Jonathan Brown – Islam and Blackness

Jonathan Brown
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The conversation covers the history and origins of the book "ENT," which appears to be a series of anti-immigrational statements and quotes. The speakers discuss the use of black in various media and the potential for anti-immigrational statements. They emphasize the need for people to address the issue and share their experiences, and discuss the consequences of the current president's immigration policy, including negative impacts on society and the American people. The "baller genre" is also discussed, with a focus on the "baller genre" and its origins.

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			Hello everyone and welcome to blogging theology. Today I'm delighted to talk again to Jonathan
Brown. You're most welcome back sir.
		
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			Hi, welcome in so I come in to everybody and
		
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			it's nice to be back. Although it's funny because I just saw you in person in London. We did our
we're talking like now I don't even know if it's 20 maybe 24 hours later. Now I'm in Washington DC
and not I felt in particular embarrassed because we had an English sort of an English breakfast
together and we had vegan bagels a vegan bacon these two strips of something it's not going on my
list of best breakfasts but you know what, that's not the point it was it was not about the food.
No, but I felt embarrassed you know, you got to American coming to London. And what did he get? He
got this this What am I view is disgusting vegan. But you know, I actually I went to slough and they
		
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			have a place called like Kashmiri
		
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			Cafe it's a big building actually. It's not a little it's a kind of big building with a park around
it and they have I had a I actually the guy was kind of he was like, Oh, you're think you're gonna
eat all this by ordered full English breakfast and then a married breakfast and that they were both
individually too big to eat on their own and so I you know, I really struggling but it was
delicious. So I had a delicious Hello English breakfast so you don't have to worry about that. Now
the food was definitely lol. Although questionable, integrity. Anyway, we're gonna go there. It was
good to see you yesterday that has a fascinating conversation. But back to today. For those who
		
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			don't know, Jonathan Brown is a professor and our lead Bintelli Chair of Islamic civilization in the
School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington. Is it Washington DC where you are
now? Yep, yep. Cool. He's the author of the following books, slavery in Islam. There we are. This is
a classic work,
		
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			seminal work and this one misquoting Muhammad, the challenge and choices of interpreting the
province legacy. We've got an enormous in friends, I think it's particularly good introduction to
the subject. One of my favorites is second edition or Hadith, Muhammad's legacy in the medieval and
modern world, because your PhD is in the subject. And this is your PhD, I think, canonisation with
Al Bukhari and Muslim the formation and function of the Sunni Hadith canon. So I recommend all of
those. He's actually written also, the the very short introduction to Muhammad, I think, is called
in the Oxford University, Very Short Introduction series, which again, is really great for the
		
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			general reader who doesn't know anything about Islam, I think.
		
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			So that's, that may not be an exhaustive list of all your books, but those are the ones I've read
anyway.
		
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			That's all. I've read all your books.
		
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			Now, Jonathan has kindly agreed today to discuss his critically acclaimed new book. Yes, there's
another one, titled, here we go, Islam and blackness. And what a striking cover that is, I think, is
a very brilliant cover book cover actually, that's the size of it. newly published it with some very
positive reviews indeed, on the back cover. One for example, Imam Zaid Shakir who's a professor
emeritus now, obviously tuna college and other other scholars as well. And I just want to read just
briefly what the dust jacket says on the inside front cover about the book, I assume the publisher
wrote this rather than you. I wrote it. Oh, you did? Okay. I wrote it. I think they say they, I
		
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			mean, they what they do is they say, Can you write us what to say on the inside of the dust jacket,
and then I write it for them. They may check it and say, you know, this may mean they may it may
some person person might write when it's lousy, and they don't abuse it, but they've always used the
ones I sent them. So yeah, this is about you, though, isn't a third person. It's commonly claimed
you write or it says that Islam is anti black, even inherently bent on enslaving black Africans.
Western and African critics alike have contended that anti black racism is in the face of very
scriptural foundations and institutions of law, spirituality and theology. But what is the basis for
		
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			this accusation? Best Selling scholar Jonathan AC brown examines scripture, Islamic scripture, law,
Sufism and history to comprehensively interrogate this claim, and determine how and why is emerged,
locating his origins in conservative politics, modern Afro centrism and the old trope of Barbary
enslavement. That's a particularly common one on the internet. And there it is. He explains how
		
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			anti black blackness arose in the Islamic world and became entangled with normative tradition, from
the imagery of black and faces in the Quran, to Sharia assessments of black women as undesirable.
And the assertion that Islam and Muslims are foreign to Africa. This work provides an in depth study
of a controversial not that Islam, that is Islam and blackness, and identifies authoritative voices
in Islam as past that are crucial for combating anti black racism today. So that's the book Islam
and blackness.
		
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			Except best selling author, Jonathan Brown, I everything I probably just wrote this book does that
and then
		
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			out of that,
		
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			thank you, for your honesty there. Yeah, you didn't write that bit.
		
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			So there's something we need to get, we need to clear the decks on this. First off, if I may, some
people might have an issue with the fact that a white guy you has written a book titled Islam and
blackness. And I know there's something that came up recently, when you were in London a couple days
ago, I had so I think it actually this is something you address at the very beginning of your book
immediately, actually, what is your response?
		
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			I mean, yeah, I've heard this a lot.
		
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			I understand people, I mean, I'm not angry at people for having this criticism. It's just that I
don't think that it has anything to do with the book. Like, I mean, the, if I were writing a book
about, you know,
		
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			the experiences of black Muslims, or,
		
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			you know, even kind of getting into like, the Define grains, or dynamics of anti black racism in the
modern world, like, you know, maybe my being a white guy is probably not helpful, or doesn't give me
some kind of,
		
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			you know, perspective that I need. But this book is about, it's a book of Islamic intellectual
history, really, I mean, it's a book about how Muslim scholars, over 1400 years dealt with, you
know, texts in society interacted and then how Muslim scholars dealt with their own legal and
normative traditions in, you know, surrounding questions of like, race and color in their society.
So it's really
		
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			Yeah, I mean, I just wonder, like, if I were,
		
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			I mean, if I were, like, a black Muslim in the US, I'm not sure that would give me a lot more
insight about what, you know, a text written in, like,
		
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			ninth century Baghdad,
		
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			is saying, I mean, it's just sort of, you know, the the only way that that would make sense is if
there was some kind of trans, historical, unchanging thing called blackness, so that if you're black
in America today, it's the sort of same as being black and Baghdad in the ninth century. And I think
that it contradicts basically all the established understandings of race, which say that it's not
some kind of essential thing that exists throughout time and space, but rather, it's it's socially
constructed. So I think, I think that the criticisms are kind of, I mean, I understand someone's
criticism if they think this is a book about being black and Muslim, or about how challenges of
		
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			being black and Muslim, but this is a book about the interaction between Islamic normative
tradition. And me just make sure my computer is not
		
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			going to ping every couple of minutes focus. Okay, do not disturb.
		
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			So, but, you know, that's not what the book is about. The book is about. And we're I mean, the funny
thing is, like, we're all foreigners to the past. So not none of us is from the past. Yes. It the
past is foreign to all of us. I think. I think it's interesting to think about, like, what these
questions assume about the work. And also, I mean, not to be kind of a pain about this, but someone
could say, well, your books caught us on blackness. So you know, we're, we have concerns about this.
Okay, that's fine. I understand. I don't expect people to read the book. But you know, there is the
blurb that you just read, which tells you what the book is about, which I think that if read this, I
		
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			think they would it would not
		
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			probably make sense why you could have,
		
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			you know, someone who's not like a black Muslim today writing it. So, but I would also say that, you
know, I mean, I may as well also use this opportunity to say why I wrote the book, it wasn't like I
wasn't like I woke up one day and I said, Hey, you know, I really want to write about Islam
blackness or something. I mean, this was, in fact, when I wrote the slavery book, Islam and slavery
book people would ask me, oh, you know, you should write.
		
