In the context of a widely perceived decrease in knowledge of the Arabic Literary Heritage among recent generations of Arab youth, it is fascinating to examine recent transformations of Arabic Literary Heritage into screen media, specifically of the story of `Antara bn Shaddad and his poetry originally attributed to the Pre-Islamic era. This paper examines how five twentieth century films and recent Arabic television serial, amongst a wave of such transformations of material from the literary heritage into screen media, recast complex narrative and poetic material relating to `Antara ibn Shaddad and Ayyam al-Arab, with admixtures from related folk epics/siyar, to offer contemporary versions of these stories and their heroes, through curated selections of poetry attributed to personalities in these stories, and reproduce a racially fraught episode from foundational Arabic myth, with carefully crafted emotional, social and political messages for the modern audience. This paper interrogates how these productions negotiate with issues of race, slavery, tribal identity, belonging and exclusion from the Arab past they reimagine, and contribute to the discourse of race in modern and contemporary Arab societies. The screen productions under consideration include “Antar and Abla” (1945), “The Adventures of Antara and Abla” (1948), “Antar Raids the Desert” (1960), “Antara ibn Shaddad: The Black Prince” (1961), “Antar, Knight of the Desert” (1974), and the most recent 2008 television serial “Antara ibn Shaddad.” The screen versions must also be framed within the context of the social, historical, and political circumstances of their production. In the transformation and mythologization of Arabic literary material for modern audiences via recasting the cultural heritage for the screen, we must ask what curated selections, and expurgations of source material have occurred in these transformations into modern media, and what interpolations added, to what effect? In these film and television reimaginings of the life of `Antara and his contemporaries and their roles in the War of Dahish and al-Ghabraa’, what contemporary messages are inserted through the speech, poetry selections and actions of `Antara, `Urwa bn al-Ward, Shanfara, Sulayk and others, as deployed in the production for the modern audience? What do casting choices, filming locations, costumes, script writing, and make-up contribute to the negotiations and constructions of race in the various films? And what messages, both explicit and implicit are to be found in these productions with respect to racial identity, belonging, social hierarchy, human rights, and the contemporary societies which these productions address.

Huda Hamed’s novel Allati Ta‘ud al-Salalim [She Who Counts the Stairs] tells three intertwined stories, told by three different narrators, Zahiyya, a Omani artist who struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder and a deep fear of the “Other”; Faneesh, an Ethiopian domestic worker who pursues a job in the Gulf so that she may provide for her family; and Hamdan, Zahiyya’s father-in-law, who spent a large part of his life in Zanzibar and was ultimately forced to abandon his African wife when the inhabitants of Zanzibar revolted against their Omani occupiers. Zahiyya becomes obsessed with finding the “perfect” maid who would transform her house into a spotless paradise—without getting too close or crossing the line. Zahiyya’s fear of sharing her space with a black maid illustrates David Sibley’s assertion that “The anatomy of the purified environment is an expression of values associated with strong feelings of abjection, a heightened consciousness of difference and, thus, a fear of mixing or the disintegration of boundaries.” The reader learns that Zahiyya’s obsessive compulsive disorder may have been a result of her traumatic childhood. Her racism, however, cannot be extricated from broader political realities, including Zanzibar’s subjugation under Omani occupation. Unlike Zahiyya, Faneesh had enjoyed a rather peaceful, if impoverished, childhood in Addis Ababa. It is later in life, when she moves to the Gulf, that Faneesh suffers abuse at the hands of Arab employers who belittle and violate her because of her black skin. But Faneesh is not a passive victim. She keeps a journal documenting and reclaiming her story—a journal that Zahiyya decides to read and which allows her to recognize Faneesh’s humanity. Zahiyya also reads her husband Amer’s novel-in-progress, which documents his father Hamdan’s journey into and out of Zanzibar and his relationship with Amer’s African mother. Drawing on critical studies on race, gender, and space, by scholars including Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, David Sibley, and Etienne Balibar, I argue that Huda Hamed’s novel reveals anti-Blackness as it intersects with personal and systemic violence, illuminating not only the dangerous consequences of hate and racism on perpetrator and victim, but also their reversibility through “ethical encounters,” to use Sara Ahmed’s term. By vividly portraying the lived realities of characters who both internalize and resist hegemonic notions of gender, race, and citizenship, the novel offers a discursive intervention that interrogates racism and xenophobia in an intersectional approach that eschews sensationalism and Orientalism.

