Five answers on race in the Quran and the hadith reports critics cite

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Critics say that the Quran and the hadith (reports of the words and actions of Muhammad (peace be upon him)) teach contempt for black people. They point to a curse on the descendants of Noah, to praise of the Arabs as the most noble, and to a few reports that speak harshly of dark skin.

Some of those reports exist, and some later medieval writings do contain racial prejudice. Below are five points that keep apart the Quran, authentic reports, weak reports and traditions of Israelite origin (isra’iliyyat), and that set the counter-evidence beside each charge.

The charge that the Quran ranks peoples meets its hardest test at Quran 49:13. The verse addresses all humankind, says that God made them into peoples and tribes so that they might know one another, and ends: the most noble of you in the sight of God is the most righteous.[1] Nobility is a matter of conduct. Quran 30:22 lists the variety of languages and colours among the signs of God, in the same sentence as the creation of the heavens and the earth.[2]

Two claims in the critique have no basis in the Quran. It names no curse on a son of Noah and says nothing about skin; its one story of Noah’s family concerns a son who refused the ark (11:42-43).[3] And no verse calls the Arabs the most noble people. Hadith do record that leadership of the community belonged to Quraysh, the tribe of the Prophet, in his day.[4] That was a statement about tribal and political standing. Later writers sometimes stretched it into a claim of ethnic superiority, and that stretch is a fair target for criticism.

In the sermon he gave near the end of his life, Muhammad said that an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab, nor a non-Arab over an Arab, nor a white over a black, nor a black over a white, except through taqwa (God-consciousness).[5] The report is in the Musnad of Ahmad, from a man who heard the sermon, and a version from Jabir ibn Abd Allah was graded sound in its chain by al-Albani.

Bukhari records a quarrel in which the Companion Abu Dharr insulted another man through his mother. The Prophet told him that he was a man with some of the ignorance of the pre-Islamic age (jahiliyya) still in him, and that those under a man’s hand are his brothers, to be fed and clothed as he is.[6] The version in Bukhari does not name the man insulted; later retellings name him as Bilal. The lesson of the report holds either way: the Prophet treated an insult based on descent or colour as a fault to be corrected.

The pilgrimage enacts the same teaching. Ismail al Faruqi calls the hajj the clearest embodiment of Islam’s egalitarianism, with pilgrims of every race and class standing in the same plain dress; it was this sight, he notes, that persuaded Malcolm X to give up black racialism.[7]

Bilal was an Abyssinian slave who was tortured for his faith in Mecca and freed by Abu Bakr. He became the first muadhdhin, the one who gives the call to prayer. Umar later called Abu Bakr “our master” who had freed “our master”, meaning Bilal.[8] When the first Muslims fled persecution, the Prophet sent them to the Christian king of Abyssinia, who sheltered them. When that king, the Negus, died, Muhammad told the Muslims of his death and led the funeral prayer for him in absentia.[9]

Usama ibn Zayd was the son of a freed slave. In the Prophet’s last illness he appointed Usama to command an army that included senior Companions. Some people criticised the choice, and the Prophet defended it.[10] Salman, a Persian, came to Medina as a seeker and an enslaved man, and later advised the digging of the trench that protected the city.[11] None of this proves that no Muslim ever held a prejudice. It shows that the first community gave authority, honour and trust to people of African and Persian origin.

Bukhari has a saying that the Prophet’s followers must listen and obey even if an Abyssinian slave “whose head is like a raisin” is placed in authority over them.[12] The report is authentic, and the physical simile may jar a modern reader. Its point is about obedience to lawful authority: the example was chosen as the lowest social position imaginable, so that no origin could disqualify a ruler.

The well-known report with “dinar” in it is the saying “wretched is the slave of the dinar and the dirham”, in Bukhari.[13] The Arabic word abd here means a servant or devotee, and the target is the person who serves money. The text contains no word for black. A critic’s wording, “negro slave of Dinar”, has to be checked against the primary text before it is accepted.

The saying about Nabtal comes from the biographical literature on the Prophet, not from the major hadith collections.[14] Reports of that kind do not carry the standing of an authentic hadith. In the account critics give, the target is one named man and not a people.

