Islamic societies originated modern racial stratification and racialized slavery

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.” … Ultimately, Evans argues, racial myths emerge to justify and rationalize existing power relationships. … As historical events redirected the slave trade, as European slavery entered what the leading authority [Charles Verlinden] on medieval slavery has called its ‘Negro’ period, Christians began to look at blacks in ways that had been characteristic of racially stratified Muslim countries for some seven centuries” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1786

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to Robinson’s broader argument in Black Marxism about the racial capitalism that preceded, and was independent of, capitalism itself — and to the ‘Sons of Ham’ myth as an origin of racial ideology.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how exactly did Christian European cosmology absorb the Islamic racial myths, given Evans’s account is vague on the transmission mechanism?

Related

• Islam, despite universalist ideals, made slavery largely racial (similarity 0.91)
• Europe’s first racialized view of Africans came through Islam’s armies (similarity 0.86)
• Claiming Islam invented racial prejudice serves modern Western hostility toward Muslims. (similarity 0.85)
• European racism predates African enslavement and originated as intra-European domination (similarity 0.85)
• Islam’s racialization dates to American slavery, not modern immigration debates (similarity 0.85)
• Islamic slavery conventions were not adopted into the emerging European world system (similarity 0.84)
• Capitalist imperialism’s denial of equality to colonized peoples produced Muslim racialization (similarity 0.83)
• Islamic Mediterranean civilization both retarded and then accelerated Europe’s development, seeding anti-Islamic racism. (similarity 0.83)
• For early modern Europeans Islam functioned as a civilizing intermediary toward Christianizing Africans (similarity 0.82)
• European slavery was already elaborate before Islam and rejected Muslim slave ideals as heretical (similarity 0.82)
• American Islamophobia stems from slavery and anti-Black racism, not just Orientalism. (similarity 0.82)
• Africans served prominently in Islamic armies from Islam’s earliest century (similarity 0.82)
• Racialization of Muslims is historically discontinuous and empire-contingent. (similarity 0.81)
• Islamic and Christian societies held fundamentally different concepts of slavery (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial-era differentiation of Muslims preceded and enabled present-day racialization. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Medieval theologians constructed Muslims as a degraded race descending from the slave Hagar #corroborates (0.60) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 156
• Racial hierarchy and whiteness were invented inside Europe before modern capitalism #contradicts (0.60)
• European racial hierarchy is ancient, predating modern slavery #contradicts (0.50) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1700
• Slavery formed the demographic and economic backbone of precolonial West African states #corroborates (0.40)