Medieval Islamic geographies like those of al-Idrisī have been made famous by a splendid heritage of illuminated manuscripts and serious scholarly attention. Less illustrious is the unillustrated and largely untranslated legacy of Ibn Sa‘īd al-Maghribī (d.1286), contemporary of al-Qazwīnī (d.1283), the writer of Wonders and Rarities. Ibn Sa‘īd’s Geography, like his histories and anthologies, once attracted only students of al-Andalus, where his family, the Banū Sa‘īd of Alcalá la Real, claimed a long lineage. Yet the similarities between someone like al-Qazwīnī, who carved out a career in the wake of the Mongol conquest of Baghdad, and someone like Ibn Sa‘īd al-Maghribī, who fled a chaotic peninsula for a relatively welcoming “East,” are testaments to the highly-developed sophistication of Islamic cosmopolitanism in the seventh/thirteenth century. This culture of learning withstood political upheaval and provided points of connection where more explicitly political forms of power could not. Yet not all were “included” in this “cosmopolitanism,” as the authors of these texts (the creators of/participants in that discourse) readily acknowledged. Like his interlocutors, Ibn Sa‘īd ascribed inferiority to both the “black” people living in Southern places of extreme sunlight and the “white” or “blonde” people living in Northern places of little sunlight. While climatology’s astonishing persistence from Antiquity to Early Modernity is well-known, the concept’s centrality for medieval Muslims, the way in which they renegotiated the idea for their own reasons, remains grossly underappreciated. Drawing on his descriptions of Ghana, Eastern Africa, Britain and the white Amazons, I argue that throughout his Geography, Ibn Sa‘īd al-Maghribī ascribed moral corruption, stupidity and plain physical weirdness to white people (sometimes Ifrānj/Franks, or Ṣaqāliba/Slavs) and black people (sometimes called the Zanj, or those of Bilād al-Sūdān). While these “color lines” are familiar, the racial thrust of Ibn Sa‘īd al-Maghribī’s project lies not with his personal distaste for these phenotypes, or even the unrealistic and unpleasant creatures he imagined to inhabit what is today Ghana or Germany. Rather, it is the system of climatological division, and the hefty explanatory power ascribed to environmental factors like sunlight, heat, and even plant life, that participated in the essential, hierarchical and collective theory of human reproduction I am calling race.