Islam in History by Lewis Bernard

Author:Lewis, Bernard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2011-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

The term commonly used by the ancient Arabs for the offspring of mixed unions was hajin, a word which, like the English “mongrel” and “half-breed,” was used both of animals and of human beings. For example, hajin would indicate a horse whose sire was a thoroughbred Arab and whose dam was not. It had much the same meaning when applied to human beings, denoting a person whose father was Arab and free and whose mother was a slave. The term hajin in itself is social rather than racial in content, expressing the contempt of the highborn for the baseborn, without attributing any specific racial identity to the latter. Non-Arabs, of whatever racial origin, were of course baseborn, but so too were many Arabs who, for one reason or another, were not full and free members of a tribe. Full Arabs—those born of two free Arab parents—ranked above half-Arabs, the children of Arab fathers and non-Arab mothers (the opposite case was inadmissible). In turn, half-Arabs ranked above non-Arabs, who were, so to speak, outside the system.

Among the ancient Arabs there was an elaborate system of social gradations. A man’s status was determined by his parentage, family, clan, sept, and tribe, and the rank assigned to them in the Arab social order. All this is richly documented in poetry, tradition, and a vast genealogical literature. A more difficult question is how far the ancient Arabs recognized and observed social distinctions among the various non-Arab peoples and races who supplied much, though not all, of the slave population of Arabia. According to Badawī, “there was a consensus that the most unfortunate of the hajīns and the lowest in social status were those to whom blackness had passed from their mothers” (S, p. 21).

At his discretion, the free father of a slave child could recognize and liberate him and thus confer membership of the tribe. Under the Islamic dispensation such recognition became mandatory. In pre-Islamic custom, however, the father retained the option; according to Badawī and the sources cited by him, Arab fathers at that time were reluctant to recognize the sons of black mothers. The alleged reason for this reluctance was their color, sincethe Arabs despised the black color as much as they loved the white color; they described everything that they admired, material or moral, as white. A theme in both eulogy and boasting was the whiteness of a man, just as one of the signs of beauty in a woman was also whiteness. It was also a proof of her nobility. In the same way a man could be eulogized as ‘the son of a white woman’. Similarly they would boast that they had taken white women as captives. [S, p. 21 ]

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.