Islam and Race Relations!

This article is exclusive to this site; it will not appear anywhere else or in any other format. I thought it would be interesting to write a piece about Islam's attitude towards race, since after all Islam and race are the two things I write about most at this blog. This will be fairly short, but I hope interesting and informative.

So what does Islam say about race? On the one hand, Allah states in the Qur'an that "We created you from a single (pair) of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other (not that ye may despise each other)." (49:13) Elsewhere, "And one of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth and the diversity of your tongues and colors; most surely there are signs in this for the learned." (30:22) And in his Last Sermon, Muhammad preached: "All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over a black nor a black has any superiority over a white - except by piety and good action."

Nevertheless, the odd questionable tradition remains. The most notorious of these is Muhammad's infamous "raisin-head" quote: "You should listen to and obey your ruler even if he was an Ethiopian (black) slave whose head looks like a raisin." (Bukhari v.9, b.89, No.256). Elsewhere, one hadith has him saying: "When Allah created Adam, he hit Adam on the right shoulder and the white race sprang out, while the black race came from the left shoulder. Allah said to those of the right hand to Paradise you are and to the left hand to hell you go." (Mishkat Al-Messabih, v.1 , no.119) However, it should be pointed out that this tradition does not appear in one of the collections considered most reliable by Muslims, although many scholars still consider Mishkat Al-Messabih an important work.

Others point to verses such as 3:106 and 10:26-27, which say that the faces of those in Paradise on the Day of Judgment will be white, while the faces of those in Hell will be black. However, while these at first seem to be racial statements, Muslim scholars have traditionally not interpreted them as such. Rather, these are moral judgments.

Nevertheless, racism has popped up in Islamic culture from time to time. This was particularly evident in the long tradition of trafficking black slaves from north Africa. The great medieval Muslim theologian Ibn Khaldun wrote that Africans submitted to slavery because they "have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals." In the modern day, following a visit to Palestine by US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Hamas TV broadcast images of Rice with a caption that labeled her a "black snake". However, it would probably be unfair to link racism such as this intrinsically to Islam, since human nature is everywhere the same and anyone of any race and religion can be racist (although the media often tend to forget this...)

So overall, it has to be said that, while Islam has many undesirable aspects to it which make its culture inferior to Western culture, racism is not really one of those aspects. It largely does not teach race hatred, since anyone of any race can become a Muslim. Now, religious hatred; that's an entirely different matter...