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			You should write kind of a book on Islam and race or something. And I said, a way out and I said,
I'm not
		
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			Crazy, I'm not going to do that.
		
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			But what happened was in the summer of 2020, there was this debate, which actually I found out later
is actually a recurring debate in
		
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			some circles about that, where some scholars like actual professors in the US in academia, we're
saying that Islam had its scriptural foundations in the Quran, the Sunnah of the Prophet leaves us
alone, right? That the normative tradition of Islam is itself anti black, not you know, Muslims are
racist. Some of it actually, the scriptural foundation is normally
		
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			our anti black, you know, so I kept getting these emails forwarded to me from by our questions.
People, my friend, you know, colleagues asking me like, hey, you know, there's this debate going on,
and someone's bringing up this hadith and this Quranic verse and this fic opinion, and do you have
any, you have any responses to this? I'm trying to figure out how to respond. And I was like, oh,
okay, interesting. So I just kind of I was like, Okay, I'll look at it. And I'll try and send you
helpful information. And then I started to actually look into it. And I was like, Well, this is
actually really interesting. And then I started to, in order to answer those questions, I look at
		
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			other issues that was raised other questions, issues of context, and history came up. And so before
I knew it, I had a book on my hands. And that's how, yeah, so I have an almost act, not
accidentally, but you haven't, it actually was, it was entirely accidental. Yeah, it was something
where I, I didn't think, yeah, it was kind of was a bizarre experience. But I mean, that's sometimes
how even the slavery book it wasn't, I didn't intend really to do it, it kind of came up. But you do
write books that tend to address these popular misconceptions or misunderstanding that Islam?
Obviously, a statement is something one, and this one, I know, you, you told me before, he didn't
		
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			didn't choose the title of this misquoting Muhammad. This is kind of a reference to bourbons
Misquoting Jesus. But, you know, the, you do push back against misunderstandings in this book, as
well on Hadith. And so you do have a history of really tackling some of these red button issues as
they arise in our culture, even though you you're not looking for them, they tend to find you
perhaps, I mean, I think that I think what it is, is that I'm, you know, like I'm Muslim. And I
mean, when I come across these questions, you know, I also have these questions, right. So someone,
when I see these, you know, Hadith or fake opinion, that used to be really shocking in the context
		
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			of blackness. I mean, I also want to know what's going on? So I mean, I sort of I think maybe one of
the reasons I do this is that I am a member of the I'm, I'm, you know, curious readers want to know,
I'm curious reader, I want to know the answers to these things as well. No, that's fair. Oh, you
touched on this briefly. But is this my next question to you? What is the argument of the book that
you have a section of your book? What is the argument of your book so?
		
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			So I have a section in my book called I actually have this in all my books, I think, which is, this
is true argument of this book. So if you really don't want to read the book,
		
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			this section and it will tell you everything, or will give you a summary, but tell you everything I
give you a very very brief summary. Yes. Yeah. Okay, so I'm gonna read it. It's, it's, it's, it is
two pages. Exactly. Yeah, well, pages a game can't remember where it is page three, and PAGE PAGE
three to five, but it's
		
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			okay. Yeah.
		
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			Though a contested concept. anti blackness is most succinctly understood as racism directed against
people of sub Saharan African descent. stereotypes about real or imagined black Africans are nearly
as old as historical records. From ancient Rome into medieval China. However, these stereotypes
rarely stood out markedly in societies that were often cosmopolitan. And where skin color played a
less important role than other markers of identity. The notion that the rights and standings of
people racialized as black African, were determined by that racialization became pervert pervasive
only in the early modern period, with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and Europe's powerful
		
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			colonial states.
		
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			The understanding of race the sorry the understandings of race and blackness that formed in the
West, particularly the United States, have profoundly shaped global shaped global discourse. They
have forced a dualistic template of black and white onto social terrains from Mali to Karachi, which
are often too dissimilar or complex for such a binary. They have bound black African pneus and
slavery in an essential relationship. When the two when the link between the two has often been
incidental, and they continue to insist that black as a mundane color descriptor cannot be separated
from black as a negative metaphor. When no such a central relationship exists. Not everyone
		
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			everywhere, and particularly not speakers of African languages south of the Sahara has collapsed
blackness as skin tone and
		
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			blackness is a metaphor. Neither has aesthetic preference always entail judgment of human worth. Not
all descriptions of color is a prescription of value.
		
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			In the West Islam and Muslims have been particularly singled out as anti black and accusation
emanating from a centuries old western stereotype of Muslims as slavers, as well as from
contemporary American Conservative cultural and political agendas. anti blackness is rampant in much
of the Muslim world, North Africa to South Asia. It causes real pain that goes unrecognized, but it
does not originate in Islamic scriptures or its system of law and ethics. Islamic civilization
inherited stereotypes about black Africans from the Greco Roman conviction that climate shaped both
body and personality and from Judeo Judeo Christian lore about Africans being cursed with blackness
		
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			and enslavement. Though problem though prominent Muslim scholars oppose these ideas as antithetical
to the Koran, the bulk of Islamic tradition, indulged and added to this body of material. While anti
blackness did not define the lives and destinies of people with darker skin tones. from Morocco to
India, black African came to stand in for slave and correlate with inferior social status. The Sufi
tradition, however, inverted this image, using it to represent the saints journey from earthly
subjugation, to liberation through union with the divine, and it portrayed the black African as the
pious and devout slave of God, who taught and inspired his or her social betters, and Islamic law,
		
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			particularly norms around marriage. When the correlation of blackness with low status and
undesirability was recognized. It was as a social reality that law had to manage not as a norm for
it to protect, whether in law or in how we're sorry, whether in Islamic law or how black Africans
have been perceived in other genres of Islamic scholarship, anti blackness has been incidental, not
essential. In law, Muslim jurists recognized that what blackness meant whether it was attractive or
unappealing ended on where, when and who was perceiving it. negative stereotypes about black
Africans and Muslim writings on geography and ethnology, were often mirrored by stereotypes about
		
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			slobs and Turks. And the association of blackness with slavery and primitiveness, including in the
writings of many black Muslims from this * ultimately turned not on phenotype, but on their
locating blackness beyond the southern boundaries of the abode of Islam. Whether anti blackness was
incidental or accepted as social customs. However, leading voices of Muslim scholarship from
medieval to modern times have rejected it, and advocated vigorously for the prophets teachings that
no race or tribe has any inherent value over another. As judges, jurists, and moral guides, Muslim
scholars have had to balance a realistic accommodation of custom with their duty to enjoy and right
		
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			as heirs of the prophets, in light of the severity of the blight of anti blackness today, it is
clear that their duty as moral guides must be to promote the ratio of the color line.
		
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			Section. Yeah, very eloquent. I just noticed something in terms of the way you
		
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			express yourself in this is that the word black itself, sometimes there were like black African is
capitalized, B, capital B, capital A, but other times you have a small b, when the word Black is,
what was the logic here in switching from capital to non capital when he using word black? Yeah, so
there's a lot of actually writing and debate around this in
		
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			various academic fields in the US, primarily in the context of kind of Africana Studies in the US,
kind of Atlantic world.
		
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			The so the debate is, is that black can mean different things. So if I say, you know, like, this
book cover is black, like, that's just a color descriptor, right?
		
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			If I say that, you know, a person is black. Well, now, I mean, I've never actually met anyone whose
skin was actually this Gregory, there's always struck me as this whole language of black and white
when I look at you, I'm also not yours. I didn't mean to be rude, but your pink show is, yeah, so
when we, when we use it to talk about people's features. Now we're getting kind of into more of a
realm of figurative description and also, not just that, but race, but but inscription, right. So
		
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			somebody might mean for example, languages in a lot of languages in Africa, south of the Sahara. You
know, if you ask someone what's what color is your skin and your language, they'll say black right?
And that doesn't they're just such a subscription for them doesn't mean anything. But when you say,
you know when a British person or an American person says someone's black or an Arab person says
someone's black, there's also other
		
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			are kind of
		
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			connotations about that they come through history. But in addition, this is also very important,
right? If you're like Heraclitus, you know we know the famous Greek historian from from almosafer
Muhammad from 100 BC. Yeah. Oh my God, he's not from Malaysia. He's died for about a strum.
		
