Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry by Bernard Lewis

early
Islamic period, including, for example, a tribal chief called Khufaf ibn Nadba, a
contemporary of the Prophet. The son of an Arab father and a black slave
mother, Khufaf was a man of position and a chief in his tribe. A verse ascribed
to him remarks that his tribe had made him chief "despite this dark pedigree.-9
    These stories and verses almost certainly belong to a later period and
reflect a situation which did not yet exist at that time. This is indicated by the
very fact that such men as `Antara, Khufaf, and others could rise to the social
eminence they attained, something which would have been very difficult a
century later. In pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia, there would have been
no reason whatever for Arabs to regard Ethiopians as inferior or to regard
Ethiopian ancestry as a mark of base origin. On the contrary, there is a good
deal of evidence that Ethiopians were regarded with respect as a people on a
level of civilization substantially higher than that of the Arabs themselves. A
slave as such was of course inferior-but the black slave was no worse than the
white. In this respect pagan and early Islamic Arabia seems to have shared the
general attitude of the ancient world, which attached no stigma to blackness
and imposed no restrictions on black freemen."'
    There were many contacts between Arabs and Ethiopians, both in Arabia
and in Africa, and during the career of the Prophet several of his Meccan
Companions were able, for a while, to find refuge in Ethiopia from the
persecution of their pagan compatriots. Many prominent figures of the earliest Islamic period had Ethiopian women among their ancestresses, including
no less a person than the Caliph `Umar himself, whose father, al-Khattab, had
an Ethiopian mother. Another was `Amr ibn al-`As, the conqueror of Egypt
and one of the architects of the Arab Empire. There were several others of
Ethiopian descent among the Companions of the Prophet." One of the most
famous was Bilal ibn Rabah. Born a slave in Mecca, he was an early and
devoted convert to Islam and was acquired and manumitted by Abu Bakr, the
Prophet's father-in-law and eventual successor as first caliph. He is remembered chiefly as the first muezzin, when the call to prayer was instituted
shortly after the Prophet's arrival in Medina. He was also the personal attendant of the Prophet and is variously described in the sources as his mace
bearer, his steward, his adjutant, and his valet.'' Another Companion was
Abu Bakra, literally, "the Father of the Pulley," an Ethiopian slave in Ta'if.
He acquired this nickname by letting himself down with a pulley during the
Muslim siege of Ta'if, and joining the Muslims. He was accepted and manumitted by the Prophet and later settled in Basra, where he died in about 672 A.D.

    During the period immediately following the death of the Prophet in 632
A.D., the great Islamic conquests took the new faith to vast areas of Asia and
also of Africa. A new situation was created, and many changes can be observed in the literature of the time.
    The first of these is the narrowing, specializing, and fixing of color terms
applied to human beings. In time almost all disappear apart from "black,"
"red," and "white"; and these become ethnic and absolute instead of personal
and relative. "Black," overwhelmingly, means the natives of Africa south of
the Sahara and their offspring. "White"-or occasionally (light) "red"means the Arabs, Persians, Greeks, Turks, Slavs, and other peoples to the
north and to the east of the black lands. Sometimes, in contrast to the white
Arabs and Persians, the northern peoples are designated by terms connoting
dead white, pale blue, and various shades of red or ruddy. In some contexts
the term "black" is extended to include the Indians and even the Copts; but
this is not normal usage."
    Together with this specialization and fixing of color terms comes a very
clear connotation of inferiority attached to