In this overview of the concept of race/racism so far, the effort has been to look at it mainly from a generic perspective—albeit with a focus on the U.S. example. However, one would be grossly remiss if we did not also include a description of a number of geographically-specific sub-varieties of racism as an ideology and practice of oppression, such as, antisemitism and Islamophobia. While these two forms have their origin in Europe historically (especially Western Europe), today antisemitism and Islamophobia have become universal. 

Additionally, below, we will also look at a different geographic sub-variety of racism as the source of antisemitism, Islamophobia, Sinophobia, and the like, specifically Whiteness (and its corollary white supremacy). 

Antisemitism

Antisemitism[1] is unlike any other kind of racism because it is a unique and exceptionally virulent form of racism in that genocide is already baked into this racist ideology of oppression (something that Nazi Germany, for example, tried to achieve in practice through its death squads, gas chambers, concentration camps, and the like, killing millions and millions of Europeans of Jewish ancestry[2]). In other words, an anti-Semite is always contemplating and working toward a world where there are no Jews alive at all. It is not simply a matter of religion, and in fact religion may not necessarily be an issue at all, but rather it is about an ethnic group as a whole—no matter what their religious beliefs, if any.

Here is a thought experiment: what if all the Jews had converted to some other religion (Buddhism, or Christianity, or Islam, etc.), or had become atheists, in Nazi-occupied Europe? To the European antisemite it would not have mattered. But why? Because Jews had become, for historical reasons—beginning from the time of the Roman occupation of Judaea around 63 BCE, the subsequent revolt of the Jews against Roman rule, and their forcible dispersal from Judea as refugees, about 2000 years ago—a convenient scapegoat for the ills of a society, perpetrated by the ruling elites of the day. This scapegoating, initially through religious justification (Christianity being the main culprit here), and later secular justification (with industrial capitalism being the villain of the piece), was made possible because of their ethno-religious difference from the rest in their host societies. So, for example, for centuries, Christianity taught its adherents that Jews were “Christkillers,” which of course was a complete myth. (Christ was killed by the Romans for political reasons.) Notice, however, that given that Jews were always a minority group, following their dispersal from Roman-occupied Judea, in any given host society (until the creation of the State of Israel in 1948), the Jewish identity that was the basis of antisemitism was itself a function of antisemitism—one depended on the other dialectically. In other words, over the millennia, had Jews not faced antisemitism, they would have disappeared through the natural processes of demographic and cultural absorption, as a distinctly identifiable ethnicity, because of their circumstance as a minority population. Today, while it has steadily receded in Europe and North America through the process of “whitening” (meaning Jews being considered a “white” people rather than an alien minority, as in the past[3]), antisemitism has become much more prevalent in the Islamic Middle East since the creation of the State of Israel (and its subsequent and ongoing persecution—aided and abetted by the United States—of Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Palestine, as well as its occupation of the third holiest city of Islam, Jerusalem).

Yes. It is true, that antisemitism has always been present in the Islamic world too, but was rarely as widespread and horrendously virulent as in Christian Europe. On the contrary, more often than not, Jewish communities in Islamic lands often thrived, such was the case, for instance, over most of the seven-hundred year Muslim rule of Spain, which of course was then followed by the infamous Christian-led Spanish Inquisition, as Muslim rule came to an end, that led to another massive diasporic dispersal of the Jews. (One reason being that Islam recognizes Judaism, as it does Christianity too, as a legitimate religion—after all, knowledgeable Muslims recognize the fact that their religious roots lie in both these religions, constituting together with the other two, the three dominant Abrahamic faiths.)

So, what then is antisemitism, in a nutshell? It refers, at the ideological level, to the genocidal hatred (repeat—genocidal) of all peoples of Jewish ancestry on mythical grounds that Jews are a cunning and money-hungry people always plotting to take over the world (as mythologically outlined in that antisemitic fraudulent tract known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), and at the socio-economic and political level it refers to such racist practices targeted at individuals and entire groups as employment discrimination, residential segregation, enslavement, murder, and mass-killings, often at the behest of ruling elites (as in the case of pogroms, of which the Holocaust is a prime example).

