Theology racialized Muslims as degenerate descendants of the slave Hagar

Evidence

The identification of the Hagarenes, described as a lowly, racially degenerate race, with the Muslims is another way in which the appearance of Islam was explained. John of Damascus, who wrote about the Hagarenes, claimed the black stone of the ka’aba was worn smooth because “Abraham has sexual intercourse with Hagar on it.” This race was constructed along theological lines, and much like the Saracens, the Hagarenes were a community that was alienated from God. The earliest reference to this group is found in Nicetas of Byzantium’s ninth-century text, A Refutation of the False Book Written by Muhammad, in which he describes Muslims as the descendants of the slave girl Hagar. Hagar is depicted as a black-skinned slave who begat a dark, strange race that was excommunicated from the Christian—and by extension, the human—community. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 156

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hagarene is the key analytical figure here — supplies the reader’s category of how a ‘theologically constructed race’ explains Islam’s appearance through biblical lineage.
• XREF: The black-skinned slave Hagar begatting a ‘dark, strange race’ fused biblical race-thinking with antiblackness and anti-Muslim sentiment into one genealogy — connects to the reader’s question of what the monster lets its makers avoid seeing: here, the kinship between Christian and Muslim (both Abrahamic) is denied by racializing one side. — connects to: Islam’s racialization dates to American slavery, not modern immigration debates — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 148
• SEED: Essay angle: the black stone smear as a single absurd detail (Abraham sex on the ka’aba stone) that reveals the whole racial-theological manufacturing process — how a wrong physical explanation carries a hidden genealogical claim of impurity.