Evans’s racial-polarity thesis about medieval Islam is analytically self-contradictory

Evidence

Despite the general polarization of Muslim society into low-status blacks and high-status whites, no clearly defined color bar emerged” (Evans, op. cit., p. 31). It should also be noted that earlier Evans had written: “In certain contexts, especially when comparing themselves to more northerly peoples, Arabs of this period thought of themselves as ‘black’” (p. 24 n. 23). Still, he insists that the terms “Mamluk” and “Abd” came to distinguish respectively European from other slaves while David Ayalon remarks on the variable use of the term “Mamluk” in his “Studies on the Structure of the Mamluk Army,” pt. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1788

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to the reader’s interest in origins of racial consciousness within the Black radical tradition’s intellectual genealogy.