Islamophobia

As one can surmise by parsing this word, this form of ethnicism has to do with the religion of Islam. One can begin by noting that relations between Islam and the West date back almost to the beginning of the founding of Islam in the 7th century; however, the West’s view of Islam has almost always been through the lens of what may be called Islamophobia. And this continues to be true today. (See, for example, the Islamophobic article authored by Wood (2015) popularized by ultra-right zealots, as well as critiques of it by Dagli (2015); Haqiqatjou and Qadhi (2015); and Jenkins (2015). For a historical perspective, see also Hillenbrand (2000), and Meserve (2008).) So, what then is Islamophobia? It refers to a variant of racism (much like anti-Semitism) that rests on essentialist stereotypes that foster an irrational distrust, fear, or rejection of Islam and those who are Muslims (or thought to be Muslims).[4] While Islamophobia dates back almost to the period of the founding of Islam, as just noted, in recent times it has received considerable currency and legitimacy across the world--even in some Muslim majority countries! In the West, Islamophobia is endemic and is of long historical standing, so much so that it is now legendary. Much of the blame for this circumstance can be laid at the door of Christian nationalists, Western media, as well as academics and government officials (often hiding behind “freedom of speech” slogans) following the 9/11 tragedy in United States. Read, for example, Sandra Silberstein’s well-received book, War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11 that not only documents how language can be commandeered in the service of objectives that go well beyond simple communication, but also provides an illuminating window into the mechanics of the construction of ideologies of war (such as the current replacement of the Cold War, with the “War on Terror”). Of particular relevance is her last chapter (titled “Schooling America: Lessons on Islam and Geography”), in which she demonstrates how an opportunity, in the aftermath of 9/11, to mount a genuine effort to provide the U.S. citizenry (and the rest of the planet that subscribe to such U.S. television news channels as CNN) with an objective introduction to Islam—in terms of its history, basic tenets, and its far from insignificant role in the genesis of modern Western civilization—was, instead, often subverted to produce a caricatured image of Islam and Muslims well-suited to the task at hand of manufacturing a new global enemy to replace the one of yesteryear, communism. As she explains: “The geography [of Islam] Americans learned post 9/11 was of a particular sort. This was not a benign travelogue of cultural and historical highpoints. Rather, instruction focused on the military, political, and economic self-interest of the United States as it became involved in a region in which several of the countries were presented as dangerous and incompetent. And the metaphors used to describe this area were often military” (p. 149).[5]

It should be pointed out that from the perspective of the Muslims living in Western countries, Islamophobia has also involved government sponsored projects to reconstruct the Muslim identity by suggesting implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, that Islam is a primitive and backward religion practiced by a backward peoples (the darkies) that is intrinsically violent and terrorism prone. Such an essentialist view, of course, is not only false but completely neglects to consider the historical truth, as those intimately familiar (in a scholarly sense) with both the history and practice of Islam know quite well, that its appearance on the stage of human history marked an important turning point toward the better for much of the Afro-Eurasian ecumene (and indirectly the rest of the world). It is not simply that Islam was marked by such deeply progressive ideas as education and social welfare as constituting the responsibility of the state (baitul mal), or that a highly inegalitarian class-fractured society was unjust (zakaat), or that an economic system that rested on unbridled capitalism was anti-democratic (laws of equity governing commerce), or that the conduct of war be based on principles akin to those agreed to at the Geneva Convention of 1864 and its later incarnations, or that reciprocal obligations between the state and the citizenry be constitutionally codified (dhimma), or that seeking knowledge (ilm) was an exceptionally worthy attribute, and so on, long, long before such ideas came into vogue elsewhere, but that without the Islamic civilization it is quite conceivable that there would be no Western civilization as we know it today. The question that emerges here, however, is this: Is the problem of Islamophobia simply one of ignorance and misunderstanding? Or is there something more going on in that Islamophobia is a symptom of a wider problem: the use of ideologies of prejudice in Western societies to underwrite domination and exploitation, internally and externally? The answer is that it’s the latter. That is, Islamophobia, whether in its past (Crusader era) or current (“war on terror”) guises, is not an aberration, but tied up with the construction of the Euro-Americo-Australasian identity. It is one of several ideologies of the “Other” that aims to render non-European peoples as merely “resident aliens” of this planet and which has been so instrumental in justifying and explaining both the past and the current global domination by the West.[6]

