Claiming Islam invented racial prejudice serves modern Western hostility toward Muslims.

Evidence

How a racially stratified “pigmentocracy” (Evans’s terms) manages to avoid the formation of a color bar is not clarified by Evans. In short, Evans’s thesis is analytically flawed, not supported by his own “evidence,” and suspiciously convenient at this moment of renewed Western hostility toward Islamic peoples. Moreover, he never seems to get around to explaining why or how the ideologues of a society so ideologically hostile to Islamic beliefs and with a quite ancient and sophisticated racial consciousness of its own would bother or need bother to borrow such an ambivalently held social ideology. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1788

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Robinson inverts the causal frame: rather than Islam borrowing racial ideology from the West, he argues that the Western idea that Islam originated racial slavery is itself a contemporary political weapon. The ‘why would a hostile society borrow an ambivalently held ideology’ jab is a tight methodological point worth sitting with.
• XREF: Mirrors Edward Said’s Orientalism, which Robinson cites — the argument that Western scholarship on Islam is an instrument of power. Also parallels Robinson’s broader thesis that European racism was constructed to justify its own slave trade.