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			It's today It's Bo drum. Telekinesis. Yeah. So he, in his when he talks about
		
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			Ethiopians being like black, he also says like Indians are also black. So for him blackness. And
this is actually not uncommon in the kind of Greco Roman tradition, but also in the, in the early
Arabic tradition, that blackness is not just something about Africa, it also includes like people
who are very dark skinned toned in Southern India, for example.
		
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			So it's, it doesn't this is important, right. So when we, when we say black, in modern, you know,
kind of European linguistic traditions, and we're using it as a color just to describe someone's
phenotype, their, their, their presentation, their physical appearance, we also it's not just their
skin color, right? We have associates about what their hair texture is, what their facial feature
is, features are, right? So there's all these
		
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			kind of stereotypical phenotype ideas that come along with saying someone's buck. So that's becoming
suddenly a lot more complicated than just saying the color black of this book. And so the question
is, do we want to
		
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			put a capital letter there to show that we're not this is no longer just a neutral kind of normal
color description anymore. But now we have other ideas about race and ethnicity and value and
history and power going into it? Then you take another step, right, which is that some people will,
you know, it's very common to find this among scholars in Africana studies that
		
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			Black can also mean, for example, if I it's actually interesting that my friend giving me a ride to
the airport yesterday, is British Muslim, his family is from Zambia. Okay, I actually actually saw
you walking past with him to the car, actually, actually. So he, when he went to
		
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			visit his family members in Zambia, they said, You're not, you're not you're not black, you're
white. They said to him. It had to do with his skin color. They meant like culturally, you're not
from here, like you're
		
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			right. You just use the word. I think it's Masoom. Boo, I think is your what one of these like, the
word they use for white foreigners? Right? So it was really funny, because someone's telling him,
he's not black, right. But in the UK, he's always been told he's black. Yeah, so the reason why is
for some people. And this includes, by the way, some, you know, scholars and activists in let's say,
black American culture or anti racist, anti racism activism in the US, where they'll say that black
with a capital B isn't, is really for it's not for people in Africa, from Africa. It's for people
who are part of this diaspora community that had the experience of enslavement, of being taken away
		
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			of growing up in these kinds of
		
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			almost like Creole communities that have different cultural and racial
		
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			kind of inputs into them in the 400 years or so, since the
		
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			or four and 500 years of the Atlantic slave trade and the European enslavement of Africans and then
exploitation of their labor in the Americas. And then the growth of commute of the diaspora
communities in the Americas, right. So in this case, Black would mean
		
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			to someone what you remember when President President Obama was there was these debates about
whether Obama is black or not? About what the heck is this? I thought I thought he was black. But
the idea is,
		
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			he some people would say he's not black, because he doesn't share his father was from Kenya. You
know, his mother was white, his mother was white. The idea is that he doesn't have share this black
experience in terms of enslavement, segregation and exploitation of communities that come out of the
diaspora. So there's all these debates about what black means. And people have come up with various
ways, kind of conventions for using capitalization to indicate this. I think it's it's very, it's
difficult because on the one hand, you want to kind of acknowledge and abide by these conventions.
On the other hand, the problem is if you start to capitalize and not capitalize, it sort of becomes
		
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			unmanageable because you're reading let's say some 10
		
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			century Muslim jurist or 11th century Muslim historian in Baghdad or Cairo or something, and he says
someone's black and you're like, do I capitalize this or not? I mean, I don't know what what do they
mean by this? I mean, if, if I realize or don't count, you know, then I might, imposing my reading
of what he's trying to stay on to something that he might not mean. So what I say in the book is,
you know, if you're, if we're going to talk about like black British or black American, we'll talk
about, you know, capital B, capital A right, black American, yeah, we're talking about
		
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			blackness as like, a modern construct that we're discussing in the context of race and everything, I
use a capital B. But generally, I just default to lowercase because otherwise it becomes, you know,
you sort of you end up backing yourselves into court and yourself into a corner, forcibly
interpreting for the reader something that maybe the reader should be able to kind of encounter.
unmediated. Okay. Well, from that, from that very sophisticated theoretical analysis of the dilemmas
of how we capitalize words, I want to go to the other extreme in my experience at speakers corner,
here in London, this occasional bear pit of a place don't necessarily recommend it. A lot of Muslims
		
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			go there. A lot of Christian missionaries go there and they're not main terribly mainstream. They're
quite that they're definitely anti Muslim. They all are actually, I think it was one exception, who
wasn't NT wasn't polemical and hostile. And, and one particular issue amongst a number one that came
up repeatedly. Still does sometimes, is what you call in your book, The so called reason headed
Hadith. Kind of quote it because I'm not actually sure why you say that it comes in different
variants anyway, it's not like a single Hadith. Some do mention the raisin headed Hadith words.
Others don't. But that is in Bukhari, as well. But the accusations of anti black racism in the
		
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			Sunnah is the point here. And now personally, I don't I don't have an issue with it. I mean, what
what I think is not really the point. But what is, what is the most likely wording of this series?
And why is it problematic? And how do you respond to it? I mean, is it an example of racism? From
the Prophet himself? Yeah.
		
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			Um, so I mean, I think the Hadith itself occurs in several variations. The general
		
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			pretty consistent part is that you should
		
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			obey your commander. So it's in the context of,
		
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			of essentially like being on a military campaign. Right? So obey your commander,
		
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			even if he is so some versions will say like an
		
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			mutilated slave, like a slave who's had his, like, nose cut off or ears. This is something you see
in the kind of Byzantine tradition actually, that sometimes slaves would be, like, mutilated, like
have their nose parts of yours cut off.
		
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			And then some versions say, you know, even if he's an Ethiopian slave, right?
		
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			And then some versions say even if he's European slave, who who's not so because of EBA, his head is
like a raisin. Right? So the general meaning of the hadith is very clear, it's not really disagreed
on right, which is that says that whoever is your commander, you obey them, it doesn't matter if
they're someone you think is socially higher, you're socially lower than you. Even if it's the
lowest person in this society, this kind of mutilated slave, they're in charge you obey them. This
was then interpreted, extended kind of Anna logically to apply to any kind of official in authority.
So one of the instances in which the hadith is actually transmitted. And the main transmitter of the
		
00:29:05 --> 00:29:31
			Hadith the companion I bizarre, look at 40 he settles after the death after the death of the Prophet
he settles at a place called lava which is like kind of a view if you go on the trail from Mecca,
Medina to southern Iraq, you would pass it's sort of like a station way and it's where also where
the all the cat camels, the camels were collected from for charitable tax work for pastured there.
So he lived there. And
		
00:29:33 --> 00:29:51
			one of this A, like artificial under the Umayyad government is brought out to or the Muslim
government is is brought to is they're like assessing for taxation. And this is the official is a an
Ethiopian slave whose whose job is to do this right.
		
00:29:52 --> 00:29:53
			So
		
00:29:54 --> 00:29:59
			the prayer time comes and the you know, everyone's like, Okay, I would thought it a saint, you know,
very old
		
00:30:00 --> 00:30:16
			We'll do companion to the Prophet they say you should lead us in prayer. And abogado says no like
you the the gesturing to the Ethiopian slave official, he says you should lead us because the
Prophet said, you know, obey your command or even if he's Ethiopian slave, right?
		