Whiteness

To start with, this is a sociological term—no, folks I did not invent it—and it refers to a racial ideology that is unique to those societies today where Europeans (whites), or their colonial descendants, dominate other peoples in political and/or economic terms, against the backdrop of capitalism, and which is characterized by a number of fallacious beliefs— held consciously or subconsciously—that are all rooted in the notion of the supremacy of the “white race” (captured by the common phrase: white is right! white is might!). In other words, this is a sub-variety of racism (much like antisemitism, and Islamophobia). In order to explain further what “whiteness” really means let me ask you to consider the following two quotes: The first is by Etherington (1989: 286-87) and it is part of his account of relations between the European settlers and missionaries in the colony of Natal (that would later become part of South Africa and which today is called KwaZulu-Natal) in the nineteenth-century.

[A] settler complaint was that… missionaries attempted to convert people who were not capable of becoming true Christians. According to a Methodist district superintendent, the major reason why settlers would not contribute to missions was “skepticism as to the converting power of the gospel upon the native population.” A candidate for the Legislative Council once told an election rally that a “corps of police officers could do more to civilize the Kaffirs, than all the missionaries in the Colony.” Lieutenant-Governor Pine reinforced local prejudice by telling the Methodists that experience had taught him “the extreme difficulty of really converting savage nations to a knowledge of our religion.…” It was as though the settlers unconsciously feared that Christian Africans would have a more powerful claim to equal rights than an uneducated population devoted to their ancient beliefs.

 This second quote is from Ostler (2004: 17-18) who seeks to explain the ideological premises of the dispossession of the U.S. Native Americans in the U.S. West following the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory from the French in 1803 (as if it was theirs to sell in the first place).

Though many men and women who “settled” western frontiers became virulent Indian haters and advocated extermination, most theorists offered assimilation as an alternative. Assimilation resolved the contradiction between a commitment to dispossession with its implications of genocide on the one hand, and Enlightenment and Christian principles of the common humanity of all people on the other.… Yet the basic premise of assimilation, that Indian ways of life were inferior, was linked to increasingly systematized theories of racial classification and hierarchy that tended to reinforce ontological thinking about race.… American elites eventually tried to resolve the contradiction between imperialism and humanitarianism through the idea that whereas rare individuals might become “civilized,” Indians were an inferior race that was inevitably destined to vanish. Although Americans knew at a practical level that Indians controlled a significant proportion of North America, on an ideological level they conceived of the entire continent as empty.

O.K. So, what is my point? It is impossible for the psyche of a people to remain completely unaffected by their unprincipled and violent abrogation of the rights (that is those subsumed by the Natural Law of Prior Claim) of other peoples over a period spanning centuries and on a scale that is simply unfathomable by the human mind—most especially when those so victimized continue to live among the interlopers. It is not surprising then that the denouement of such shameful markers in the history of the colonization of the United States and South Africa as the enslavement of Africans and Asians (in South Africa—1650s–1830s) and First Americans and Africans (in the United States—1500s– 1863/1865); the Hundred Year War (1799–1879); the aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase (1803); the Trail of Tears (1838); and Wounded Knee (1890), on the ideological plane has been the development among the descendants of the European settlers of what may be described as the hegemony of the ideology of “whiteness.” United in their common history—that transcends class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and any other social structural division one may care to identify—of gross criminality (in terms of crimes against humanity), a perverse racist sense developed among them of entitlement to human and natural resources, before all other peoples, on the basis of nothing more than their skin pigmentation. Fortified by the power to continue across centuries, all the way to the present, to impose hegemony upon others (and contrary to the logical expectation of feelings of remorse, the quest to seek forgiveness, the magnanimity to consider restitution, and so on, befitting a people that have never ceased to trumpet to this day their membership of a supposedly superior civilization) the descendants of the European colonial settlers elevated the notion of whiteness as signifying entitlement to privilege to one of Darwinian naturalness (or in the case of those of a religious mind a God-given right).

