Racism is a problem inside Muslim communities, and we cannot fight it until we admit it lives within us. That is hard to say, because Islam came to end it. The Qurʾān calls the diversity of our colors and languages one of the signs of God. It says the noblest among us is the most God-conscious. Our Prophet ﷺ made a freed Black man, Bilāl, the voice that called the believers to prayer. If we do not root this racism out of how we live our faith, we will remain colonized in our minds. The sense that lighter is better and darker is lesser is not a private habit. It is built into the way the modern world learned to rank people, and that same ranking was used to dominate Muslims and every non-white people on earth. As long as we carry it, we carry our colonizers’ view of ourselves.
And yet the bias is still here. Black Muslims are still looked down on, passed over, and made to feel like guests in their own faith. I wrote The Color of the Arabs: How Blackness Became an Insult in Early Islam to help root that prejudice out of the Muslim mind, by showing where it came from.
What it looks like today
In much of the Arab and Muslim world, Black people are still called ʿabd, “slave,” in everyday speech, generations after slavery ended. Dark-skinned daughters are passed over in marriage. In one study of 760 female university students in Saudi Arabia, more than half were using skin-lightening products. Light skin is sold as beauty, and darkness is treated as a flaw to be fixed.
Most of us would never call ourselves racist. “Islam teaches equality” is something we learned as children, and we mean it. But a person can believe that sincerely and still carry a quiet ranking inside, one in which lighter skin feels more beautiful, more noble, more marriageable, and somehow closer to the world of the Prophet ﷺ. Belief alone does not remove that ranking. Knowing where it came from does.
The color of the early Arabs
Here is what surprised me most. Ask people what the early Arabs looked like, and most picture a pleasing olive tan, or even white. The Arabs described themselves differently.
Their own scholars of language wrote that samra and udma, brown and darker complexions, were “the colors of the Arabs,” and that fairness belonged to the Persians and Byzantines, the foreigners. An Arab poet could say, “My color is samra, the colors of the Arabs,” as a boast. A pre-Islamic chief remembered as aswad, black, was also remembered as “Rabīʿa the Good.” A Persian scholar who loved a Bedouin was said to smear himself with tar and sit in the sun so that he would look more like an Arab.
So if the Arabs once called darkness their own, how did blackness become an insult among Muslims?
To know how this happened click here.
I wrote this book for Muslims who want to understand their own history, for Black Muslims who have carried this weight for too long, and for anyone who has wondered why we admire a black horse or a black panther but not a black human being. It works directly from the Arabic sources, quotes them in the original, and is open about what the evidence can and cannot prove.
Blackness did not become an insult. It was made one. And what was made can be unmade.
