is explained by Islam's long history of enslaving black Africans. (Even today in
many Arabic dialects, the word for Black is 'abd, which actually means "slave.")
Such linkage provided the justifying myth sustaining the social structure. In
Jewish history, the Israelites conquered and enslaved the Canaanites and thus
invented the attendant justifying myth: Noah's curse of the eponymous Canaan
with eternal slavery. In Islamic history, it was not Canaan who was enslaved, but
Black Africa. The biblical curse story was then reinterpreted to embrace both
slavery and blackness—Islam's own etiological myth. 50 The same mythic
justification was then adopted from Islam by other societies in which the Black