While the literature on the subject of the hegemony of whiteness ha burgeoned considerably, a brief foray into its principal characteristics is all we can afford, given limitations of time. There are seven central elements around which the ideology of whiteness is organized:

(i) a pervasive and stupefying ahistoricism;

(ii) the deep illusion that whiteness is an immutable biologically determined concept,rather than one of contingency (exemplified by the profound inability to clearly and consistently define who a “white” person is across time and space);

(iii) the fallacy that whiteness equals civilizational superiority (a Eurocentrist hubris);

(iv) the preposterous belief that whiteness is a synonym for humanness;

(v) the notion of whiteness as “property”;

(vi) the belief that possession of this property entitles one to privileges that otherswithout this property are not entitled to; and

(vii) the idea that what constitutes knowledge is a prerogative that belongs only to those who possess this property (and therefore, even describing and questioning whiteness, its practice, its historical antecedents, and so on is akin to dabbling in superstition).

Using this framework as a starting point it is possible to do an analysis of the role of whiteness in society from the perspective of a wide range of topics, such as:

• 'White' as an unstable, time and place dependent ethnic category;

• Whiteness and 'normality' in the popular consciousness of Western citizenry;

• Whiteness as a determinant of social spaces;

• Whiteness as a determinant of power relations;

• Whiteness and urban planning;

• Whiteness and its intersection with class relations;

• Whitness and its interaction with race relations;

• Whiteness, and settler colonialism;

• Whiteness and imperialism;

• Whiteness and Marxism;

• The politics of whiteness in the academy;

• How whiteness determines personal identity;

• Whiteness, law and legal discourse;

• Whiteness and the justice system;

• The role of the media in the 'normalization' of whiteness (nationally and transnationally);

• Whiteness and cinema;

• White feminism and the interrogation of whiteness;

• Women of color and their interrogation of whiteness in white feminism;

• Whiteness and the politics of white supremacy (in the present and in the past);

• Whiteness and concepts of human beauty;

• Whiteness and Christianity;

• Columbus and the origins of whiteness;

• The history of the manufacture of the 'white race';

• Whiteness and presidential politics in the U.S.;

• Whiteness and the politics of immigration;

• The politics of whites struggling against whiteness;

• People of color and their perception of whiteness;

• Whiteness and international relations;

• Whiteness and psychiatry;

• Whiteness and war;

• Whiteness and the globalization of Western culture

• Comparative white studies (Australia, Canada, Europe, South Africa, U.S., and so on).

But of what relevance is the concept of whiteness to the subject matter of our course? Simple: as I have explained quite a few times, we cannot comprehend the functions of racism in this society without understanding this concept. The reason is that “whiteness” has become the ideational element in the ideational/structural dialectical binary that not only underwrites the material basis of the prosperity of the peasant/proletarian European interlopers and their descendants to this day, but also helps to shape the character of the relations that currently exist between whites and blacks in the U.S. There is however, one fly in the ointment in the analysis so presented: A question arises that is not so easily dispensed with: Exactly how does whiteness interact with the overall process of accumulation that in the last instance is the driving force of all capitalist orders? Very briefly: whiteness within the working-classes of European ancestry serves as an ideological vehicle for the subjectification of the objective and the objectification of the subjective in the domain of class-relations, which in the end benefits capital. This explains, for instance, why in the United States cross-racial working class alliances have been notoriously difficult to organize or sustain, permitting capital almost unfettered access to political power. It also explains, to turn to a wholly different time-period, why most of the poor whites in the slave-holding South (who could not afford to own slaves) supported the plantation aristocracy in maintaining the slave order—so much so that when that order came under severe threat they en masse took up arms in its defense (reference here is of course to the U.S. Civil War).