00:30:18 --> 00:30:41
			So he, he kind of II, he was interpreting this a deed you can and so that becomes used. Well, Judge
has that but just the general meaning of the hadith is generally it's understood to apply to any
official who's an authority, you will obey them, even if there's someone you think is lower than
you. Okay. Now, let's put that aside. That's pretty simple. The other then the issue is,
		
00:30:43 --> 00:31:05
			so everything about the hadith is fairly straightforward. Except this one clause, which appears in
one actually very rare narration of Hadith. This narration is in Sahih Bukhari. But it's bizarre
because not in other books, it's and it's actually not the most reliable narration of the Hadith, if
you were to get all the different narrations of the Hadith, the part that has the clause that says,
		
00:31:06 --> 00:31:34
			his head, like or his head, like a raisin, that is actually a minority clause, right. So this is
specifically in one version, it's not the most reliably transmitted version. It's insane Bukhari so
there's no people don't really debate its authenticity. But if you were to, you know, if you were to
say, like, look, we have lots of different versions of this hadith, which is the most reliable it
would not be, it'd be the least reliable version. Okay. But let's but, you know,
		
00:31:35 --> 00:32:08
			no pre modern scholar that I know of no modern Hadith scholar that I know of, has ever argued that
this flaw is somehow false or has been added in. So let's deal with it. But you do, and you say, to
continue in the book that in the early centuries of the Hadith commentators, this was not understood
this particular clause or the whole Hadith And anyways, pejorative in a negative way at all, it was
only much later that it was understood with perhaps more racist or in early times, the earliest
		
00:32:09 --> 00:32:19
			prescriptions of scholars in like the 910 Hundreds, they just say, you know, oh, it just means that,
for example,
		
00:32:20 --> 00:32:30
			you know, Ethiopian people's heads are like dark, you know, their skin is like dark color like a
raisin. And they also say that they, they talk about the
		
00:32:33 --> 00:32:40
			the texture of like, tightly coiled African hair, they say it looks like peppercorns. So if you
have,
		
00:32:42 --> 00:33:02
			like, it looks like a bunch of peppercorns, like together, they like the texture of the, like the
outside of the kind of wrinkly texture of the peppercorns. So they say that the it's the color and
the texture of the raisin is like the texture of their hair. They just, they just say like, this is
what the profit means. And then they move on. They don't have a problem with it.
		
00:33:04 --> 00:33:19
			Incidentally, I mean, I should add right now that it's, it's actually it's hard to Okay, so if you
look at how African Muslim scholars uses Hadith, it's the same right? So they don't have
		
00:33:20 --> 00:33:26
			you know, let's say like scholars like Holland Bello, the second world or the Sokoto Caliphate, and
what's now northern Nigeria.
		
00:33:28 --> 00:33:35
			People like his father as mind on video, died 1817, the founder of the so called caliphate, people
like
		
00:33:36 --> 00:33:46
			Muhammad Amin, Sheikh Mohammed Amin, Al Hadi, who just died a few years ago who's actually
Ethiopian, right? So he's not just he's actually the exactly the that's being described.
		
00:33:48 --> 00:34:20
			None of them have any, they don't ever say anything about the Hadith that indicates that they're,
they consider it to be like offensive or something. They just, in fact, Muhammad bello and most
minds on fire, do they just use it? They actually use it in instructions to their commanders like
and how to how to act on campaign. So what does happen roughly in the sort of 1200s 1100 1200
amongst Hadith scholars, who are living from kind of in the kind of Cairo,
		
00:34:22 --> 00:34:34
			Syria, greater Syria, kind of Iranian world is you see a shift to a much more pejorative language,
right. So what they'll say again, they don't, they don't
		
00:34:35 --> 00:34:53
			they're not trying to say anything pejorative, but what the way they read it shows a much more of a
kind of social openness or contextual openness to a negative meaning. So they'll say things like, is
the reason why the prophet is using this example is because, you know,
		
00:34:54 --> 00:34:57
			Ethiopian black slaves are those sort of the most
		
00:35:00 --> 00:35:42
			they disregarded sort of lowest rung of the social ladder. They'll say that they're, you know, that
they're the smallness of their heads has to do with like, their stupidity, their lack of reason.
Their ugliness, right, so you get a lot of like just kind of a lot more negativity, whereas the
early commentators, they're just like, it's color and texture. And that's it, they don't really go
into it anymore. So there's definitely after the 1200s. And that really continues into the, you
know, essentially, Early Modern period, or maybe even to the modern period, depending where you're
looking that this negativity, really, it's more because much more pejorative. And you see kind of
		
00:35:42 --> 00:35:51
			the reading into much more reading into the stereotypes about ugliness and stupidity, and
loneliness. So
		
00:35:52 --> 00:36:16
			it's a purely subjective, but I know some Ethiopian brothers in London, I would never ever think
they were ugly, or stupid. Ova is just I'm just running with this idea comes up. It's not obvious
that this would be something that could be said, and even the raisin head thing. Maybe I need to go
look at some Google Images of raisins. But I just didn't, it's not obvious to me that this is a
collected description, either. But hey, I mean,
		
00:36:17 --> 00:36:20
			I mean, here's the thing, like, I mean, you.
		
00:36:21 --> 00:36:49
			So what's interesting is I remember I was reading this French ethnographer study on this, in the
1960s, on this oasis in Algeria. And she talks about the describing the hair of some of the people
who live there, she says it looks like peppercorns, which I thought was really I was like, wow, like
this is a person's kind of the the same description of peppercorns not raising. But I would say that
		
00:36:51 --> 00:36:53
			it's interesting, right? The
		
00:36:54 --> 00:36:57
			one of the the kind of pitfalls of this sort of
		
00:36:58 --> 00:37:39
			looking into the past is that we tend, especially on issues of race and black men, there's kind of
been this globalization of American conceptualizations of race and what it means not just kind of
globally today, but actually kind of retroactively imperially into the past. So it's sort of
Western, you know, it's like American cultural conquest, not just of the present, but of the past,
which is kind of about horrific weight. And so, there's always this idea that what blackness means
to Americans is somehow what it means everybody in the past which is or the present, which is just
totally untrue. So one thing you find this very interesting is and by the way, this is same thing
		
00:37:39 --> 00:37:44
			with Heraclitus. Harada says talks about the Ethiopians being the handsomest people.
		
00:37:45 --> 00:37:47
			Okay, it's a mixed race, right?
		
00:37:48 --> 00:38:05
			And what's interesting is there's a book written in the 1500s, the late 1500s, by Medina and
Scotland and even Abdullah boggy was actually a tea but like a guy who gives the Sermon on the
Friday sermon in the prophet's mosque in Medina. So
		
00:38:06 --> 00:38:39
			him, you know, you can see in his work in other works from the 1600s 1700s 1800s, early 1900s, from
the hijas, including foreigners who go there, like snooker Granja, the Dutch foreigner, like this
one, Scottish traveler, Bruce, who travels there in the 1700s, trying to find the source of the
Nile. They all know they all say the same thing. And they note the same thing, which is the people
in jazz, are absolutely obsessed with Ethiopian women. And by Ethiopian, they mean, both kind of
Horn of Africa. So Ethiopia and Somalia.
		
00:38:40 --> 00:39:05
			These are the that are the most beautiful women. And they're, they're obsessed. So this one guy,
even of the buck is teacher. He's writing all this love poetry about Ethiopian women, how much he
longs for them. And he has like some concubines for Ethiopian. And he's so so bad. The Alto has also
asked to write a poem to his wife is apologizing for his obsession with
		
00:39:07 --> 00:39:12
			women. So on the one hand, you could say, well, these people are definitely not ugly.
		
00:39:13 --> 00:39:59
			According to Hijazi men from the, as far as I know, the 1500s pretty consistently from the 1500s to
the 1900s. Okay. On the other hand, if then Abdullah Baca in his the the same book, right, I mean,
he has a whole section about the beauty of Ethiopian women, and then he moves on to how ugly
Czanne's women are. They're ugly, they're stupid. They're lousy parents. They're done. I mean, just
this is so what is ENTJ Zan for him? And the general way it's used in its kind of Arab Islamic
civilization is its people from further south on the East African coast. So kind of, you can imagine
kind of Ethiopian Somalia and then you're going south.
		
