The monograph draws attention to the recent conditions of Black Arabs socially, economically, and politically through the lenses of Arabic novels and inspects the ways in which social and physiological blackness are employed and portrayed in Arabic novels with Black protagonists. This monograph illustrates through the Arabic novels how culture has made distinctions among Arab people based on their race. However, the black Arabs’ issue is still marginalized by a collective cultural consciousness and social stratification. In short, it opens the door wide for a large segment of black Arabs who exist in different Arabic cultures that deal with them in different levels of lack of social and human rights. This phenomenon clearly appears in contemporary Arab literature, specifically Arabic novels which were written by bold writers who utilize the fictional techniques such as characters, protagonists, plots, dialogue, monologue, etc., to explore their condemnations the humiliation of black Arabs and their racial social segregation. This monograph argues that Arabic narration highlights the social and political segregation of black Arabs by: 1) Employing fictional techniques to intensify the light on the psychological impact of this social marginalization practice on Black Arabs and to reflect their frustrations and disappointments; 2) Reflecting the justifications of the Arab social classes’ racial practice towards black Arabs; 3) Exposing the social stratification that has placed black Arabs in social segregation and deprived them of their normal social role; 4) Exploring the Arab novelist’s perspective towards the black Arabs and their stereotype among the Arab society. The study sources are the selected novels that reflect the new paradigm of the racial system that relies on black skin and discovers the interconnection between the racial ideology and the Arab society especially; first, it inspects the racialization of the social structure of Arab countries, particularly through the different Arab cultures.; second, it explores the factors causing the marginalization of Black Arabs, and their social segregation. The monograph utilizes Arabic novels which were published after 2000 to highlight black Arabs’ sufferings by analyzing the connection between the narration and racial ideology to demonstrate the racialization. More specifically, the research uses direct quotes from these Arabic novels to depict the bold literary movement that has taken place in different Arab countries such as Yemen, Sudan, Egypt, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia to liberate the Black Arabs from social segregation and stereotypes.

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the ensuing US War on Terror, and emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been an increased critical awareness regarding the presence and participation of Black Americans, particularly Muslims, in the formation of the US, beginning with 15th-century encounters between Europe and the Americas. However, this work, first begun by Allan Austin’s sourcebook African Muslims in Antebellum America (1984), remains incomplete due to inconsistent and incomplete translations of some of the primary source material. Moreover, personal narratives written by Muslim and Arabic-speaking Africans enslaved in the US and the Caribbean remain largely excluded from the critical tradition of African American and diasporic slave narratives. This paper will examine the lives and writings of enslaved African Muslims such as Omar ibn Said and Abd al-Rahman Sori to illustrate how they complicate hierarchies of enslavement and how this history still affects contemporary racial relations. Using a historical approach grounded in the early modern context of Mediterranean slavery, I argue that enslaved African Muslims and their writings illustrate how Islam became racialized in the broader shift from religious to racial slavery in the West. By the mid-19th century, these “exceptional” African Muslims were re-categorized as “Moors” or “Arabs” to de-Africanize them–a method of domination and form of racism rooted in culture and religion, rather than race and biology. In turn, African Muslims were placed above enslaved Africans of different religions and language groups in the social and racial hierarchy, further distancing African Muslim slaves from the canonical enslaved figure. The exoticist and inadvertent elevation of African Muslims due to their linguistic and religious identities led to their forced participation in public spectacles, where they maintained a continuous performance of piety for their visitors and the public at large. I argue that these performances of piety complicate and reflect discourses of dissimulation (taqiyya) under which many African Muslims publicly appeared as assimilated Christians to avoid persecution or in some cases, to obtain funds by Christian groups to return to Africa under the guise of becoming missionaries themselves. As the 9/11 generation enters college in the midst of Black Lives Matter protests and commemoration of the tricentennial of Africans in North America, my research both reveals the formative role of enslaved, Arabic-speaking Muslims in US history and culture, and aims to broaden the genre of the slave narrative to include their works.

This work examines the extent to which leadership in U.S. Islamic institutions is impacted by anti-Blackness. Findings are based on a study conducted between 2016 and 2018 in one city in the southwestern portion of the U.S. with 15 attendees and leaders of two mosques and a private Islamic school as the participants. Findings indicate that one of the ways in which anti-Blackness manifests is through a lack of access to leadership roles or limitations placed on leadership for Black leaders. Furthermore, “policing” of Black children is common and Black leaders tend to be relegated to the role of disciplinarian. In general, findings indicate that Black Muslims are robbed of the “safe space” that Islamic institutions provide many non-Black attendees as there is no “safety” from anti-Blackness.

What place does hybridized, diasporic identity have in discussions of Arab-ness? This paper uses the concepts of Homi Bhabha’s “hybridity,” Hamid Naficy’s “accented identities,” and Jose Estaban Muñoz “disidentifications” to reflect on a conversation in the documentary film Revolution From Afar, in which Sudanese-American artists gather in the United States to heal and to perform poetry and music in support of on-going popular protests in Sudan, from which they have been cut off. While Sudan is home to many ethnicities and languages, and carving out a monolithic national identity might seem like a futile task, the thirty-year rule of Omar al-Bashir's National Congress Party did exactly this, labeling Sudan’s citizens "Arab-Islamic" and routinely positioning the country as an integral member of the "Arab" world. This is in contrast to instances in which the very etymology of as-suudaan (“land of the black people”) is weaponized to exclude Sudanese people--and people from other modern nation-states, such as Chad, historically part of bilaad as-suudaan--from being “Arab” on account of "blackness" and "Africanness." The participants in Revolution From Afar debate their ownership of the word “Arab,” as well as the hybrid “Afro-Arab,” through the lenses of language, ethnicity, and political utility. They reflect not only on their self-identification but also on how “the Other” may view them, whether or not they're accepted, and why it matters. Meanwhile, they grapple with their own sense of belonging to, and role in, Sudan’s future from afar, while balancing the dual identity of being “American” and “Sudanese” at the same time. Can the same sense of dual identity be extended to “Arab” and “African”? To enrich discussion, this presentation includes screening a scene from the film.