A close reading of the foregoing, to sum up, should lead to this conclusion: whiteness performs a contradictory role. It is, at once, a source of privilege, and a source of oppression for the working classes of European ancestry; similarly, for capital whiteness serves to undermine accumulation as well as enhance it. In other words, like all ideologies whiteness is an inherently contingent cultural artifact in its practice; it all depends on the level and specificity of the analysis one undertakes, and the place and time-period in question, to comprehend the contradictory role of whiteness, today—as well as in the past. In one sense the policy of affirmative action has always existed in this country from the very beginning of European colonial settlement, in the shape of legalized racist and sexist discriminatory practices that gave preference to whites in general, and white males in particular, in all areas of the economy, politics and society (from employment to voting rights). In other words, white racism and sexism has always been another name for illegitimate “affirmative action”—in support of whiteness and patriarchy. Yet, when legitimate affirmative action policies were instituted beginning in the 1960s in order to help rectify the historically rooted injustices of racism and sexism, considerable opposition among whites (even among liberals—including, ironically, white females) to this policy emerged. (See also Essentialism, Jim Crow, Marginality, Other/Otherness, Social Darwinism, White Southern Strategy, Stereotype, Textual Erasure.)

Other Geographic Sub-Varieties of Racism

Besides the above, there are other geographic sub-varieties of racism. They include, depending upon geographic location, anti-Chinese (Sinophobia), anti-Indian, anti-Japanese, anti-Hindu, and so on. Their purpose and function is the same as for those mentioned above.

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NOTES

[1] There has been some confusion out there on how the word antisemitism should be spelled. Here is one authoritative source that dispels this confusion on how to spell the word antisemitism.

[2] The estimate used to be that around six million European Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators (usually ordinary Europeans) in a time period of roughly no more than ten years (1933-1945)! (And this is not counting probably an equal number of others—Poles, Russians, the Roma people, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Germans who opposed the Nazis, and so on, altogether.) New research, however, suggests that the numbers were probably much, much higher—possibly, ten million or more! See the report in the New York Times by Eric Lichtblau: “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking,” March 1, 2013.

[3] See, for example, How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says About Race in America by Karen Brodkin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), and The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity by Eric L. Goldstein (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

[4] It ought to be mentioned here that sometimes one gets the sense as one travels around Europe and North America that the issue is not Islamophobia but what may be called “Arabophobia,” where the age-old racial hatred of Arabs is trundled out under the pretext of a “freedom of speech” criticism of Muslims. Of course, ignorance is also tied in because there is a lack of conscious awareness that not all Arabs are Muslims and vice versa. (On Muslims and the “freedom of speech” issue that the Charlie Hebdo tragedy in France highlighted see the excellent address (Trudeau, 2015) by the celebrated U.S. cartoonist Garry Trudeau—of the Doonsbury comic strip fame—at an award ceremony.)

[5] For additional sources on Islamophobia, past and present, see: Ahmed (2013); Allen (2010); Helbling (2014); Kundnani (2014); Lyons (2012); Meer (2014); Omidvar and Richards (2014); Rane, Ewart, and Martinkus (2014); Shyrock (2010); Trudeau (2015); and Van Driel (2004).

[6] No discussion of Islamophobia would be complete without also bringing up the matter of Islam’s own views on race/racism. From a strictly theological point of view, Islam does not recognize the concept of the chosen race; in fact, such socially divisive markers as racism and nationalism (contrary to current practice in Islamic countries) are forbidden. Though in practice this has not always been adhered to at all times in all places. While all forms of racism and ethnocentrism are highly objectionable, what is especially disquieting is when it is expressed against fellow coreligionists in a theological context where all are supposed to be equal before God. Hence, even though the only two references to skin color (one tangential and the other specific) in the entire Qur’an has to do with affirming God as the architect of all things, including diversity in human pigmentation, and the admonition that piety supersedes all distinctions in the eyes of God—as Lewis (1990: 54) explains: “[t]he Qur’an gives no countenance to the idea that there are superior and inferior races and that the latter are foredoomed to a subordinate status; the overwhelming majority of Muslim jurists and theologians share this rejection.”

