Culture substituted for phenotype in racializing sixteenth-century Muslims

Evidence

Where physiognomy did not prove su≈cient as a distinguishing factor, culture became a stand-in for racial di√erence. Muslims groups began to be defined via racial mixture and notions of blackness. It is here that the racial antecedents of the Semitic–Hamitic hypothesis are evident. Under this hypothesis, ”Semites” as an ethnological category comprise Arabs and Jews, while ”Hamites” (named for the biblical Ham) were those of the African-descended Negroids. These categories of identity were associated with a notion of Muslimness and of racial classifications based on ethnological di√erence. Further, fear of mixing bloodlines provided a pretext for classifying people according to the notion of ”blackness” or ”darkness,” although it still did not provide a viable definition for groups that could blend easily into Spanish society. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 179

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the Semitic–Hamitic hypothesis and how it attached Muslimness to racial classification.
• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on how cultural markers get racialized when phenotype fails, e.g. later colonial racial science. — connects to: Colonial-era science transformed Muslims into a fixed racialized type — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 180