The story that Noah cursed Ham and condemned his line to servitude comes from the Bible, where the curse falls on Ham’s son Canaan, and no word of skin colour appears.[15] Some early Muslim historians, al-Tabari among them, passed on material from earlier traditions about the sons of Noah.[16] Muslim scholars call such material isra’iliyyat and treat it as unverified, since it did not come from the Prophet. A report in al-Tirmidhi on the descent of peoples from Noah’s sons is graded weak by modern editors, though al-Tirmidhi himself called it fair.[17]

Medieval prejudice was real, though. Ibn Khaldun called the Ham story baseless and explained skin colour by climate, yet in the same book he wrote demeaning things about black peoples.[18] Against that stands al-Jahiz, whose own grandfather was of the Zanj, and whose treatise on the pride of the Blacks over the Whites set out their merits against those who looked down on them.[19] Scholars of the tradition were divided, and their prejudices came from their own societies. Those prejudices have no warrant in the Quran or in the sound reports.

The bottom line

The Quran ranks people by righteousness and names no curse on any race. The farewell sermon says so in plain words, and the lives of Bilal, Usama, Salman and the Negus show a community that honoured people of every origin. Several reports critics quote are either graded weak, drawn from Israelite sources, or misread.

The honest concession is that some medieval Muslim writers shared the prejudices of their age and wrote them down. The remedy the tradition itself supplies is to test every such claim against the Quran and the sound reports.

Notes

  1. Quran 49:13.
  2. Quran 30:22.
  3. Quran 11:42-43; no verse of the Quran mentions Ham.
  4. Sahih al-Bukhari 7139 (Book of Judgments, chapter “The rulers from the Quraish”). Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 13, p. 113 (Shamela text), for Bukhari 7139.
  5. Musnad Ahmad 23489, from someone who heard the sermon in the days of tashriq; al-Albani, al-Silsila al-Sahiha, no. 2700, on the version from Jabir (from Abu Nuaym and al-Bayhaqi).
  6. Sahih al-Bukhari 30 (Book of Faith, chapter that sins are from the age of ignorance). Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 1, p. 84 (Shamela text), for Bukhari 30.
  7. Ismail Raji al Faruqi, Islam: Religion, Practice, Culture and World Order (London and Washington: The International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2012), p. 42.
  8. Sahih al-Bukhari 3754 (Book of the Companions, the merits of Bilal): “Abu Bakr is our chief, and he manumitted our chief”; the torture of Bilal is in Ibn Ishaq, Sira. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 7, p. 99 (Shamela text), for Bukhari 3754.
  9. Sahih al-Bukhari 1245 (Book of Funerals), on the announcement of the Negus’s death and the prayer; Ibn Ishaq, Sira, on the emigration to Abyssinia. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 3, p. 116 (Shamela text), for Bukhari 1245.
  10. Sahih al-Bukhari 4469 (Book of Military Expeditions), the dispatch of Usama during the Prophet’s last illness. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 8, p. 152 (Shamela text), for Bukhari 4469.
  11. Ibn Ishaq, Sira, on Salman the Persian and the battle of the Trench; Ibn Kathir, al-Bidaya wa al-Nihaya, vol. 4, p. 97, on Salman’s advice to dig the trench.
  12. Sahih al-Bukhari 7142 (Book of Judgments), from Anas. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 13, p. 121 (Shamela text), for Bukhari 7142.
  13. Sahih al-Bukhari 2886 (Book of Jihad), the saying on the slave of the dinar and the dirham. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari (Salafiyya edition), vol. 6, p. 81 (Shamela text), for Bukhari 2886.
  14. Ibn Ishaq, Sira, as transmitted by Ibn Hisham, the account of the hypocrites of Medina; al-Wahidi al-Naysaburi, Asbab al-Nuzul, on Quran 9:61, p. 168: “whoever wishes to look at Satan, let him look at Nabtal ibn al-Harith”.
  15. Genesis 9:18-27.
  16. Al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, vol. 2, Prophets and Patriarchs, trans. William M. Brinner (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), pp. 11–12: Wahb ibn Munabbih makes Ham “the father of the Blacks”, and Ibn Ishaq gives the curse as what “the people of the Torah claim”.
  17. Jami al-Tirmidhi 3931, from Samura ibn Jundab (“Sam was the father of the Arabs … and Ham the father of the Ethiopians”); al-Tirmidhi called it hasan, and Darussalam grades it weak.
  18. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, abridged by N. J. Dawood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 117; on his rejection of the Ham story, Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), pp. 50–54.
  19. Al-Jahiz, Fakhr al-Sudan ala al-Bidan (The Pride of the Blacks over the Whites); Helmi Sharawi, “The African in Arab Culture: Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion”, in Tahar Labib (ed.), Imagining the Arab Other (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008), pp. 97–99.