Though the Qur'an expresses no racial prejudice, ethnocentric prejudice towards black people is widely evident among medieval Arabs, for a variety of reasons:[1] the declining power of the Aksumite Empire; Arabs' extensive conquests and slave trade; the influence of Aristotelian ideas regarding slavery, which some Muslim philosophers directed towards Zanj;[2] and the influence of Judeo-Christian ideas regarding divisions among humankind.
[7] At the same time, Arabic poetry from the early Islamic period continues to attest to abusing people for their dark skin colour.
[6]: 114–17 One important echo of these pre- and early ideological relationships between the Arab and African worlds is found in the writings of al-Jāḥiẓ (d. 868/869), whose Fakhr al-Sūdān wa-al-Bīḍān ('pride of Blacks over Whites') represents debate about the superiority of these races.
[14] The hajin, half-Arab sons of Muslim Arab men and their slave concubines, were viewed differently depending on the ethnicity of their mothers.
[6]: 122 The low status of Black people were stated in a number of contemporary anecdotes in the Umayyad Caliphate, such as for example in the comment of an Arab who expressed his dislike of a civil war among fellow Arabs referring to an "Ethiopian" (Black African), stating that he "would prefer to be a mutilated Ethiopian slave tending broody goats on a hilltop until death overtakes him, rather than that a single arrow should be shot between the two sides".
The first two filters are paramount, involving the presence or absence of Islam (or another Ibrahimic religion), followed by urbanity, literacy, wealth accumulation, and clothing.
Some observers were aware that West and North African societies were heterogeneous, that categories of "black" and “white” were simplistic, and were therefore more interested in other distinctions.
[6]: 104 For example, Ibn Buṭlān composed a stereotyping description of the qualities of slaves of different races which is relatively positive about Nubians, but otherwise particularly negative about the characteristics of Black people.
I never thought I should live to see the day when a dog would do me evil and be praised in the bargain, nor did I imagin that true men would have ceased to exist, and that the like of the father of bounty, would still be here, and that negro with his pierced camel’s lip would be obeyed by those cowardly hirelings.
[6]: 122–24 The precise composition (and degrees of freedom) of the rebels is uncertain, however; in the assessment of Helmi Sharawi, the association of Black people with rebellion in medieval Arabic sources partly reflects prejudice towards Black people, and he argues that the rebellions were not to do with race as such "but were a part of the whole context of resisting inequality and oppression in the four corners of the Arab-Islamic world".
[6]: 124–31 According to Helmi Sharawi, 'when the traveller deals with the subjective aspect of Black character, he remembers but the sexual dissipation, women’s stripped apparel and their deep involvement in superstition'.
[6]: 117–22, 128 Al-Idrisi's thirteenth-century description of Africa is especially positive, while the Muqaddima of the fourteenth-century Ibn Khaldūn is particularly noted for dismissing the idea of the Curse of Ham and explaining skin-colour as produced by environmental conditions.