At the time that Ibn al-Jawzi wrote his 12th-century treatise, “Illuminating the Darkness: Virtues of the Sudanese and Ethiopians” (Tanwir al-Ghabash fi Fadl al-Sudan wa-l-Habash), two explanations were prevalent for the etiology of black skin in humans. The first characterized blackness as a divine punishment inflicted upon descendants of Noah’s son, Ham. The second interpreted blackness scientifically, as a natural product of the extreme environment inhabited by Sub-Saharan Africans. This racial-naturalist argument—which construes humankind as subdivided into immutable, biologized kinds influenced by history and environment—was used by authors simultaneously to falsify the Curse of Ham and to substantiate racialized links between biology and behavior, as people blackened by the sun were also said to be scorched into states of irrationality, hypersexuality, and so on. At times, naturalism was taken to other specious extremes, with the 10th-century geographer al-Idrisi alleging that in the intensely hot climes of the Swahili coast and nearby islands, even plants and animals were uniformly black. By contrast, in his section on the virtues of blackness in nature, Ibn al-Jawzi points out the healing powers of such commonplace things as nigella seeds, psyllium, and ebony. He thus takes an expansive view of blackness as naturally occurring across climes and highlights its healthfulness and physiological utility for all bodies. This paper interrogates how racial naturalist discourses are posited, cited, and refashioned across a variety of genres of Arabic literature. I compare Ibn al-Jawzi’s pharmacological discussion with a range of other munazarat (responsa) composed in the early Islamic period that aimed at articulating blackness’ value vis-à-vis the Muslim community’s Arab social core. I argue that Ibn al-Jawzi deviates from the techniques of racial-naturalist discourse found in these sources while still adhering to the science of the times. By focusing on the medical applications rather than the pure aesthetics of black objects—and thus on these objects’ subtle or invisible but nonetheless significant effects on various bodies—Ibn al-Jawzi sketches a phenomenology of blackness and its effects.

In my paper, I argue that al-Jahiz’s (d. 868/869) classification of muwallad poets should be understood as an extension of his meditations on animal breeding and taxonomy. Over the past century, the consensus on how to interpret the Arabic term “muwallad” in texts about poetry and language has shifted. Scholars have moved away from using terms that emphasized enslavement or race to terms that prioritize the status of muwallad poets as “new” or “modern.” This revision has been justified be gesturing toward how the word was used by various critics and compilers hundreds of years after al-Jahiz. I contend that this shift has muddled different usages from discrete moments in history. I argue that in al-Jahiz’s corpus, we should explain muwallad by highlighting the recurring themes with which al-Jahiz surrounds the term: mixture, corruption, and impurity. With this in mind, I will explore these themes in Kitab al-Hayawan, Kitab al-Bayan, and a number of al-Jahiz’s epistles. By focusing on how “muwallad” is used in al-Jahiz’s corpus, we can see how Mu‘tazili natural philosophy could be wedded to empirical observations of animal breeding practices. These ideas about animals and breeding were brought to bear upon conceptions of human difference, and because these disparate ‘races’ were understood to possess differing natures—and language was an expression of the speaker’s nature—poetry became a site of race-making.

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.