00:40:00 --> 00:40:38
			down into, you know, Kenya, Tanzania Malawi, that area, right, that those people brought in from the
inland on and on the coast. So these people he sees as completely different. And centers I'm
extremely ugly. And this is very widely held in in kind of Islamic civilization in the medieval to
the early modern period roughly from North Africa, across through the Middle East into Iran and
northern India. Very common opinion. But the reason I bring this up as you see like this something
that we in the US would just categorize as black.
		
00:40:39 --> 00:41:04
			That for someone like him that Devaki are two totally different groups that he has absolutely
dimension always assessments of in terms of their beauty. Yeah, no, that's absolute. That's that's
very fascinating. Actually. I think what we have to ask the question, just for the record, in case
anyone is unaware of what did the Prophet Muhammad upon him up to teach about race and what really
matters to God because He did teach drums. So
		
00:41:05 --> 00:41:20
			it's very easy. I mean, the Quranic rule is very simple, right? Academic Amendola, here at Koco. The
most no bull, in God's eyes, is the most noble view, according to God is the most pious, the one
with the most Taqwa.
		
00:41:21 --> 00:41:51
			When, of course, we also have the Prophet alayhi salam saying that you know that in his famous
Farewell Sermon, the Arab has no virtue over the non Arab and the Arab non Arab has no virtue over
the Arab except by their deeds, and the black and the black and the red, which is interesting, we
can get into that if you want. He's the black half person has no virtue over the red. And the red
has no virtue over the blackboards except in their deeds. For what what is read. So it's I shouldn't
know what to read in the mobile. It's very interesting.
		
00:41:53 --> 00:42:34
			Earliest Islamic Arabic and kind of pre Islamic Arabic as far as we know, if you're going to use a
bipartite division for people for their appearances, so to like, you know, two groups, you have
black and red. So, and most scholars would say that Arabs were in the black group. So the Arabs
would lump themselves with Ethiopian southern Indians and everyone like that, right? So they would
say we're black, the Reds would be people who are like lighter skinned from maybe the north in the
Mediterranean, kind of Syrian Anatolian populations, right. So that's how they said, white, a black
and red.
		
00:42:36 --> 00:42:38
			Which is interesting, by the way, because when you go back and you look at,
		
00:42:40 --> 00:42:58
			like, let's say, ancient Egyptian artwork, and even some of the pre Islamic Arab depictions, we have
some like it caught it and fo from roughly maybe 200 to 300 ad 300 of the Common Era plays, it's
about kind of south
		
00:42:59 --> 00:43:44
			of Mecca. There are some wall paintings, and it's the same as the way Egyptians are portrayed
themselves in kind of ancient Egyptian art that we all know about, right? They, they draw themselves
at red color, almost like an ochre color, so they call themselves red. Whereas portray like a Nubian
or an Ethiopian, as literally black colored like this book color, or sometimes a kind of like a
brownish color, a lighter black. So it's interesting that you know, this idea of considering what we
might think of as like an Arab or Middle Eastern phenotype being more red colored then and then
okay, but what's also interesting is when that's not very common, right, so generally, when Arabs
		
00:43:44 --> 00:44:00
			talk about, they'll either pre early Islamic Arabic, pre Islamic Arabic, you either had a bar type
bipartite, Division of red and black, or you have a tripartite division of black, white and red,
black being very dark skinned
		
00:44:01 --> 00:44:37
			ins are dark skinned Arabs. White would be the absurd of what we think of like a Mediterranean
complexion. Which is interesting, because who came up with the idea of saying white people was the
Romans the Romans, use the word Alvis to talk about a Mediterranean complexion? You and I, Paul
would not be white. For Ancient Romans or for you know, Republican early Imperial Romans, we would
be what's called pallidus, or candy dose, which means palette. We're basically palette colored.
We're not white for in the Roman
		
00:44:39 --> 00:44:59
			kind of taxonomy of phenotype and color. But the white is kind of that idea of a Mediterranean look
is what also what the Arabs meant when they said White it's sort of like So the Prophet lays Islam
was described as white. Exactly this. I was just going to ask Him that very point because it has
caused some controversy in terms of, oh, he wasn't really an Arab was not as white
		
00:45:00 --> 00:45:12
			What that means is he sort of has like a, you know, medium all of tone, kind of, you know, sort of a
Mediterranean picture kind of an Arab or Italian or Greek. Anthony Quinn, let's go.
		
00:45:14 --> 00:45:16
			I feel like that's how Anthony Quinton or you know,
		
00:45:18 --> 00:45:33
			did he play Hamza in the the message the film? I mean, yeah, yeah, he did. I mean, I don't know. He
also played out to Abu Tae in Lawrence of Arabia and Zorba and God and another guy in Allama
seismometer in Guns of Navarone.
		
00:45:34 --> 00:46:17
			But I don't know if how much makeup on Anthony Quinn, you could have been heavily made up of Anthony
Quinn and all those movies. And that's probably pretty good. But I mean, the point is that he's sort
of he's a Greek and he's an Arab at the same time. So that's, that's white, to black, white, and
then red, which again, is sort of like an A lighter skin Mediterranean person, a lighter skinned
Persian person. Turks, Byzantines Russians. What's interesting is when Muslims, geographers start to
either travel to or hear reports about Northern Europeans, people like the British, Celts, Irish,
Irish, Irish people, they're just like, off the radar for them. They don't know they're like they
		
00:46:17 --> 00:46:40
			say their red color. They say they're blue colored. They have the stringy, red hair stringy blonde,
or whatever that might be because the Celts sometimes were portrayed with wearing blue makeup. And
that might be it but I my guess is and I don't know for sure. My guess is that it's, if you will,
people who will look really, really white light skin, you can kind of see their veins.
		
00:46:41 --> 00:46:42
			A lot. That's my guess.
		
00:46:43 --> 00:46:54
			You the word thing might be I'm gonna go for the word thing. I prefer it because it's more exotic
explanation. Yeah, I mean, but yeah, that's interesting question. So. So
		
00:46:55 --> 00:47:37
			now what's interesting is as well and very important, is that I just mentioned that when early
Islamic, you know, kind of Arabs of the time of the Prophet and early Samick. Arabia, pre Islamic
Arabia, if they're going to talk about people's looks, they'll say, either red and black and black
as the divisions or black, white and red. If they use black and whites, they don't use it for
people's appearances. So black and white is a metaphoric, right. Right. It's metaphoric. It means
noble and ignoble. So if you're when this happened, this term is used in the Chrome the sentence on
appeal was nice. Yeah. Well, to understand that as a racial classification, then does not No, no, if
		
00:47:37 --> 00:48:15
			you say in the Koran and talks about, for example, when people hear news of their that they have a
daughter, their face is blackened. On the Day of Judgment, there will be faces that are blackened
and faces that are white. And yeah, this is not this doesn't mean they suddenly look like an African
person. Or they suddenly look like you know, David Bowie or something. This isn't this is not what
this means, right? This Muslim Scott, commentators are very clear about this. First of all, they
debate whether or not it's just totally metaphorical, and not physical at all. But in the case of
safe in this world is obviously metaphorical, right? Because it's not like your face gets darker
		
00:48:15 --> 00:48:45
			colored when you get bad news. If anything, you might get lighter colors and blood drains out of
your face. But the in terms of the afterlife when the believers, their faces are white and
disbelievers, their faces are black. And what they say is this is this is obviously the whiteness of
nobility and ennoblement before God and the blackness of profanity and kind of debasement before
God. And what if they even if they say it's physical, what they'll say it's a.
		
