The legendary Basran ascetic Ibn Sirin (d. 110/728) supposedly once referred to someone as "that black man" (dhak al-rajul al-aswad). But he immediately regretted this, and asked for God's forgiveness. The anecdote is recounted in the Zuhd compilations of the 3rd/9th century, in the context of discussions on the proper etiquettes of speech (adab al-lisan). Of the various sins of the tongue, the pious renunciants were deeply concerned in particular with ghiba or backbiting, which was defined not as malicious and untrue gossip but as derogatory comments about others behind their backs. Ibn Sirin thus repented because, he said, "I fear that I have backbitten him." This tradition reflects a debate in medieval Islamic pious ethics on the limits of ghiba. Observations on physical appearance remains the central theme of hadith reports related to ghiba, the classic example being an alleged incident in which the Prophet's wife Aisha commented about another woman's shortness. While the scope of ghiba was far wider, the sources yield insights into the cultural history of gossip and verbal abuse as a marker of difference, as well as the kinds of bodies and identities that became the basis for social differentiation in the medieval Middle East. Moreover, since these discussions typically dealt with skin color alongside other categories of difference, including facial features and various physical disabilities, they help situate medieval Muslim views about race in a broader discursive context. This included some apparent concerns with the common practice of identifying individuals by distinguishing features, a fact which led to the nisba al-Aswad/al-Sawda' in the names of many "Black" figures. In this regard, later classical works such as al-Ghazali's systematic exposition on ghiba in the Ihya' attempted to manage the tensions outlined by early pietists, but which would arguably remain unresolved (as Kristina Richardson's 2012 monograph has shown). In this paper, I examine the treatment of racial difference across the genre of early Islamic pious ethics, from the kutub al-zuhd attributed to Waki b. al-Jarrah and Hannad b. al-Sari, to Ibn Abi l-Dunya's Book of Silence. Whereas the Zuhd tradition retains a strong continuity with late antique Christian monastic literature (especially the Apophthegmata Patrum), their respective approaches to gossip and matters of race/ethnicity reveal notable contrasts. I argue that the attitudes and anxieties of early Muslim pietists thus throw into relief the urban social realities of the Umayyad and early Abbasid empires.