In the Arab world, racism targets non-Arabs and the expat majority of the Arab states of the Persian Gulf coming from South Asian (Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh) groups as well as Black, European, and Asian groups that are Muslim; non-Arab ethnic minorities such as Armenians, Africans, the Saqaliba, Southeast Asians, Jews, Kurds, and Coptic Christians, Assyrians, Persians, Turks, and other Turkic peoples, and South Asians living in Arab countries of the Middle East.
The previously taboo topics of race and racism in the Arab world have been explored more since the rise of foreign, private, and independent media. In one example, Al-Jazeera's critical coverage of the Darfur crisis led to the arrest and conviction of its Khartoum bureau chief. [1]
Medieval Arab attitudes to Black people varied over time and individual attitude, but tended to be negative. Though the Qur'an expresses no racial prejudice, ethnocentric prejudice towards black people is widely evident among medieval Arabs, for a variety of reasons: [2] their extensive conquests and slave trade; the influence of Aristotelian ideas regarding slavery, which some Muslim philosophers directed towards Zanj [3] and the influence of Judeo-Christian ideas regarding divisions among humankind. [4] On the other hand, the Afro-Arab author Al-Jahiz, himself having a Zanj grandfather, wrote a book entitled Superiority of the Blacks to the Whites, [5] and explained why the Zanj were black in terms of environmental determinism in the "On the Zanj" chapter of The Essays. [6] By the 14th century, a significant number of slaves came from either West or Central Africa; Lewis argues that this led to the likes of Egyptian historian Al-Abshibi (1388–1446) writing that "[i]t is said that when the [black] slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is hungry, he steals." [7]
According to Dr. Michael Penn: [8]
Contrary to many present-day stereotypes of early Islam, throughout much of the seventh and early eighth centuries, admission into the umma was reserved exclusively for Arabs. Religious conversion was predicated on ethnic conversion. For a non-Arab to become Muslim, that individual first had to gain membership in an Arab tribe by becoming the mawlā (client) of an Arab sponsor. From a seventh-century Islamic perspective, ethnicity and religion were not independent variables. All Muslims were Arabs, and ideally all Arabs were Muslims.
According to a statement by Fred Halliday, the Ba'athists in Iraq were inspired by Sati' al-Husri and with rhetoric tinged with pan-Arabism and anti-Iranian sentiment. In the decade and a half after the Ba'ath party came to power, up to 200,000 Feyli Kurds were expelled from Iraq. In claiming to be "defenders of Arabism", Halliday asserts the Ba'ath promoted a myth of Persian migrants and communities in the Persian Gulf region to be comparable to "Zionists" settling Palestine. [9] [10]
According to Holly Burkhalter of Human Rights Watch, in a statement made in testimony before the Congress of the United States, "It is fair to say that the Mauritanian government practices undeclared apartheid and severely discriminates on the basis of race." [11]
Beginning in 1991, elders of the Zaghawa people of Sudan complained that they were victims of an intensifying Arab apartheid campaign. [12] Vukoni Lupa Lasaga has accused the Sudanese government of "deftly manipulat(ing) Arab solidarity" to carry out policies of apartheid and ethnic cleansing against non-Arabs in Darfur. [13] Alan Dershowitz has pointed to Sudan as an example of a government that deserves the appellation "apartheid", [14] and former Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler has also criticized Sudan in similar terms. [15]
Black Egyptian President Anwar Sadat faced insults of not looking "Egyptian enough" and "Nasser's black poodle". [16] An Egyptian Nubian soccer player Shikabala stopped playing football for some time due to racist slurs by rival Egyptian fans during a game. [17] A group was shouting out "Shikabala" while pointing a black dog wearing the number 10, which was Zamalek football shirt. [18]
According to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), Black African immigrants to Egypt often face physical violence and verbal abuse at the hands of the general public and law enforcement officials. Refugees from Sudan are especially targeted, with racial slurs like "oonga boonga" and "samara" (meaning "black") constituting the most typical insults. The EIPR attributes the violence and abuse to both a lack of government efforts at disseminating information, raising awareness and dispelling myths with regard to the economic contributions made by the newcomers, and stereotyping on the part of the Egyptian media. [19] Black women are also targets of sexual harassment. [16] As a remedy, the EIPR recommends that the Egyptian government "should intensify and accelerate efforts to combat racist xenophobic views towards migrant workers, especially those of Black African origin, and to promote awareness of their positive contribution to society. The government should train all personnel working in the field of criminal justice and law enforcement officials in the spirit of respect for human rights and non-discrimination on ethnic or racial grounds." [19]
In March 2011, officials from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees confirmed allegations of discrimination by Tunisia against black Africans. [20] Black Africans were reportedly targeted by rebel forces during the Libyan civil war in 2011. [21] [22] [23]
