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2 | Islam and Anti-Blackness: Leaving Ignorance Behind Author Biography Dr. Jonathan A. C. Brown is Professor and Chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University. He is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law, and the author of several books including Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy. Disclaimer: The views, opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in these papers and articles are strictly those of the authors. Furthermore, Yaqeen does not endorse any of the personal views of the authors on any platform. Our team is diverse on all fronts, allowing for constant, enriching dialogue that helps us produce high-quality research. Copyright © 2021. Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research 3 | Islam and Anti-Blackness: Leaving Ignorance Behind This essay is adapted from my forthcoming book Islam & Anti-Blackness (Oneworld, 2022), which will provide a comprehensive discussion of this important topic. The son of ʿImrān’s dark skin was of no matter, since the Most Worthy of Worship chose him to speak to. - Ibrāhīm bin Muḥammad al-Kānemī (d. 1212-13 CE), a scholar from Kanem who moved to Marrakesh, on the blackness of Moses1 Introduction Mālik bin Dīnār (d. circa 127/745) was a pious scholar of Basra. The son of a Persian slave, he lived off pennies made by copying the Qur’an.2 Yet Basra’s wealthiest man, whose daughter had been courted by elite Arabs, offered Mālik her hand in marriage (it was her idea). He refused, saying that he had long ago divorced the world. On a different occasion, it was Mālik bin Dīnār who was the seeker. When he realized that a black slave in Basra was actually the truest ‘friend of God’ in the city, Mālik bought the slave and freed him so that he—Mālik bin Dīnār—could follow that slave and serve him as a student.3 I am fortunate never to have suffered racial discrimination. But I have experienced what both the wealthy Basran family and Mālik bin Dīnār knew, what all those who have ever sought knowledge (ʿilm) or blessing (baraka) quickly discover: that once one gains a taste for knowledge, one pays little heed to the shape or color of the vessel that bears it. 1 Wa lam yubāli Ibn ʿImrān bi-udmatihi, ḥattā iṣṭafāhu kalīman khayr maʿbūd. Ibn al-Abbār, Tuḥfat al-qādim, ed. Iḥsān ʿAbbās (Beirut: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1406/1986), 157. Thanks to Andrea Brigaglia for this citation. 2 Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī, Siyar aʿlām al-nubalā’, ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnā’ūṭ et al., 25 vols. (Beirut: Mu‘assasat al-Risāla, 1992–98), 5:363–4. 3 Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣbahānī, Ḥilyat al-awliyā’, 10 vols. (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, and Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1996), 2:365, 10:173–4. 4 | Islam and Anti-Blackness: Leaving Ignorance Behind Yet our prejudices are stubborn. We must combat them with the contempt they deserve. When some of the Companions lapsed into tribal chauvinism, the Prophet decried what they were doing as “putrid (muntina).”4 Of all the names and ﷺ visages most recognized and beloved in West Africa, none is more so than Shaykh Ahmadu Bamba (d. 1346/1927). A Wolof scholar and Sufi master from Senegal, he knew that some Muslims from the Arab and Berber north looked down on him. In the opening of his famous work Pathways to Paradise (Masālik al-jinān) he wrote, “Do not turn down [this book’s] benefits because I am from among the blacks. The most honored servant with God is, without a doubt, the most reverent. And blackness of body signals neither weakness of mind nor lack of understanding.”5 This essay is an effort to answer many queries diverse in their details but all begging the same question: Is Islam anti-Black?6 Others have addressed this question before, including Sherman Jackson in his Islam and the Blackamerican, Abdullah Hamid Ali in The ‘Negro’ in Arab-Muslim Consciousness, Ahmad Mubarak and Dawud Walid in their Centering Black Narrative, Dawud Walid on his own in Blackness and Islam, AbdulHaq al-Ashanti in his Defining Legends: An 4 Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, kitāb al-birr wa’l-ṣila, bāb naṣr al-akh ẓāliman aw maẓlūman. 5 Rudolph Ware, Zachary Wright, and Amir Syed, Jihad of the Pen (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2018), 140. See also Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007), 61–2. 