Muslim Arabs, however, contrary to Islamic teachings, quite often (which is not to say always) appear to have favored those who most closely approximated their own skin color; which they mistakenly perceived as “white.” Certainly the current arrogance, vis-à-vis other Muslim peoples of color, but who happen not to be “Arabs,” expressed some times openly and sometimes sotto voce, that one finds among many Muslim Arabs—who usually and hypocritically consider themselves as the true inheritors and custodians of the religion of Islam regardless of their level of practical commitment to it—appears to have always been part of the Arab Islamic tradition. Here, for example, is what the Arab Muslim Ibn Khaldun—arguably one of the foremost philosophers of history of the medieval era— had to say about black Africans: “Their qualities of character are close to those of dumb animals. It has even been reported that most of the Negroes of the first zone dwell in caves and thickets, eat herbs, live in savage isolation and do not congregate, and eat each other.” (Though in fairness to him he did not think much of Europeans either for in the next sentence he writes: “The same applies to the Slavs.” His explanation for this supposed inferiority of blacks and whites was that it had to do with climate. (Khaldun 1967, Vol. 1: 168–69)

What is particularly disturbing is that such prejudice has at times been expressed in extremely virulent forms, with horrendous consequences for their victims. Two examples in support of this point; one from the past, and the other from the present: during the era of the slave trade, Muslim Arab slave traders were not entirely above enslaving their fellow Muslims and selling them into bondage—simply because the latter were not, in the eyes of the former, racial co-equals. (Here, the matter of the theological position of Islam on slavery is of relevance: it was akin to that of Christianity and Judaism, and is well summarized by Diouf (1998: 10): “Islam neither condemned nor forbade slavery but stated that enslavement was lawful under only two conditions: if the slave was born of slave parents or if he or she had been a pagan prisoner of war. Captives could legally be made slaves if the prisoner was a kafir (pagan) who had first refused to convert and then declined to accept the protection of the Muslims. In theory, a freeborn Muslim could never become a slave.”)

One ought to also point out, however, that the corrupting influence of the slave trade did not spare black African Muslim slave traders from succumbing to the same temptation; they too at times sold their fellow black African Muslims into slavery. The enslaved Muslims who became part of the humanity dragged across the oceans (see Diouf) were more than likely sold, mainly, by non-Muslim black African enslavers, but it is not beyond the realm of the possibility that a few were also sold by both black African and Arab Muslim enslavers. All this was in the past, but what about today? The short answer is that things have not changed much for the better. Consider, for instance, what is going on today in the Sudanese Muslim province of Darfur where government supported “Arab” militias are embarked on a mass slaughter of, this time, fellow Muslims (unlike in Sudan’s south where the target of Khartoum’s genocidal tendencies for the past several decades have been Christians/ animists) who they consider as black and therefore inferior. The irony of this horror is that the so-called Arabs involved in the conflict are Arabized black Africans, phenotypically indistinguishable from their fellow Sudanese (whether Muslims, Christians or animists) they are slaughtering. (For more on this conflict visit the www.bbc.com website and search their archives of news stories.)

Attention should also be drawn here to the horrendous mistreatment today of migrant Muslim labor (and non-Muslim labor alike) imported—often under false pretenses—from Asia and Africa in a number of Arab countries in the Middle East. As Sharon Burrow (general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation), writing in an extended feature section titled “Modern-day Slavery in Focus; Qatar” in the The Guardian newspaper observed, to give just one example: “Life for a migrant worker under Qatar’s kafala sponsorship system means living under your employer’s total control over every aspect of your existence – from opening a bank account to changing jobs, and even being allowed to leave the country. This corrupt system starts with recruitment under false pretenses in their home countries and entraps them once they set foot in Qatar. Talking to workers in the squalid labor camps has brought home to me how these proud young men, who have left home to build a future, are deprived of dignity and treated in the most inhumane way. Worse, in the years that I’ve been visiting the camps, nothing has changed. Hundreds of these workers succumb every year to the appalling living and working conditions, returning to their home countries in coffins, their deaths callously written off as the price of progress.” (Source) And one should not also forget the matter of gender where female migrant labor has to endure even worse conditions, tantamount to nothing less than slave labor. Then there is the issue of human-trafficking, which of course is simply slavery and nothing less. For additional sources on this topic, see also the various reports put out by the U.N.’s International Labor Organization; the International Trade Union Confederation; and Human Rights Watch. Arabs and their apologists, may want to quibble here by suggesting that in the matter of this deep and widespread exploitation and abuse of foreign labor, regardless of whether it is migrant or trafficked, what is at work in the Middle-East today is not so much race, but class (the rich versus the poor), and gender. The truth is that it is all three, where one merges into the other.