Author draws parallel between Arab nationalism and Turkish nationalism, both were "likewise evolving into the "racial" stage, the ideal being a great "Pan-Arab" empire, embracing not merely the ethnically Arab peninsula-homeland, but also the regions of Mesopotamia, The Levant, Egypt, Tripoli, North Africa and the Sudan." [24]
A writer on the Durban conference regarding racism suggests: That stressing out that "Arabism is racism" would have been an interesting debating topic. Yet, he adds that "the OIC countries were very clever in how they deflected the slavery issue that could so easily have been turned on them with a vengeance." [25]
Some Muslim activists have also expressed that "Arabism is racism, pure and simple." [26] There was Sheikh Mustafa al-Maraghi, who in a famous 1938 essay dismissed the goal of [pan] Arab unity as racist. [27]
Arab Muslim authors in "Arab-Iranian relations":
Much ink has flowed on the issue of Arab nationalism. Some people believe it to be a racist movement, advocating the superiority of the Arabs. [28]
Ali A. Allawi, the former Iraqi Minister of Defense and Finance, envisioning a peaceful Iraq: "Arabism, racism and sectarianism – would be dethroned. Iraq would be at peace with itself and with its region." [29]
In 1960's, the French Comite d' Action de Defense De- mocratique published a pamphlet titled Racism and Pan-Arabism, its introduction followed by an article by the well known French sociologist, anthropologist & political leader: Jackes Soustelle to fight against all kinds of racism, this was followed by a paper by Shlomo Friedrich on "Pan-Arabism: A New Racist Menace?" who offered a sharp critique of Nasser's book The Philosophy of the Revolution, and it terms it a mere pale imitation of Hitler's Mein Kampf . [30]
Some charge that "ultra-Arabism and Jihadism have been responsible for widespread persecution and genocide." such Saddam's using chemical weapons and gas against the Kurds during the bombings of Halabja in northern Iraq. "The Kurds, a non-Arab people whose language belongs to the Iranian group, have suffered from persecution under the Baath of Iraq and Syria, especially since the departure of British and French forces in the late 1940s." (Kurds are also claiming rights in Iran and Turkey.) The Berbers, the pre-Arab native peoples of North Africa, have been victimized by the Arabs in North Africa. [31]
There are historic racial divisions, [32] racial and religious prejudices in Iraq, including on Kurds, on Shia and the Marsh Arabs. [33]
In Sudan, including the Nuba Mountains and the Blue Nile region, from 1955 to 2005, it is estimated that nearly 4 million black people were killed or ethnically cleansed. During the Second Sudanese Civil War, about 2.5 million people were killed in attacks widely regarded as racially motivated against black indigenous Africans. [34]
Racism has been documented in Libya, [35] including the 2000 anti-African racist violence. [36] They have reported facing racism in the country, with one witness reporting being called a "slave" and "animal." [37] [38] From the start of Libyan Civil War in 2011, blacks were massacred for their skin color according to an Amnesty International report. [39] [40]
In Algeria victims of racism include Sub-Saharan immigrants who suffer daily from verbal attacks and other forms of discrimination. Many Sub-Saharan immigrants find themselves on the street due to lack of public resources. The homeless immigrants often quote the Quran in an effort to appeal to the country's Muslim unity and divert attention from their race. [41] On the world stage the country has declared that members of its national football team must undergo a stricter selection process if they possess dual citizenship to ensure their loyalty to the country. [42]
Some of the persecuted victims of racism and discrimination in the Arab world include: Sub-Saharan Africans in Egypt, [43] including on Eritreans, [44] and oppressing Darfurian refugees, [45] Algeria, Mauritania – fighting off racist policies in these countries, [46] [47] [48] in Iraq where blacks face racism, [49] [50] Kurds in Syria and in Iraq, [51] [52] [53] [54] Copts, [55] it worsened under pan-Arabism by Nasser and with the empowerment of the Muslim Brotherhood. [56] [57] [58] Al-Akhdam in Yemen, [59] as well as slaves who fight the stigma of their status as 'slaves' in impoverished Yemen, [60] Persians' historic struggle against the 'Arab supremacy,' [61] Berbers in North Africa (Moroccos, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya ), [62] [63] [64] [65] [66] South Asians and Southeast Asians (migrant workers and maids in the Gulf Arab nations), [67] [68] [69] [70] Jews (see: Antisemitism in the Arab world, in a 2009 PEW poll, 90% of the Middle East were found to view Jews unfavorably). [71] Although slavery was officially abolished in 1981, a 2012 CNN report suggested that 10% to 20% of the Mauritanian population was enslaved with a correlation with skin color – darker-skinned Mauritanians were often enslaved by lighter-skinned. [72]
Black is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin color-based category for specific populations with a mid- to dark brown complexion. Not all people considered "black" have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the Western world, the term "black" is used to describe persons who are perceived as dark-skinned compared to other populations. It is most commonly used for people of sub-Saharan African ancestry, Indigenous Australians and Melanesians, though it has been applied in many contexts to other groups, and is no indicator of any close ancestral relationship whatsoever. Indigenous African societies do not use the term black as a racial identity outside of influences brought by Western cultures.
