In attacking America for its “racism,” the Supreme Leader would no doubt like us to remain unaware of the virulent racism to be found in the works of Arab and Muslim Qur’anic scholars, jurists, historians, and theologians. We need not do his bidding, but can take a look at the extensive evidence for Arab and Muslim racism. It’s hair-raising.
Let’s begin with the many Hadiths with racist implications, such as this: “Narrated Anas bin Malik: The Prophet said to Abu-Dhar, “Listen and obey (your chief) even if he is an Ethiopian with a head like a raisin.” And this: Ahmad ibn Abi Sulayman, the companion of Sahnun said, “Anyone who says that the Prophet was black should be killed.” (Ibn Musa al-Yahsubi, Qadi ‘Iyad, p. 375)
And there is this from the celebrated historian Al-Tabari: “Noah prayed that the hair of Ham’s descendants [Africans] would not grow beyond their ears, and that whenever his [Ham’s] descendants met Shem’s, the latter would enslave them.” (Al-Tabari, Vol. 2, p. 21, p. 21)
Why was it so terrible for the Prophet to be called “black”? Because for the Arabs, blacks were unquestionably inferior. And therefore Prophet Muhammad could not possibly have been black. Such misidentification, according to Ahmad ibn Abi Sulayman, was an insult to the Prophet, and deserved death. Blacks, as descendants of Ham, are fit to be slaves (Shem’s descendants “would enslave them”).
Many of the most famous Arab writers and Islamic scholars were certainly “racists” in the full meaning of that word.
Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was, among other things, an Islamic jurist, Islamic lawyer, Islamic scholar, Islamic theologian, and hafiz (one who has memorized the entire Qur’an). He is one of the most important figures in Islamic history. Here are two (among many) remarks he makes about black Africans in his Muqaddimah:
“Therefore, the Negro nation are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because [Negroes] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.”
“Beyond [known peoples of black West Africa] to the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves, and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings.”
Ibn Sina or Avicenna (980-1037), was another celebrated figure in Islamic history: a Hafiz, an Islamic psychologist, scholar, and theologian and, by our lights, a deep-dyed racist: “[Blacks are] people who are by their very nature slaves.”
Ibn Qutaybah (828-889), was a renowned Islamic scholar from Kufa, Iraq: “[Blacks] are ugly and misshapen, because they live in a hot country.”
Nasr al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274), was a Shia Muslim Scholar and Grand Ayatollah:
“If (all types of men) are taken, from the first, and one placed after another, like the Negro from Zanzibar, in the Southern-most countries, the Negro does not differ from an animal in anything except the fact that his hands have been lifted from the earth –In no other peculiarity or property – except for what God wished. Many have seen that the ape is more capable of being trained than the Negro, and more intelligent.”
“[The Zanj (African) differ from animals only in that] their two hands are lifted above the ground,… Many have observed that the ape is more teachable and more intelligent than the Zanj.”
Al-Muqaddasi (945/946-1000) was a medieval Muslim geographer:
Of the neighbors of the Bujja, Maqdisi had heard that “there is no marriage among them; the child does not know his father, and they eat people — but God knows best. As for the Zanj, they are people of black color, flat noses, kinky hair, and little understanding or intelligence.” [Kitab al-Bad’ wah-tarikh, vol.4]
Al-Masudi (896-956), was a Muslim historian and geographer, known as the “Herodotus of the Arabs”:
“Galen says that merriment dominates the black man because of his defective brain, whence also the weakness of his intelligence.” (Al-Masudi, Muruj al-dhahab)
Ibn al-Faqih was a Muslim historian and geographer:
“A man of discernment said: The people of Iraq … do not come out with something between blonde, buff and blanched coloring, such as the infants dropped from the wombs of the women of the Slavs and others of similar light complexion; nor are they overdone in the womb until they are burned, so that the child comes out something between black, murky, malodorous, stinking, and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds, and depraved passions, such as the Zanj, the Somali, and other blacks who resemble them. The Iraqis are neither half-baked dough nor burned crust but between the two.” (from his Mukhtasar Kitab al-Buldan, 903 AD).
These are just a small sample of the racist remarks made by those whom Muslims regard as outstanding figures in Islamic intellectual history.
“If you’re dark-skinned walking in the US, you can’t be sure you’ll be alive in the next few minutes.”
Yes, let’s take another look at this charge by the Supreme Leader. Palpable nonsense, of course. It would be far truer to note the risks to life and limb you run, if you are identified as a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu, in any of a dozen Muslim countries.
According to Khamenei, US slave-traders “used to go and capture hundreds of thousands of men and women, old and young people with guns and other weapons which were not available to the people at the time.” These people, he said, “were taken to the US on those ships for slavery.”
The slave-owners “captivated [sic] free people who were living in their houses and in their own cities,” he continued, adding that the past of African-Americans is as evil as their present.
Khamenei has a most imperfect grasp of history. The slavers (they were not all Americans) who conducted the Atlantic Slave Trade did not seize people “who were living in their houses”; they purchased African slaves from other Africans, who roamed the interior –where the Americans and Europeans never penetrated – kidnapping fellow Africans, in order to sell them to the trans-Atlantic slavers.
Appealing to African-Americans, Khamenei said the “question of racism has not been solved yet in the country that claims to support freedom and human rights. A human, for his black skin, has no reassurance to live in society, if indeed, a police officer can beat him to death because of his colored skin.”
African-Americans, claims the Supreme Leader, have “no reassurance [sic] to live in [American] society.” Really? When the radio and television nation-wide have nonstop coverage of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, when politicians compete to declare their sympathy for the victim and their anger at the police involved, when spokesmen for Black Lives Matter are all over the media and protesting noisily in the streets, when the policeman whose knee was on Floyd’s neck has been arrested for murder and rioters lay siege even to his Florida vacation home, all this doesn’t sound like “a police officer can beat [someone] to death” with impunity.
A police officer did not “beat him [George Floyd] to death because of his colored skin”; there was no “beating” but the wrongful, because unnecessarily prolonged, application of pressure to his neck to keep him subdued. Certainly such an application of force, while the victim for several minutes kept saying “I can’t breathe,” is unacceptable and will be punished – the police officer responsible has been arrested — but Khamenei is attempting to tar with the same absurd brush all 800,000 of the sworn police officers across America.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, has denounced the Atlantic Slave Trade carried on by Americans and Europeans, with nary a word about the other, much larger, longer lasting, and much crueler trade in African slaves, a trade marked especially by the castration of young boys in the bush, conducted by the Arabs. Fewer than 20% of those castrated survived both the operation and the trip to the slave markets of Islam. He, and we, deserve to know more about that slave trade and why it lasted so long.
Since he has raised the issues both of “slavery” and of “racism” in his indictment of America, we are entitled to pay him back in kind, and to examine the Arab slave trade, the Muslim slave-owners, and the virulent anti-black racism found in the works of so many notable figures in Arab and Islamic history. And that is what, in the paragraphs above, we have done. Under the circumstances, the Supreme Leader left us no choice.