Islam and Blackness

by Jonathan A.C. Brown

The most comprehensive examination to date of the claim that Islam, as a system of scripture, law and spirituality, is antiblack

It is commonly claimed that Islam is antiblack, even inherently bent on enslaving Black Africans. Western and African critics alike have contended that antiblack racism is in the faith’s very scriptural foundations and its traditions of law, spirituality, and theology. But what is the basis for this accusation?

Bestselling scholar Jonathan A.C. Brown examines Islamic scripture, law, Sufism, and history to comprehensively interrogate this claim and determine how and why it emerged. Locating its origins in conservative politics, modern Afrocentrism, and the old trope of Barbary enslavement, he explains how antiblackness arose in the Islamic world and became entangled with normative tradition. From the imagery of ‘blackened faces’ in the Quran to Shariah 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 the controversial knot that is Islam and Blackness, and identifies authoritative voices in Islam’s past that are crucial for combatting antiblack racism today.

Genres: Islam, Race, History, Religion

416 pages, Hardcover

First published December 13, 2022

About the author

Jonathan Andrew Cleveland Brown is an American scholar of Islamic studies. Since 2012, he has been associate professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. He holds the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University.

He has authored several books including Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenges and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy, Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World, Muhammad: A Very Short Introduction, and The Canonization of al-Bukhari and Muslim. He has also published articles in the fields of Hadith, Islamic law, Salafism, Sufism, and Arabic language.

Reviews

[Khalid Sharif · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book covering the complex history of race, desirability, and blackness in Islamic Law and History.
Rather than reflexively interpreting the past, consuming it’s complexity, through the lens of the present the author works to engage texts within their socio-historical contexts.

Discussions include Race/Racism, contested understandings of Blackness and the rise of anti-black racism, Western Narratives of Islam and Slavery, Maliki Marriage Law, and much more.

[Potter Wickware · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slave trade in Islam more prevalent than in trans Atlantic slave trade. Islam is an antiblack slaver religion. The book is a self consciously academic treatment of the proposition. Boko Haram, a modern version of Barbary pirates, captured women and girls and enslaved them. Book expresses anti-black, anti-woman attitudes embedded in Islam. Curse of Ham. Book is a census of racist attitudes. It attempts a comprehensive view of an important and seemingly timeless topic, but is marred by a turgid style and use of academic non-words, eg normative, appetitive. With 7 appendices its organization is questionable.

[Leib Mitchell]

Book Review
Islam and Blackness
0/5 stars
"A tale of Saudi oil money and scholars for dollars"

*****
This is the worst $27.29 I have ever spent in my life. (I read about 80 pages of this book before discarding it.)

If this author turns up mugged, then somebody's going to need to check my alibi.

This book itself appears to be extremely compromised: the author is the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

For the record, that is a Saudi Arabian businessman/ Crown Prince who has enough money to rent scholars and endow chairs to try to create whatever reality he wants. (In this case it is tried to talk away the unfortunate events of blacks in Arab lands. A thousand years of slavery trading, as well as mistreatment and exploitation of guest workers in Arab countries.)

This book was not anything to write home about.

a. It was published in 2022, and discarded from a public library not even a year later--bad sign! (Evidenced by the discard stamp in the book.)

b. It is not on any type of reputable label, such as a university press label that could at least show *some* semblance of honest academic effort.

The first/most consistent stated thing that pops out at the reader in this book is that: the connection between African ancestry and low cognitive ability has been observed in many places--and these are the words of the sources that the author himself brings.

"Stupid" seems to be the adjective that describes them more than any other in these sources.

In this case, it is in the Muslim world.

More specifically, it would have to be the Arab world--and that is because:

1. The Africans typically could not read well enough to write their own stories;

2. Non Arabs have mostly been a sideshow in the Islamic World - even in these days where they are only 20%.

The author tries as hard as he can to soft pedal the fact that Arab Muslims (like many others) really don't think too terribly much of black people. (Anybody who has ever lived around Arabs can tell you that. I live just up the street from a bunch of them from many parts of the World - - in Dearborn - - and I don't think that there's any black person in southeast Michigan who cannot/would not tell you the same thing.)

It's not too hard to imagine: they were brought to the New World as slaves for several centuries, and they were slaves in the Arab world for 6 centuries before that time. (p. 21: Mauritania only abolished slavery in 1980. For the third time.

It happens in many places in the world and in many different cultures that people want to distance themselves from other unfortunate people. (Outcastes in India, Burakumin in Japan, African slaves all over the Western hemisphere. If Muslims/Arabs were in on the game, they are doing what pretty much everybody else did.)

*****
This book is so long and badly written that I'll have to try to reduce it to a few overarching themes (and that's only for the parts that I did read, because this book was not worth finishing):

1. LOTS of discussion of things that have nothing to do with this topic.

Ch 2 quotes the monologue of a stand-up comedian. (Aamer Rahman.) Then he throws in a bit of critical race theory / Ibram Kendi/ "people who are powerless cannot be racist"/South Indian caste system / blaming colorism on colonization.

Ch3 is a discussion about what it means to really be black/ Hellenistic perceptions of blacks/ the association of blackness with sin in Christian theology/ Huey Newton / Malcolm X/Black political consciousness/ Afropessimism.

AGAIN, let's remember that this is a book about Islam and blackness.

2. Lots of reinterpretation about negative statements about black people made in Islamic sources to not mean what they really said that they meant.

So, if some Islamic Source described these blacks as " bow-legged, unintelligent, and hypersexual" (lost count of how many times these adjectives have been repeated in the book) then it didn't really mean what it said; the issue is about status, and not just color.

3. Misdirection.

For example (p.12), the author repeats the shibboleth about "globalized power structure and system of norms and standards of beauty that emerged... Through European colonialism and global consumer capitalism."

(The classical period of Islam is way earlier than that, and it is just as anti-black; nice try.)

Verdict: NOT RECOMMENDED.

[Graeme Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jonathan A. C. Brown delivers a rigorous and deeply researched academic study in Islam and Blackness, examining one of the most contested and sensitive questions in contemporary religious and racial discourse. The book investigates claims that Islam contains inherent antiblack elements, carefully tracing how such arguments developed across history, politics, theology, and cultural interpretation.

Brown engages with Islamic scripture, legal traditions, and spiritual writings to separate historical reality from modern ideological framing. He situates the discussion within broader global contexts, including Afrocentric thought, colonial history, and evolving racial narratives within and outside the Muslim world. The result is a balanced and scholarly exploration that challenges simplified conclusions and encourages deeper engagement with primary sources and historical complexity.

Islam and Blackness stands as a significant contribution to religious studies, race studies, and intellectual history, particularly for readers interested in nuanced, evidence-based analysis of faith and identity.

[Miroku Nemeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent discussion of the topic. One of the few works that really sorts through all the layers of confusion and goes to the source. There is just so much that is plainly false and propagandistic and Islamophobic on this topic out there when the truth of the matter is that Black folk have always been at the core of Islam any way you measure it, though most of the ideas of Blackness that say, an American has, are very peculiar to modern American history and identity and most Americans are so American and Eurocentric that they cannot actually conceive of entirely different frameworks of understanding. Brown does a good job of setting things straight, as have many of the contemporary writers he mentions in his work from Mustafa Briggs and Dawud Walid to Habeeb Akinde and Adeyinka Mendes. Alhumdulillah, there is so much great literature on this topic now. Folks just need to read and understand it.