The Arab world, formally the Arab homeland, also known as the Arab nation, the Arabsphere, or the Arab states, comprises a vast group of countries, mainly located in Western Asia and Northern Africa. While the majority of people in the Arab world are ethnically Arab, there are also significant populations of other ethnic groups such as Berbers, Kurds, Somalis and Nubians, among other groups. Arabic is used as the lingua franca throughout the Arab world.
Arabization or Arabicization is a sociological process of cultural change in which a non-Arab society becomes Arab, meaning it either directly adopts or becomes strongly influenced by the Arabic language, culture, literature, art, music, and ethnic identity as well as other socio-cultural factors. It is a specific form of cultural assimilation that often includes a language shift. The term applies not only to cultures, but also to individuals, as they acclimate to Arab culture and become "Arabized". Arabization took place after the Muslim conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, as well as during the more recent Arab nationalist policies toward non-Arab minorities in modern Arab states, such as Algeria, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Bahrain, and Sudan.
Slavery in Sudan began in ancient times, and had a resurgence during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005). During the Trans-Saharan slave trade, many Nilotic peoples from the lower Nile Valley were purchased as slaves and brought to work elsewhere in North Africa and the Orient by Nubians, Egyptians, Berbers and Arabs.
Zanj was a name used by medieval Muslim geographers to refer to both a certain portion of Southeast Africa and to its Bantu inhabitants. This word is also the origin of the place-names Zanzibar and the Sea of Zanj.
The Middle East and North Africa is a geographic region whose countries are often referred to by the acronym MENA. It is also known as WANA, SWANA, or NAWA, which alternatively refers to the Middle East as West Asia or as Southwest Asia; this is another way to reference the geographical region, instead of using the more common political terminology.
Afro-Arabs or African Arabs are Arabs of full or partial African descent. These include primarily minority groups in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Qatar, as well as Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Jordan. The term may also refer to various arab groups in Africa.
The Arab world consists of 22 states. As of 2021, the combined population of all the Arab states was around 475 million people.
Slavery in the Ottoman Empire was a major institution and a significant part of the Ottoman Empire's economy and traditional society. The main sources of slaves were wars and politically organized enslavement expeditions in the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Southeast Europe, and Africa. It has been reported that the selling price of slaves decreased after large military operations. In Constantinople, the administrative and political center of the Ottoman Empire, about a fifth of the 16th- and 17th-century population consisted of slaves. Statistics of these centuries suggest that Istanbul's additional slave imports from the Black Sea have totaled around 2.5 million from 1453 to 1700.
The article describes the state of race relations and racism in the Middle East. Racism is widely condemned throughout the world, with 174 states parties to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination by April 8, 2011. In different countries, the forms that racism takes may be different for historic, cultural, religious, economic or demographic reasons.
Afro-Iraqis are Iraqi people of African Zanj heritage. Historically, their population has concentrated in the southern port city of Basra, as Basra was the capital of the slave trade in Iraq. Afro-Iraqis speak Arabic and mostly adhere to Islam. Some Afro-Iraqis can still speak Swahili along with Arabic.
Libya is a predominantly Arab country that has traditionally held racist views towards black-skinned, sub-Saharan Africans although it's not all of them it's still prevalent among the country. The New York Times argues that Libya has a "long history of racist violence." A population estimate from 2001 placed the number of Black Arabs in Libya at 98,000 or 1.9% of the Libyan population.
