Islam, despite universalist ideals, made slavery largely racial

Evidence

J. O. Hunwick, op. cit., p. 22. William McKee Evans has made the unique claim that: “In view of the broad-minded ethnic and social attitudes of the Prophet as well as the noblest of his followers, it is ironic that the lands of Islam became the cradle of modern racial stratification and of many of the ideas that are still used to justify special privileges defined by skin color and other racial characteristics. Muslims aspired to a universal brotherhood of believers. But prominent among their actual achievements was the forging of new links between blackness and debasement. It was under the Muslims that slavery became largely a racial institution.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1786

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s knowledge of pre-Islamic Arabian slavery and to Robinson’s broader thesis that racial capitalism predates European racism — an earlier thread in this book.
• QUESTION: Evans’s argument that Islamic law banning freeborn Muslim enslavement redirected the trade toward Africans is worth verifying against the scholarship on early Islamic slavery.