In collaboration with Karima Foundation and SOAS Islamic Society, IHRC hosted an author evening on Monday, 13 February at SOAS, with Dr Jonathan A.C. Brown, Mustafa Briggs and Habeeb Akande, to discuss Islam & Blackness.

Purchase Islam & Blackness and Beyond Bilal from the IHRC Bookshop.

WATCH THE AUTHOR EVENING: 

The event began with a recitation of the Qur’an from Surah al-Hujurat, starting with the verses that translate to:

“O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may ˹get to˺ know one another. Surely the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous among you. Allah is truly All-Knowing, All-Aware”.

Main speeches

The panel discussion consisted mainly of a Q&A format, with Habeeb Akande opening up with his thoughts about both books and describing the methodology that the authors used in order to answer the question of Islam’s relationship to blackness. The event was an interactive event and started off with both authors reading a short excerpt from their book. Mustafa Briggs started off by reading an excerpt from his book which described how he came to write the book and his journey to Islam. Dr Brown’s excerpt opened up the question of what anti-blackness is, how anti-blackness defined the global discourse around racism and how Muslims became racialised as black. He went on to explain how anti-black stereotypes were incorporated into Islamic tradition, how certain scholars challenged this racism and what contemporary scholars needs to do today to challenge racism. Habeeb Akande elaborated on why he doesn’t agree with this idea that non-black people cannot talk about anti-black racism and highlighted the works of past scholars who challenged the anti-black racism within the Muslim community. 

Habeeb then proceeded to ask questions to the panellists which covered issues surrounding why the authors wrote their books, the difficulties that Muslim scholars had when it came to trying to balance legitimate community concerns and challenging racism. Mustafa Briggs further elaborated on how we came to adopt racial concepts via Western colonisation and Western Academia. In regard to the question of the sources of racism within the Muslim community, Dr Brown responded by highlighting the issues of status and class which played a big role on how people saw ‘the other.’ Mustafa then added the fact that a lot of our religious ancestors would have been described as black and interestingly he also bought in the issue of gender. He stated that in his religious learning, he learnt from many black Muslim women that have been invisibalized within the Muslim community before ending by saying that he believes that the erasure of black Muslims in the Islamic tradition went hand in hand with the erasure of women in Islamic tradition. 

The book is an impressive volume that addresses race issues in Islam from multiple angles. As usual, Dr Brown demonstrates his erudition and knowledge of multiple languages in the citations he has. Furthermore, he does a good job of refuting orientalist aspersions upon Islam while at the same time not being apologetic about the reality of racism in parts of the Islamic tradition.

The book brilliantly argues that those who argue that the Islamic sources including the Qur’an is racist against black people do so on extremely flimsy grounds such as arguing that Qur’anic descriptions of evil doers as having “blackened” faces are literal and a literal interpretation of this phrase somehow equates to sub-Saharan Africans. In fact, there is direct evidence to the contrary such as the Qur’an saying that the differences in languages and colours amongst peoples are God’s signs.

For many Muslims, the answer to these accusations is simple. God tells humans that “the diversity of your colours and languages” is “one of His signs” (Qur’an 30:22), and His revelation clearly rejects ethnic and tribal chauvinism. God has created mankind “in peoples and nations so that you may come to know one another, and the most noble among you in God’s eyes is the most pious” (Qur’an 49:13). Indeed, this verse was revealed to the Prophet ﷺ in order to rebuke some recalcitrant Meccans who had mocked the Muslims for “having no one better” than Bilāl, “this black crow,” as they called him, to perform the call to prayer. This led the Prophet ﷺ to address the people of Mecca and tell them that God had driven from them the arrogance and pride in ancestry that was rampant in the Jāhiliyya, the Age of Ignorance before Islam. All people were the children of Adam, the Prophet announced, and “God created Adam from dust.” As the Prophet further explained, it was the varied colours of that dust that gave humans their different skin tones.

If this were a problem with Islam then it would be uniquely pronounced in Muslim communities. And it is manifestly not. Anti-Blackness is a global problem, just as present among Arab Christians as Arab Muslims, among Muslim and Hindu Indians alike. Anti-Black racism in Muslim communities is and must continue to be addressed. 