Arabs in Romania are people from Arab countries who live in Romania. The first Fellah settlers came in 1831 - 1833 from Ottoman Syria to Dobruja. They assimilated in the Turkish-Tatarian Population. Some of them came to Romania during the Ceaușescu era, when many Arab students were granted scholarships to study in Romanian universities. Most of them were Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Iraqis, Libyans, Egyptians, and Jordanians. Most of these students returned to their countries of origin, but some remained in Romania starting families here. It is estimated that almost half a million Middle Eastern Arabs studied in Romania during the 1980s. A new wave of Arab immigration started after the Romanian Revolution. Many of the newly arrived Arabs came to Romania in the 1990s in order to develop businesses. In addition, Romania has people from Arab countries who have the status of refugees or illegal immigrants, primarily from North Africa, trying to immigrate to Western Europe. In particular, the European migrant crisis lead to Syrian people coming to Romania, although many Syrians were already living in Romania at the time of the crisis.
The history of slavery in the Muslim world began with institutions inherited from pre-Islamic Arabia. The practices of keeping slaves in the Muslim world nevertheless developed in radically different ways in different Muslim states based on a range of social-political factors, as well as the more immediate economic and logistical considerations of the Arab slave trade. As a general principle, Islam encouraged the manumission of Muslim slaves as a way of expiating sins, and many early converts to Islam, such as Bilal, were former slaves. However, Islam never banned the practice, and it persisted as an important institution in the Muslim world through to the modern era.
The Trans-Saharan slave trade, also known as the Arab slave trade, was a slave trade in which slaves were transported across the Sahara. Most were moved from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa to be sold to Mediterranean and Middle Eastern civilizations; a small percentage went the other direction. Estimates of the total number of black slaves moved from sub-Saharan Africa to the Arab world range from 6-10 million, and the trans-Saharan trade routes conveyed a significant number of this total, with one estimate tallying around 7.2 million slaves crossing the Sahara from the mid-7th century until the 20th century when it was abolished. The Arabs managed and operated the trans-Saharan slave trade, although Berbers were also actively involved.
The Indian Ocean slave trade, sometimes known as the East African slave trade or Arab slave trade, was multi-directional slave trade and has changed over time. Africans were sent as slaves to the Middle East, to Indian Ocean islands, to the Indian subcontinent, and later to the Americas.
Attitudes of medieval Arabs to Black people varied over time and individual attitude, but tended to be negative. Though the Qur'an expresses no racial prejudice, ethnocentric prejudice towards black people is widely evident among medieval Arabs, for a variety of reasons: Arabs' extensive conquests and slave trade; the influence of Aristotelian ideas regarding slavery, which some Muslim philosophers directed towards Zanj; and the influence of Judeo-Christian ideas regarding divisions among humankind. On the other hand, the Afro-Arab author Al-Jahiz, himself having a Zanj grandfather, wrote a book entitled Superiority of the Blacks to the Whites, and explained why the Zanj were black in terms of environmental determinism in the "On the Zanj" chapter of The Essays.
Slavery in Egypt existed up until the early 20th century. It differed from the previous slavery in ancient Egypt, being managed in accordance with Islamic law from the conquest of the Caliphate in the 7th century until the practice stopped in the early 20th-century, having been gradually abolished in the late 19th century. Slave trade was abolished successively between 1877 and 1884. Slavery itself was not abolished, but it gradually died out after the abolition of the slave trade, since no new slaves could be legally acquired. Existing slaves were noted as late as the 1930s.
Racism in the Muslim world is a source of concern for people of color, particularly for Muslims of color. Black Muslims throughout the world report that racism is practiced against them by Arab Muslims, Asian Muslims, white Muslims, and other non-Black Muslims. In white-dominated countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, Black Muslims and other Muslims of color may experience structural discrimination that white Muslims do not experience. In predominantly Arab Muslim countries, racism against Black Muslims and Asian Muslims is often ubiquitous. The oppression of Black Muslims in the Arab Muslim world is deeply connected to the long legacy of the Trans-Saharan slave trade and the Indian Ocean slave trade.
Slavery existed in the territory of the modern state of Iraq until the 1920s. When the are later to become the modern state of Iraq was a center of the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258), the are was a major slave trade destination, and slaves were imported to Iraq from the East along the Volga trade route, from the West via the Red Sea slave trade, and from the South from the Indian Ocean slave trade.