00:48:46 --> 00:48:48
			So why do you have
		
00:48:50 --> 00:49:17
			cool Anwar so odd, right? So it's blackness that differs from any kind of blackness in this world.
It's like a, it's an other worldly color that is not related to phenotype. Like it's not like
people, everybody who, you know, again, it's nothing to do with black and white in this world. And
what's really interesting is when you go to, let's say, famous Arabic poet, Arab poets who are
writing in the eight hundreds, like Anita Nebby,
		
00:49:19 --> 00:50:00
			who and at this time, right, when they're commentators are writing in the 910 Hundreds, by this
time, you know, anti blackness has become common amongst Muslim scholars from Iraq to Iran. And that
time, it's, it's there have been influenced by the same kind of anti blackness you see in the rest
of the Mediterranean world, which we can discuss later if you want. But what's interesting is even
those scholars who are culturally primed to see black people as lower and white people as higher
when they when someone like a mutant ever uses saying like, this guy is black or this guy is white.
They don't interpret it in their descriptions, those
		
00:50:00 --> 00:50:11
			They oh he means noble and ignoble, right. So that that that the strength of this notion that black
and white as a distinction is really something that is first and foremost metaphoric
		
00:50:12 --> 00:51:00
			that, that that persists even after anti blackness has become rampant. That's interesting. I, when I
read chapter four of your book is on the blackness, I didn't realize, I started from the first
sentence, I didn't realize it was a quote, and that maybe that's deliberate to the shock value. The
chapter is entitled The Western narrative of Islam, slavery, and anti blackness. And the chapter
begins, I just read the first couple of verses are going to say a couple of sentences, the Muslim
slave trade was 200 times greater than the American slave trade. Moreover, while it Westerners had
fought to an end, slavery globally, Muslims continue to buy and sell human beings. White guilt, it
		
00:51:00 --> 00:51:48
			would seem it was uncalled for. And then you say, so tweeted the Canadian fire identitarian Stefan
Molyneux in 2018, not long before he was banned from the platform, and absolutely right. So the
question really is about the Barbary slave trade, in part, and it's also it has a theme that's come
up at speakers corner, and certainly on social media as well. I'll just read a sentence from
Wikipedia, which I looked at earlier about this. The Barbary slave trade, it says, involves slave
markets on the Barbary Coast of North Africa, which included the Ottoman states of Algeria, Tunisia,
and the Sultanate of Morocco. between the 16th and 19th centuries, European slaves were acquired by
		
00:51:48 --> 00:52:11
			Barbary pirates and slave raids on ships, and by raids on coastal towns from Italy, to the
Netherlands and Ireland, and southwest Britain, as far and as far north as Iceland, I didn't know
that and into the eastern Mediterranean. So this is like a huge, almost global slave trade. So in
terms of Western narratives on Islam, slavery,
		
00:52:12 --> 00:52:41
			and anti blackness, I mean, this what is going on with the Burberry, the Barbary slave trade? And,
and why is it? Why are you talking about it in your book on Islam and blackness? Yeah, well, I it's
very important when we think about the way in which this notion of Islam as anti black, how this
idea comes about, and how, why it continues so strongly. And when I say is that it's, it's
concurrently traced back to Amina say, four,
		
00:52:43 --> 00:52:58
			or three or four kind of root causes. I'll list the root causes, and we'll count how many out of the
city and so the first one is this idea, which is very present in Western Europe, from France, Spain,
		
00:52:59 --> 00:53:28
			England, and then also in the American colonies of the northern United States. What becomes the
United States, right? This idea that Islam, and Muslims are, Islam is a slaver religion and Muslims
are slavers. So this association now in this case, it's enslaving Europeans. So what happens is from
roughly the 1500s until, really, the early 1700s is kind of the heyday of this of the Barbary slave
trade. Is
		
00:53:29 --> 00:53:30
			that
		
00:53:31 --> 00:53:50
			pirates, Raiders operating out of you know, tent, you know, Algiers, especially Morocco, Tunis to an
extent are capturing French, Italian, British and American ship ships and capturing the crews and
passengers if their passengers and
		
00:53:51 --> 00:53:59
			keeping them in slavery, usually for purposes of ransoming them, right? So they want to ransom them
back to their families for money, right?
		
00:54:00 --> 00:54:12
			So that's the Barbary slavery. And this is like a, you know, this is a real issue. One guy who is a
famous guy who is, remember that's what Robinson Crusoe in his story. He talks about being
		
00:54:13 --> 00:54:21
			in fact, I think maybe even the author was captured at one point that you can look that up or the
viewers can look this up. Robert Louis Stevenson the author
		
00:54:23 --> 00:54:25
			WHAT THE * Who the * is the author of
		
00:54:26 --> 00:54:27
			cuz I'm gonna actually read the book.
		
00:54:29 --> 00:54:37
			Anyway, getting who's who wrote this book, anyway, so that but it's very early novel, so it's much
earlier than rather than we've seen, but the
		
00:54:38 --> 00:54:45
			John Smith, the guy who's one of the founding figures in the Jamestown colony was also captured by
pirates.
		
00:54:46 --> 00:54:53
			Now, these Muslim pirates is Raiders. It is a real cause of fear in the kind of public
		
00:54:55 --> 00:54:59
			song Rule Britannia. Any Britannia rule the waves Britain's now
		
00:55:00 --> 00:55:39
			Never ever will be slaves. What does it taught me? This is actually talking about the beat, being
powerful at sea and then not being enslaved by by being captured by the pirates. And what but what
Okay, so this is very important. And this persists in popular imagination. Until, I mean, until the
present day, you know, you can I have a list in my appendix in my book of all the movies, including
some movies in the 1990s and 2000s, that have totally extraneous scenes of white women or white
especially white women being auctioned at these North African slave markets.
		
00:55:42 --> 00:56:23
			This is today it's like a vestigial, but and some of the earliest, the one of the earliest genres of
films. Oh, where was the show, it's called the shaker genre, where white Europeans especially women,
get captured and sort of room romance slash seduced by these shake figures. Right. So there's this
very mixed up like there's a lot of you know, you could put kind of British and American culture on
the couch for some analysis here because of the ones are terrified of being captured. On the other
hand, there's, there's like, they're terrified of falling in love. In other thing, by the way you
really is, there's a lot of obsession with the idea that
		
00:56:24 --> 00:56:42
			Muslims will sodomized you is a huge theme in this Barbary narrative is that you're gonna get
sodomized by the the Muslim cap. It's a little too, there's a little too much focused on it, in my
opinion. I'm not a psychologist, I'm not a psychologist,
		
00:56:43 --> 00:56:46
			post Freudian here is impossible not to do
		
00:56:47 --> 00:56:49
			this, I could just say it was Daniel Defoe. I just looked at
		
00:56:52 --> 00:57:43
			the 19. So you're much earlier than the person I mentioned yet. So what happens is, what's
interesting though, is by the early 1700s, the strength of the Royal Navy and of other European
navies has actually turned the table. So after that, it's actually more Europeans ship European
pirates and raiders and ships who are capturing Muslim in the Mediterranean. And there's a very, you
know, brisk trade in slaves of Muslims from Morocco and Algeria. And that area being captured at
sea, and sold as slaves in cities like Naples, Genoa, up through the mid to late 1800s, or the
1860s 1870s 1880s really kind of healthy trade of slaves being Muslims captured on sea and brought
		
00:57:43 --> 00:58:28
			and sold as slaves, usually domestic slave for domestic slavery in places like Naples and Genoa. So,
the but what I'm trying to say is that this becomes, it transforms from a reality into this kind of
Phantasm it that is both, that remains kind of a potent part of the European mind, in mind, in
American mind, until the present day, there are more games, there are novels, there are films, there
everything what was interesting is not only do you have a genre of people writing really their own
experiences kind of coming back and saying my time as a bar activity in the barberries on the
Barbary Coast, but it also becomes something where you make when people write fake one. So you get
		
00:58:28 --> 00:58:55
			people writing, best selling stories of how I was captured, especially British, British or American
women, I was captured by the, by these Moorish slavers. And they're horrible, like black African
slaves, and that they're made up there. So this is like there's a hot market for this. So that's one
important origin for this. The second is, so we say, well, what does that have to do with blackness?
Okay, here's the second part.
		