Here is yet one more telling example: there is ample anecdotal evidence showing that in the engagement of that holiest of all obligations, the pilgrimage to Mecca/Medina (called Hajj--mandatory on all Muslims at least once in their lifetime provided their health and financial means permit), pilgrims from outside the Middle East face humiliating slights at every opportunity from both the local Saudi citizenry as well as government officials and other Arabs elsewhere from the Middle East. The subtextual message behind this kind of mistreatment appears to be that unless you are an Arab, you simply cannot be considered an authentic Muslim.

In raising this entire matter of Arab racism one risks being accused of abandoning historical objectivity; in defense, dear reader, you are asked to consult sources by others who have looked at this issue with some diligence; such as Bernard Lewis. In his book Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (1990), he meticulously documents the history of the nefarious attitudes of Muslim Arabs on the race question. He begins by noting that the arrival of Islam in the Afro-Eurasian ecumene introduced a new equation in the matter of race relations: the potential to associate skin pigmentation with “otherness” (something that was rare up to that point in the ancient world where otherness was more a matter of ethnicity [such as linguistic or religious differences] and/ or nationality [e.g., Greeks versus Persians] rather than race). This potential emerged out of the fact that for the first time in human history Islam created “a truly universal civilization” where “[b]y conquest and by conversion, the Muslims brought within the bounds of a single imperial system and a common religious culture peoples as diverse as the Chinese, the Indians, the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, black Africans, and white Europeans,” and not only that, but the obligatory requirements of the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca enjoined on all Muslim adults, if they can afford it, at least once in their lifetime) placed members of all these groups into direct and close contact with each other (p. 18).

Against this background, the transformation of the potential to the actual (theological prohibitions notwithstanding), for a variety of reasons (including holdovers from pre-Islamic times of Arab prejudices), was a matter of time; thereby leaving us with a circumstance that he summarizes thusly: “The cause of racial equality is sustained by the almost unanimous voice of Islamic religion—both the exhortations of piety and the injunctions of the law. And yet, at the same time, the picture of inequality and injustice is vividly reflected in the literature, the arts, and the folklore of the Muslim peoples. In this, as in so much else, there is a sharp contrast between what Islam says and what Muslims— or at least some Muslims—do” (p. 20). Consequently, even among subordinate populations, such as slaves, according to Lewis, hierarchic distinctions were often imposed: white slaves tended to fare better than black slaves in almost all respects. What is worse was that as the African slave trade (both the trans-Saharan and the Atlantic) became ever more lucrative, there was a corresponding rise in the putrescence of Muslim Arab attitudes on this matter—exemplified, as already noted a moment ago, in the enslavement of black Muslims too.

The amazing irony in all this, to complicate matters, is that today there are, in truth, very few Muslim Arabs who can claim a pure Arab ancestry. Regardless of how racist Arabs think of other peoples of color, or how their equally racist detractors from among the people of color think of them, Arabs (especially those in Afro-Arab Islamic Africa), like that segment of the population categorized as “black” in the United States, range from the whitest white to the blackest black! In other words, the category Arab is less a category of skin-color and phenotype, than it is a linguistic and cultural category. That this should be so is not surprising considering that as the Islamic empire came to encompass a heterogeneity of colors, Muslim Arabs came to genetically intermingle with ethnicities from across the entire Afro-Eurasian ecumene over the millennia.

There is one other matter that ought to be noted here in the interest of scholarly integrity: while it is true that Lewis’s detractors have accused him of “orientalist” bias (a variant of Eurocentrism as indicated in Appendix II) in his work—and they may well be correct, especially in the case of his earlier works—as with all Eurocentrists, it would be wrong to assume that everything he has written is ipso facto false. In fact, in this instance, his 1990 work, one finds, is well researched and documented, even if his earlier work (Lewis 1971) on the same subject may have been less so. More importantly, on this particular issue, Lewis does not stand alone. For instance, see Davis, 2001; Fisher, 2001; Goldenberg, 2003; Gordon, 1989; Hunwick and Powell, 2002; Marmon, 1999; Segal, 2001; and Willis 1985. (A defensive view from the other side is available via Kamil, 1970.) For a trenchant critique of Lewis, see Nyang and Abed-Rabbo (1984); Halliday (1993), is also relevant here.