Europe’s first racialized view of Africans came through Islam’s armies

Evidence

It was not as the descendants of legendary Hebrews or as the vessels of ancient knowledge that Muslims came to be most frequently represented among European peoples. Islam, a faith that embraced a multiracial civilization incorporating peoples from Arabia, Africa, the Near East, the East, and southern Europe, would be known by its armies. And Africans were prominent in its armies from the very beginning. Africans had fought in the pre-Islamic Arabian wars, and within the first century of the Islamic era (the Christian seventh century), their presence had already been noted in the empires of Europe. Four hundred years later, when Christendom launched a furious counterassault against the enemy whose very being mocked the beliefs of Europe and materially diminished its daily life, Islam, and “blackamoors,” was a familiar identity. The Christian encounter with Islam would have then both racial and economic resonances. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 462

Categorization

• XREF: Sets up the racial dimension of Europe’s encounter with Islam that presumably feeds into later chapters on how racialism structured the Atlantic slave system and capitalist order. — connects to: Europeans saw enslaved African Muslims as semicivilized aids for Christianizing other Africans; For early modern Europeans Islam functioned as a civilizing intermediary toward Christianizing Africans — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 130; Even early European colonizers ranked Muslim Africans above pagan ones — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 130