00:58:56 --> 00:59:26
			When the after the abolitionist movement, which is based mainly in northern United States in Great
Britain really has its big victories in the early 1800s. In the 1830s, and 1807. With the end of the
British banning on the slave trading, most of you probably read all about in your other book, by the
way, a very interesting read that Yep, in 1830s, with the prohibition of slavery in Britain, and
many of its colonies, not one of these or not, okay, yeah. And then
		
00:59:28 --> 01:00:00
			this attention starts to turn amongst abolitionist to non Atlantic slave trade. So the Atlantic
slave trade has been crippled and in are crippled significantly. Then they started talking about
okay, they say there's two kinds of slavery there's a Christian slave, they say was incorrectly
called the Christian slave trade has nothing to do with Christianity, but Europeans did this. We
have now stopped. The other type is the Mohammed and slave trade. And so, for that kind
		
01:00:00 --> 01:00:34
			of Europeans and Americans thinking about slavery globally, after the 1830s, the only other show in
town for them is what they call the Muhammad and slave trade. And so this is, of course, completely
inaccurate. It's not inaccurate to say that Muslims were engaged in the slave trade in, let's say,
transistor, trans Saharan, or across the Red Sea or in the Indian Ocean. Yes, of course, Muslims
were involved in this. No one's denying that, right. But the idea that it's only Muslims doing this
is totally incorrect.
		
01:00:35 --> 01:01:23
			Inside inch, there's an all these inter African kind of circuits of slave trade, whether it's from
what's now like Northern kind of Nigeria, down to the southern coast to places like Ghana, or
whether it's Christian, the Christian emperor Menelik, the second in Ethiopia in the late 1800s, who
is expanding his state and capturing and enslaving other Ethiopians and non Ethiopian Africans. And
so this is a Christian ruler who's doing this. But the point is that from this point on, from really
the mid 1800s, onward, you get the idea that the Arab Muslim slaver, now their other target is the
black African, that peaceful black African native, who's just, you know, this is not my idea, but
		
01:01:23 --> 01:02:07
			this is how it's portrayed. You know, they're out and, you know, dancing and doing various noble
savage things. And then the evil Arab Muslims come in and enslave them. Remember, well, first of
all, what are some of the most successful early films Tarzan movies in the 1920s? Why in Edward Rice
Burroughs novels and in the movies, why is Tarzan there? Why is his family there that they can be
washed up on the coast and he can grow up and be raised by whatever? The the tiger, the monkey, the
gorilla, right? Why is it his family is part of an anti is part of it, the British effort to end the
Arab slave trade. Right. So now you have a new team, a new story, which is the white
		
01:02:08 --> 01:02:17
			British and Americans who have come in to help save the Africans or black Africans from the evil
Arabs, evil Arab slave traders.
		
01:02:18 --> 01:02:23
			Okay, then you add, here's the third root cause.
		
01:02:25 --> 01:03:09
			Where both of these ideas are now kind of bubbling in the western cultural imagination, that kind of
vocabulary of Western European and American culture, Arab slavers, Arabs as slaves and so even black
people. If you're, if you're a conservative, who's trying to claim the kind of moral high ground of
Western civilization or its sort of role and the vanguard of human moral perfection or moral
advancement, this is a great way to kind of shift the blame. So you can say, Yes, we were engaged in
the slave trade. But we repented. We tried, we tried to end slavery, the Muslims never did the Arab
Muslims are they they never repented, they're still doing it.
		
01:03:10 --> 01:03:44
			This is what the Steven Molyneux was doing. And he, by the way, he's just one person. If you just
Douglas Murray says the same. He said the same thing on Bill Maher show after the press, he came on
the show and said this, you can find it if you just go look at kind of these more conservative or
sort of West is best West supremacist figures in the public and public life, they will regularly
bring up the idea that the Muslims, the Muslims, slave trade was equivalent to the Atlantic slave
trade. And unlike Europeans, who realize it was wrong, Muslims have never realized it's wrong,
right? You so these, you see this over and over again.
		
01:03:46 --> 01:03:50
			In fact, and I go into this in some detail in my book, it's not.
		
01:03:51 --> 01:04:07
			It may be true, it's very hard to calculate. But it may be true that from around 700 ad until 1900
ad that slightly more people were removed from Africa,
		
01:04:08 --> 01:04:11
			then by Muslims,
		
01:04:12 --> 01:04:22
			then we're removed from Africa by Western Europeans. But one has to remember that the Western
European slave trade is basically you know, three centuries, roughly three,
		
01:04:25 --> 01:04:55
			you know, essentially three and a half centuries, whereas, so you're talking about three and a half
centuries worth of enslavement compared to 12 centuries, 1200 years or 1300 years. So the intensity
and the violence of the European slave trade is I think, is not comparable, and it's far more severe
than the very these various kinds of Muslim Islamic slave trades. And of course, then there's all
sorts of problems about calling anything like Muslim slave trade Islamic soldier, what does that
mean? I mean
		
01:04:59 --> 01:05:00
			what is it
		
01:05:00 --> 01:05:22
			mean if somebody is, you know, somebody one day becomes Muslim and there's still slave traders that
now Islamic slave trade. Some people engage in the slave trade, our local African potentates. I
mean, this is very common, you didn't go, it wasn't like these raiders went in and just started
grabbing people, they would go and buy them from people who had already captured them or who are
selling their own
		
01:05:24 --> 01:06:03
			members of their own communities. So I'm not I'm not trying to say that, you know, Muslims have no
blame or Arabs have no blame. And, by the way, then Arabs, slave Raiders from the Gulf, for example,
go to Zanzibar in the 1800s. And they would just start raiding the Zanzibar Island and taking
Muslims, they would start taking the local Muslims as slaves. And this is something that the Salton
is and local communities extremely angry about writing protest letters like you can't these people
come from like what's now UAE area kind of Persian Gulf, very calm down and read and taking people
who are who are Arab speaking Muslims as slaves. So it's a very complicated anyway. So the point I
		
01:06:03 --> 01:06:21
			want to make is that you have this idea of the Arab as slaver and Arab as enslaving blacks and the
Arab as the kind of unrepentant uncured. A slaver is very useful for conservative Western
conservatives who want to push for like a West is Best
		
01:06:22 --> 01:06:37
			Western superiority to others narrative. Now, who then picks us up the fourth very important kind of
source for this not temporal source, but in terms of who's driving it, like who's really revving
this engine and keeping it going? Is
		
01:06:38 --> 01:06:49
			Israeli public diplomacy? It says, I mean, I, someone might say, Oh, here he goes, elders, protocols
of elders, as I put his on, you know, you mentioned this
		
01:06:51 --> 01:07:16
			Israeli Zionist and others. Yeah, this is well documented. This is why I didn't go and document
this. This is well documented, right? That the role of Israeli public diplomacy, either by American
Zionist, or by Israelis, in one Islamophobia, the propagation of what Nathan Lane called the
Islamophobia industry, to the narrative of anti Muslim, anti black.
		
01:07:18 --> 01:07:26
			A lot of films that have these plots are produced by Israeli producers. They are produced in Israel
with Israeli actors, right?
		
01:07:27 --> 01:07:32
			The why so why would someone why was it why is this question is why so what what?
		
01:07:35 --> 01:08:19
			Israel was one of the earliest supporters of the South Sudanese liberation movement in the 1960s.
It's, it allows you to break the solidarity, that kind of first of all, Cold War, third world non
aligned movement colonized world movement of solidarity between colonized peoples, so black
Africans, and Arabs, navy, North Africa and Sub Saharan Africa, right? You break the solidarity
between them by promoting the idea that the Arab north and Muslim North is a predatory slaving force
on the on the real Africa, right, quote, unquote, the real Africa.
		
