Race and Ethnicity, Part 2

Not everyone believed that race and ethnicity were purely a result of being descended from the sons of Noah. Some felt the natural world/environment played a part.An Afro-Arab Islamic philosopher named Al-Jahiz (c.776 - 869) took on the issue of different skin colors in the 9th century. Living during the Abbasid Caliphate, he produced at least 140 books and essays, of which we still have 75 available. In one work, he wrote about the Zanj, a word used by Muslims to refer to the southeast coast of Africa and its inhabitants:The Zanj say that God did not make them black to disfigure them; rather it is their environment that made them so. The best evidence of this is that there are black tribes among the Arabs, such as the Banu Sulaim bin Mansur, and that all the peoples settled in the Harra, besides the Banu Sulaim are black.This sounds simplistic, but he continues:These tribes take slaves from among the Ashban to mind their flocks and for irrigation work, manual labor, and domestic…