6 Anti-Blackness is generally defined as a particular kind of racism, discrimination, and denigration, which is directed at people deemed (i.e., racialized as) Black. This, of course, raises the question of who is Black, who defines this, whether it is defined by phenotypic features like skin color or along political or social lines, and whether this Blackness is a fixed category in every society. The knot these questions form is evident in the debate over capitalization. Is Black just a description of skin tone and/or phenotype, which can convey value, judgment, or nothing at all beyond merely noting the shade of someone’s skin? Or is Black more than just an adjective? Since “Black” skin isn’t actually black, clearly there is a process of cultural construction going on when the word black is used. What else is going into that construction besides an effort to note a color, for example, labeling people as “other,” as lower, etc.? Although it seems often to be used in discussions simply to mean pervasive anti-Blackness, Afropessimism is an influential and interesting perspective on this issue. Afropessimists hold that Black is a category almost hard-wired into human culture: it is the oppressed and exploited half in an omnipresent equation of power, defined by and thus defining the powerful, the real, the White. In the view of Afropessimism, Black is the slave, the rightless, the inhuman that makes the idea of the free, enfranchised, and human White possible. It is part of the structure of how society defines itself, the category that is excluded and pushed down so that “we” can talk about who “we” are. The argument for this view is compelling, especially in the West and particularly in the United States. But Blackness has not been a stable category throughout history, and critics accuse Afropessimism of imposing a US-centric definition and experience of Blackness on others. See Moon-Kie Jung, João H. Costa Vargas, eds., Antiblackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). For an argument that the historical use of the word black to denigrate means that the word should be abandoned (as opposed to reclaimed), see Kewsi Tsri, Africans Are Not Black (London: Routledge, 2016). 5 | Islam and Anti-Blackness: Leaving Ignorance Behind Analysis of Afrocentric Writings against Islam, and Iskander Abbasi in an essay for Maydan. Here I hope to update and expand on these efforts, particularly in light of recent debates and specific accusations of anti-Black sentiment in Islamic law and scripture. Revelation takes the form of human language, and the tradition of scholarship and piety built on revelation is expressed and commemorated through the medium of Arabia, in the ﷺ language and text as well. In the language of the Prophet’s scripture of the Qur’an and Sunnah, and in the normative tradition of Islamic law and theology, we find numerous examples of the diverse ways in which ‘black’ and ‘blackness’ function literally and as metaphor. A central theme in this essay is that it is wrong to assume that everyone, everywhere, has conflated ‘blackness’ as a metaphor with ‘blackness’ as a descriptor of skin tone, aesthetic preference with judgments of human worth. (In this essay, I will use black/blackness for a color descriptor, ‘black’/’blackness’ when those colors are being racialized to describe people like Africans, and Black and Blackness for the global racial concept so often discussed today.) At the level of language, we find that anti-Blackness is extremely widespread, but not in the sense that one might expect. Looking at language globally, we find that the negative metaphor of blackness or darkness (and whiteness or light as its positive counterpart) is present in major languages the world over. But even in languages with a negative metaphor of blackness, this often does not apply when people describe their own or other’s appearances. Particularly in languages spoken in Africa south of the Sahara, a person can be described as ‘black’ or dark-skinned without any negative connotation. By the other side of this token, sometimes we find that the metaphor of blackness as bad or inferior can bleed into physical descriptions even though the person being described looks no different from others. Finally, in some cases, the negative use of ‘black’ or related descriptors has nothing to do with a negative view of a racial or ethnic group. Instead, it comes from specific cultural idioms, customs, or aesthetic preferences. So, in language, anti-Blackness can be absent in talk of race and color but present everywhere else; it can be present in talk of race and color even though no one being discussed is 6 | Islam and Anti-Blackness: Leaving Ignorance Behind actually ‘black’; and it can express taste and aesthetics without a greater judgment of value. There is no denying that anti-Black sentiment is rampant among many Muslims, as seen in Ahmadu Bamba’s introduction and in the deplorable habit of some Arabs to refer to Black people as ʿabīd (slaves). This is indefensible. But if this were a problem with Islam then it would be uniquely pronounced in Muslim communities.