In certain academic circles, it is highly controversial to locate race, racism or racists in the premodern context. Since the 1960s, however, and especially in recent years, a broad range of scholars have attempted to discuss race in distant times, sometimes even in ancient Greek texts. Much of this work (though not all) has focused solely within the boundaries of what we consider to be modern Europe. Relying on the recent contributions of David Nirenberg, Travis Zadeh and many others, this intellectual history takes the earliest extant Arabic version of Zakarīyā al-Qazwīnī’s thirteenth century encyclopedia ʻAjāʼib al-Makhluqat wa-gharāʼib al-mawjūdāt (referred to as Wonders and Rarities) as one example of how we might discuss race in a context that is both premodern and non-Western while remaining sensitive to the legacy of Orientalism. More specifically, this paper is a preliminary attempt to answer the question: Can Qazwīnī’s racial project be understood through special attention to categories like wonder, the marvellous, and the monstrous? The interconnected discursive work that race and wonder do for Qazwīnī will be explored through a few foundational examples, namely the story of Ka’b ibn al-Ashraf’s “Jewish” knowledge of angelic hierarchy, the strict genealogical boundaries between the angel subdivisions and their jinn brethren, the islands of the Chinese Sea and the Mediterranean, the tales of the black-skinned Zanj, various racialized animals and magical creatures, brief information on animal husbandry, and the story the Prophet Noah’s refusal to allow Og the Giant onto the ark. It concludes with a brief discussion of the stakes of discussing race in the premodern, non-Western world.

This paper offers a reception history of the legacy of Arabic literature’s preeminent Black hero, ‘Antarah ibn Shaddad. It compares the earliest known recensions of his diwan from the 9th century and near-contemporary biographical notes with the later anthologies and descriptions produced under the influence of the myriad pseudo-‘Antarah’s composing in his epic tradition, Sirat ‘Antar, the existence of which is first attested in the 12th century. While early versions of ‘Antarah’s diwan contain 40 or fewer poems, later ones grew to incorporate portions of ‘Antarah’s epic poetry, and especially poems that were thought to best typify his persona. I argue that this growth marks a shift in ‘Antarah’s legacy from being a self-identified hajin (mixed) figure to being a Black-Arab hero. This shift parallels the waning use of hajin as a classification due to the growing emphasis in Arab-Muslim societies through the ‘Abbasid period on patrilineal descent as the sole criterion for legal ethnicity, regardless of how an individual born to a foreign mother through marriage or concubinage may be raced in daily life. ‘Antarah’s status as a Black hero is a construction that gradually took hold. Using Fanon’s black phenomenology, in which the raced self exists carries responsibility simultaneously for “[one’s] body, [one’s] race, and [one’s] ancestors,” and Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda’s concept of the “racial imaginary” as the “the narrative opportunities, the kinds of feelings and attributes and situations and subjects and plots and forms ‘available’ both to characters of different races and their authors,” this paper assesses how ‘Antarah’s poetry and his epic tradition come to grapple with the complications of racial others moving through Arab-Muslim spaces. I conclude that what we might perceive as racial anachronism accruing to ‘Antarah’s legacy is in fact emblematic of the workings of siyar sha‘biyya more broadly, which were used not simply to salvage the stories of the past, but to set scripts for the future. ‘Antarah’s identity in his sira and later poetic discourse doesn’t line up with our earliest iterations of the historical ‘Antarah’s attitudes. It does, however, align with the concerns of an expanding Muslim polity with an Arabian center that was determining its definition of Arabness, and concomitantly, formulating new racialized practices of inclusion and exclusion.

Abstract: The Treatment of the marginalized-self: Race and Social Injustice in The Poetry of ‘Antara b. Shaddād and al-Sulayk b. Sulka. Racial discourse in Arabic was in part transformed in pre-Islamic society. This paper will explore racial discourse on the basis of colour in pre-modern Arabic society, a society where tribal forms of loyalties and kinship influenced values and social norms. Black people, for example, were subject to marginalization; which was reflected in both poetry and prose. The paper will particularly discuss the concept of the “marginalized” and “the image of the other” as expressed in the poetry of the pre-Islamic poet ‘Antara b. Shaddād (d. 615 B.C.), who was the son of an Arab aristocrat and a Ethiopian black slave mother; who was proud of his colour and wanted to promote a different moral standard to judge a person based on his or her qualities or actions rather than race, or colour. There was also his contemporary, the poet al-Sulayk b. al-Sulka (d. 605 B.C.), who was also a member of the avant garde poets (al-ṣa‘ālīk) famous for their rebellious against poverty and social injustice. These poets fought against the racilization language of the time and attempted in their poetry, whether with praise, love, or positive description, to imply a contrasting discourse that counter inherited social norms and structure as well as the socially constructed negative image of the other or “the slave black.” The poetry of ‘Antara and al-Sulayk underlines and counters patterns of hierarchical representational discourse of the Arabs of the time, which was established as a Self-Other dichotomy. These two poets aimed to transform these boundaries, by removing these exclusions of colour or race. The paper will explore how “the marginalized self” of the black poet was able to creatively express its own identity and offer a creative perspective that alter the “center” or the established socially constructed poplar conventions. It will also show how the other was imagined in the works of these two poets.