01:08:20 --> 01:08:42
			Then another thing is they'll highlight anti blackness in, in Middle Eastern Arab society. So
they'll say, and you can see, you can see this, you know, it'll come out every couple of months, you
don't have to go back and look in history, just wait around and watch for discourse online. When you
have someone like alumnus as a moment
		
01:08:44 --> 01:08:45
			I forget his name.
		
01:08:51 --> 01:09:34
			I'm forgetting his name. But every time there's, like kind of effort, were by some kind of black
American thinkers or writers to talk about solidarity with Palestinians, between like black, you
know, Black Lives Matter and lives, though, you'll see in like Jerusalem Post or something will pop
up an article saying, Oh, how do you have solidarity with Arabs, when they think they call black
people slaves? And you know, Saudi Arabia and Palestine? These are all, you know, places where they
treat black people terribly. So there's a though, Europeans, we see this idea of Arab society and
Arab culture as anti black brought up in Israeli media in pro Israel media in the West to fragment
		
01:09:34 --> 01:09:52
			or fracture the possibility of kind of black, Muslim or black air or black Palestinian solidarity,
especially isn't it to manipulate public opinion with a view to protecting the summer called the
apartheid policies of the State of Israel by as you say fracturing
		
01:09:54 --> 01:09:56
			as referred to it as this? Yeah.
		
01:09:59 --> 01:09:59
			divide and divide
		
01:10:00 --> 01:10:17
			didn't rule basically by bringing this. So this is like the other examples of going off subject but
where public opinion is manipulated to reach certain conclusions on events that happen in our world.
So we don't live in a, you know, we're gonna be wary of fake news and how we're being manipulated.
		
01:10:20 --> 01:10:31
			Okay, well, but just draw to perhaps draw to a close. But I was struck by a sentence very early on,
I was struck for several reasons. In your book in your preface.
		
01:10:33 --> 01:10:34
			And
		
01:10:36 --> 01:11:27
			you said one comment on social media, whoever is stuck, stuck stuck with me. A black Muslim asked me
with a sincerity of a Muslim brother. Do you know what it feels like to be considered subhuman? And
you replied, I do not. Once in the outskirts of Dhaka, as I sat with a family that raised me there,
a toddler came into the yard saw me and started bawling in fear. That is the one time in my life
that I've ever felt singled out by my race. And it was more entertaining than anything else. You
said, throughout my life, I have been treated like royalty at home and abroad. And I thought, that's
very revealing. And I can actually in a smaller way related to that. When I went to California at
		
01:11:27 --> 01:11:32
			San Francisco airport just a week or so ago, long queue of people and,
		
01:11:33 --> 01:11:52
			you know, I was anticipating being interrogated or asked questions, and I knew what questions they'd
asked, because I heard everyone else been asked them ahead of me. So what's your length of your
stay? And what's the purpose of your visit? And I saw people in front of me, people of different
ethnicities, you know, one one woman was taken away, I don't mean him, screaming, I mean, she was a
guy, the immigration,
		
01:11:54 --> 01:12:32
			please. And this person came away and took this woman away for I don't know, questioning, I have no
idea why. And then came my turn. So I was all prepared for questioning. And the whole interview
lasted about four seconds. It was like, purpose of visit, I was saying, seeing friends hanging over
here for five days, off you go. And it was like, whoosh, straight through. And I thought, hang on.
That's it, you know? And why? Why? You see because I've been told all these stories by Muslim
friends or my Muslim brothers who most of them are not white about the experiences they had had at
us. Immigration, I'm not, there's not a point about US immigration, particularly but same in Britain
		
01:12:32 --> 01:12:38
			as well. And elsewhere. And I didn't have that problem. And I have never had that problem. Maybe I
will now.
		
01:12:39 --> 01:13:20
			But the your experience had been treated like Roger, this sense of effortlessness of just passing
through things of being accorded a welcome. And it almost becomes norm, the normal behavior. And
it's not the experience of many of our brothers and sisters who share the same views, the same face,
sometimes the same marriages and so on. And this whole notion of white privilege, or whatever that
may mean, but nevertheless, comes comes home with renewed force. I thought in that comment in your
book, and in my recent experience in the United States, I'm not complaining, by the way, I'm glad I
got through your country's immigration very easily. But I was aware how different it could have been
		
01:13:20 --> 01:13:22
			for some people I know.
		
01:13:23 --> 01:13:26
			Yeah, I mean, I the sort of the question is,
		
01:13:28 --> 01:14:13
			if you were to or if I were to be wearing like a show, or kameez and have like a big beard and a,
you know, like a little pucks tiny hat on or something, I think we would get treated very
differently. And that's not to say that there's that that's not to kind of try to problematize the
notion of white supremacy, I think, or white privilege, I think these are, you know, very well
established facts. But I think what it means is that this idea of the racial, the racial Muslim,
right, that being racialized as Muslim, is not necessarily about your actual ethnicity or your skin
color, but that there are other signs you send of your Muslim pneus Yeah, those will also racialized
		
01:14:13 --> 01:14:52
			you as a Muslim, in the eyes of the other. And I think this is important, because sometimes people
will kind of be like, you know, there's no great Muslim is not a race. This is nonsense. How can you
say this, and it's hard to understand where they're coming from, because they're, like, look, other
races about your kind of your ancestry and how you look and things like this, and what seems like
like everything, and they have all sorts of ancestries. But the fact of the matter is, in the eyes
of the general non Muslim public, there are certain signals that mean Muslim, and that if you give
those signals, then you will be racialized as a Muslim. And you can't get out of that, right.
		
01:14:52 --> 01:15:00
			There's nothing you can do. You can't say, you know, to the guy at the border, I moderate I have
		
01:15:00 --> 01:15:19
			No problematic views. I'm wonderful. I love baseball. I'm a Sufi Sheikh, and I matter right you're
you've become racialized as a Muslim I that's when the cons of racialization means is this notion of
people reading into something, people more powerful than you reading into something about you that
they make, indelible and unalterable.
		
01:15:21 --> 01:16:00
			Anyway, it was a wake up call, perhaps we can conclude that and this is the book, we're talking
about Islam and blacklist with this incredible cover by your good self. It's quite substantial as
some very positive reviews indeed, from very distinguished scholars and experts in the field on the
back cover. I do recommend it it's not been out long and it literally it will come out in paperback
in due course, I assume. Yeah, I think so. Usually, I usually try and stuff some extra things into
the paperback. I like when because they'll they'll send me the essay kind of before you do this guy
stuff. I try to stuff more stuff into the footnotes. You know, the paperback versions of my book
		
01:16:00 --> 01:16:04
			actually have stuff to hardbacks. Don't have they have more stuff, more
		
01:16:05 --> 01:16:44
			data stuff in there. Yeah, gosh, I'm gonna plug my local books that one of my favorite by using
misquoting Mohammed the challenging choices of interpreting prophets legacy in the contemporary
world is an outstanding introduction to the whole subject of Islam and how we interpret the the
Islamic tradition today. You tackle a lot of really thorny issues about 434 We're not going to go
then Kron 434 And you know, lying about the prophets. And when scripture can't be true, these IPH
Daijiro some people saying no to the Scripture, because they don't agree with it and hermeneutics
interpretation. So its history and narrative as well as taking on board complex theoretical
		
01:16:44 --> 01:17:27
			questions about how in the modern world we understand and take on board the scriptures of Islam. So
that's my feed, particularly for non Muslims and Muslims as well. We I certainly learned a huge
amount from it. So do you have any concluding words, Jonathan, before we wrap up, thanks for having
me on. That's all my concluding word. And I'm happy that you sort of let me ramble ramble on and
know your rambling is always educator and interesting. So once again, thank you very much Dr.
Jonathan Brown for your time. I'll put a link to the two books I've mentioned primary ones and
misquoting Muhammad and Islam or Black was in the description below. And if you haven't got them,
		
01:17:27 --> 01:17:35
			get them both. They're both worth your time and, and share them with friends as well. So so I'm
gonna come until next time, thank you. Thank you.