Anti Black Sentiment in Islam?

▮Muhammad Rashid AT              

Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) slowly ascended upon the mount Arafat to deliver his farewell sermon during his last pilgrimage to Mecca in 632 CE. He began detailing the piety-measuring yardstick after extending praises and gratitude to the one who made him capable of sharing the message of Islam in the fullest sense. Prophet ( peace be upon him) continued “ O people, indeed your lord is one and your father is one. There is no preference for an Arab over non-Arab, nor for a white person over a black person, nor for a black person over a white person, except though piety”, thus he asserted how the way Islam looks upon blackness and racism.

But there are some Hadiths explicitly defame black Africans as stupid, disfigured, lazy and so on, which not only goes against the notion of Humanism, but even against the principles of Islam. The leading Hadith critics like Ibn Qayyim Al Jawziyya (d.1350 CE) had denied the authenticity of such Hadiths and concluded that any Hadith denigrating a race or ethnicity cannot come from the prophet and must be a forgery or error. The Hadiths of this kind could be seen in the works of Al-Tabarani (d.971) and Nu’aym Al-Isbahani (d.1038), it might be their zest for Hadith collection but they were criticized by Muslim scholars for misleading people with such false narratives.

The westerners, especially Americans often claim that the racial divisions such as black people and white people were also common in previous societies. Here arises a question whether this putrid divisions were alive in Arabia at the time of prophet(PBU)?

Take this Hadith for example,” obey your commander even if your commander is an African slave”. It might be misunderstood from this that there in Arabia ,there was a deep anti-black sentiment in their minds. But is that true? To understand this , we firstly want to realize that the tribe was everything for Arabia. Those who lacked it, will live as marginalized, least respected,as an outsider. And there is no greater outsider than the slave, while the ‘black’ was the strong marker of a slave of that time. So here in Hadith `African slave’ is a connotation to the least respected one in the society, not to the blackness.

There are also some verses in the Quran like which might be understood as having anti black sentiment like in 3:106

يَوْمَ تَبْيَضُّ وُجُوهٌۭ وَتَسْوَدُّ وُجُوهٌۭ

Which means that “ on the day when faces will be whitened and faces will be blackened”. Muslim scholars have said that this is a metaphorical binary between white and black just like purity and impurity. Some scholars had took it literally as Imam Fakhr Al Din Razi and said “ it will be a type of blackness differing from all other types of earthly blackness”.

The scholars said that anti black sentiment is something that formed in early centuries of Christianity. The Curse of Ham in which Noah cursed the descendants of Ham and in result they turned black and slaves. Christians considered blackness as sinful and cursed and Christ is the one who was sent to whiten those blacks in the kingdom of heaven.

Quran clearly mentioned the most superior one in the world is the most pious, regardless of his colour, social status etc.. In 49:13 it says that إِنَّ أَكْرَمَكُمْ عِندَ ٱللَّهِ أَتْقَىٰكُم ۚ Which means that the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most pious.