For all the long-standing and unacceptable anti-Blackness found in Muslim communities, we need to give credit to the many and renowned Muslim scholars who tackled the ‘Is Islam anti-Black’ question before it was ever formulated in its present sense. Indeed, pushing back against racism and prejudice in the Muslim world formed a veritable genre of scholarly writing. The first to address the issue was the famous Basran litterateur and overall man-about-town, al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 255/869) in his epistle on The Pride of Blacks over Whites (Fakhr al-sūdān ʿālā al-bīḍān). This was followed by the Treatise on the Virtue of Blacks over Whites (Risāla fī tafḍīl al-sūd ʿalā al-bīḍ) by the Baghdad intellectual ʿAbdallāh b. Muḥammad Ibn Shirshīr al-Nāshī (d. 293/906), the Book on Blacks and their Virtue over Whites (Kitāb al-Sūdān wa faḍlihim ʿalā al-bīḍān) by the Baghdad scholar Muḥammad b. Khalaf Ibn al-Marzubān (d. 309/919), the Book on the Asceticism of Blacks (Kitāb Zuhd al-ṣūdān) by Jaʿfar b. Aḥmad b. al-Sarrāj al-Muqrī (d. 500/1107), the huge Illuminating the Darkness concerning the Virtue of Blacks and Ethiopians (Tanwīr al-ghabash fī faḍl al-sūdān wa’l-ḥabash) by the famous Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201), the Embroidered Brocade on the Virtues of Ethiopians (al-Ṭirāz al-manqūsh fī faḍāʾil al-ḥubūsh) by the Meccan scholar Ibn ʿAbd al-Bāqī (d. circa 993/1585), the Boast-Off between the White, Brown and Black Women (Mufākhara bayn al-bayḍāʾ wa’l-samrāʾ wa’l-sawdāʾ) by the Damascene Muḥammad Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-Bayṭār (d. 1328/1910), and no less than three treatises by the great Egyptian scholar al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505): Raising the Standing of Ethiopians (Rafʿ shaʾn al-ḥubshān), The Trellised Flowers on Reports about Ethiopians (Azhār al-ʿurūsh fī akhbār al-ḥubūsh), and Life’s Promenade in Choosing Preference between the White, Black and Brown (Nuzhat al-ʿumr fī al-tafḍīl bayn al-bīḍ wa’l-sūd wa’l-sumr).

Habeeb then opened up the floor where the panellists faced questions around caste, blackness, colonialism and the issue of race in the Islamic tradition.

Below are brief excerpts of both speakers contributions in the panel discussion

Dr Jonathan AC Brown:

“Just to say why I wrote this book, it wasn’t just like one day I woke up and said “you know I want to write about blackness.” This is not something I’ve ever thought about. As I wrote a book about Islam and slavery, people kept on saying to me ” you know what? You should write a book about Islam & race.” I said “I’m not crazy, look at me, what do you think I’m nuts?” But then this happened, in the summer of 2020, there was this debate in the research Africa academic listserve and there were professors, actual professors with academic backgrounds, making the argument that Islam is, not that Muslims are racist, but Islam in its discourse, the Qur’an, the sunnah, are anti black. I wasn’t on this listserve & people kept sending me emails”. In responding to the questions from the emails, I had to carry out further research. My answers started to amount to a sizable amount, which then I thought, I should convert it into a book. This resource will be a response to those black academics who have been claiming that Islam is racist or anti-black.

Mustafa Briggs:

In reference to the book Islam & Blackness he said “I feel as though the existence of this book is important because the paradigms which we see blackness and which we see race and which we see community and the way in which we see the world, as the professor mentioned is largely the result of things that we don’t think about. It’s largely the result of Western academia, and the way that western society has defined the world. To which they went onto apply those definitions on a global scale”

The event covered several themes relates to the issue of Islam and blackness, specifically anti-black racism in the Muslim community and how we came to see and understand race in society. This event was a very important event covering several issues related to racism and will be of interest to anyone interested in the issues of religion, racism, colonialism and how to challenge racism today. 

About the speakers: 

Jonathan A.C. Brown is the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He received his BA in History from Georgetown University in 2000 and his doctorate in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2006. Dr. Brown has studied and conducted research in countries such as Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, South Africa, India, Indonesia and Iran.

His book publications include The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunni Hadith Canon(Brill, 2007), Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (Oneworld, 2009) and Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011), which was selected for the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Bridging Cultures Muslim Journeys Bookshelf.His book, Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy (Oneworld, 2014), was named one of the top books on religion in 2014 by the Independent. He has published articles in the fields of Hadith, Islamic law, Salafism, Sufism, Arabic lexical theory and Pre-Islamic poetry and is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and Law. Dr. Brown’s current research interests include Islamic legal reform and a translation of Sahih al-Bukhari.

Mustafa Briggs is a graduate of Arabic and International Relations from the University of Westminster whose dissertation focused on Arabic Literature and Literacy in West Africa. Mustafa started an MA in Translation at SOAS, University of London with a specialisation in Arabic and Islamic Texts, before going onto al-Azhar University in Cairo, Egypt where he is currently doing another degree in Islamic Studies and Arabic.

Mustafa rose to international acclaim for his ‘Beyond Bilal: Black History in Islam’ lecture series which saw him explore and uncover the deep routed relationship between Islam and Black History; and the legacy of contemporary African Islamic Scholarship and its role in the International Relations of the Muslim World as well as the vital role Female Scholarship plays in the West African Islamic Tradition.

Habeeb Akande is a British-Nigerian writer and historian. He is the author of seven published books. He is a chartered accountant by profession and former student of Islamic law at al-Azhar University in Egypt.