The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa by John Allembillah Azumah

Author:John Allembillah Azumah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oneworld Publications

THE IMAGE OF BLACKS IN LIGHT-SKIN MUSLIM SOURCES AND SOCIETIES

In pre-Islamic Arab poetry and historical narrative, blacks – who at this stage were by and large Ethiopians – were usually referred to as Habash, the Arabic name from which the term ‘Abyssinian’ is derived. There is hardly any trace of antagonism or discrimination on the basis of the skin colour in pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia. In line with this pre-Islamic and early Islamic period, the Qur’an, apart from one instance where the colours black and white are used in an idiomatic sense to depict evil and good respectively,70 expresses no prejudice in matters of race or colour. Indeed, the Qur’an makes no specific reference to blacks, Africa or Abyssinia.

In social life in pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia there were black slaves as well as white slaves, mainly captured during war, and there is no evidence that the former suffered any specific discrimination by virtue of the colour of their skin. On the contrary, the Habash, who were active in sixth-century Arabia as allies of the Byzantines, were usually regarded as people with a higher civilization than the Arabs and respected during early Islamic times as people with a revealed religion. It was partly due to the high esteem with which the Habash were held in the early Islamic period that Muhammad advised his persecuted followers to seek asylum in Abyssinia in 615 CE.

The second caliph, ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, the conqueror of Palestine and Egypt, ‘Amr ibn al-As and several other Companions of Muhammad are known to have had black-African traits in their ancestral lines.71 However, after the death of Muhammad and the early Muslim conquests, there developed what Bernard Lewis describes as ‘an inherent and continuing contradiction between Islamic doctrine on the one hand and the social reality on the other’ in the attitude of Arab and subsequently, other light-skinned Muslim societies towards blacks.72

The hadiths generally insist on the equality of all men in Islam before God. There are, however, a considerable number of hadiths, even though technically termed ‘weak’ in that doubts have been cast over their authenticity as reflecting Muhammad’s or his early Companions’ views, that nevertheless constitute important evidence for contemporary Muslim attitudes. A number of these hadiths deal with race and colour with some specifically condemning other races, especially the black race.

One such hadith reports Muhammad as having said of the Ethiopian: ‘When he is hungry he steals, when he is sated he fornicates.’ Sometimes some of these hadiths have an eschatological dimension, as for instance when Muhammad is quoted as having predicted that the Ka’ba would one day be destroyed by ‘Black-skinned, short-shanked men’, who will tear it apart and begin the destruction of the world.73 Referring to this hadith, the head of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Mission in Ghana, Maulvi Wahab Adam, identifies the ‘Black-skinned, short-shanked men’ as Africans of Abyssinian origin and writes:

The Ka’abah symbolises the unity of Allah. It is the symbol of Islam. It stands for Muslim solidarity. It represents all that is dear to all true Muslims.

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.