Informative Response 300 words

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CHAPTER 1

Antiquity

Scholars of American history have long understood that discussions of the African American experience must begin with a consideration of people and cultures and developments in Africa itself, before the rise of American slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, to debilitate the notion that black folk, prior to their experiences in the Americas, had no history worthy of the name.

Long before the rise of professional historians, black men and women had reached a similar conclusion. Facing the withering ef- fects of slavery, black thinkers as early as David Walker and Frederick Douglass were careful to mention the glories of the African past. When circumstances all around suggested otherwise, they found evidence of the potential and ability of black people in the achievements of antiq- uity. Rather than conforming to divine decree or reflecting the natural order of things, the enslavement of black people, when placed in the context of thousands of years of history in Africa itself, was but an aber- ration. In this view, there was nothing inevitable about black suffering and subjugation.

These early thinkers, uninformed about the greatness of West and West Central African civilizations, invariably cited those of ancient Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia as exemplars of black accomplishment and creativity. In so doing, they anticipated the subsequent writings of scholars like W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, and St. Clair Drake, who likewise embraced the idea that ancient Egyptian and Nu- bian societies were related to those toiling in American sugar cane and cotton fields. This view was not limited to black thinkers in the

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Americas; the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop argued for links between Egypt, Ethiopia, and West Africa. The latest to make such claims have been the “Afrocentrists,” but whatever the particular school of thought, certain of their ideas resonate with communities in both West Africa and the African Diaspora, where the notion of a connectedness to either Egypt and Nubia or Ethiopia resides in the cul- tural expressions of the folk. Whether one accepts their views or finds them extravagant, there is no avoiding the realization that Africans and their descendants have pursued a long and uninterrupted conversation about their relationship to the ancients. Such intergenerational discus- sion has not been idle chitchat but rather has significantly influenced the unfolding of African American art, music, religion, politics, and societies.

A brief consideration of ancient Africa, especially Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia, remains important for at least two reasons: First, it con- textualizes the discussion of subsequent developments largely inaugu- rated with massive trades in African captives. Antiquity reminds us that modernity could not have been predicted, that Africans were not always under the heel but were in fact at the forefront of human civiliza- tion. Second, antiquity reminds us that the African Diaspora did not begin with the slave trades. Rather, the dissemination of African ideas and persons actually began long ago. In this first diasporic phase, ideas were arguably more significant than the number of people dispersed. The Mediterranean in particular benefited from Egyptian and Nubian culture and learning. This initial phase was further distinguished by the political standing of the Africans in question; Egypt was a world power that imposed its will on others, rather than the reverse. This was therefore a different kind of African Diaspora than what followed many centuries later.

Egypt

The study of ancient Egypt is a discipline unto itself, involving majestic monuments, mesmerizing religions, magnificent arts, epic wars, and the like, all of which lie beyond our purpose here. Rather, our deliber- ations are confined to Egypt’s relations with its neighbors, especially to the south, as it is in such relations that the concept of an ancient African Diaspora can be demonstrated.

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ANTIQUITY 9

TARTESSOS

NUMIDIA

500 km

N

0

AFRICA

Carthage

Rome

Chalcedon Nicomedia Nicaea

Antioch

Sidon Tyre

JerusalemAlexandria

Fayum

ConstantinopleBYZANTIUM

ASSYRIA

Alwa

Meroe Soba

Kerma

Nobatia

Thebes (Luxor)

NUBIAFaras

Old Dongola

Adulls

Aksum

Approximate Southern limit of desert

Philae (Aswan)

Memphis

UPPER EGYPT

LOWER EGYPT

Sennar

CYRENAICA

GREECE

MAURETANIA

MAP 1. North Africa in antiquity.

Ancient Egypt, located along the Nile and divided into Upper and Lower regions, exchanged goods and ideas with Sumer (in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers) as early as 3500 BCE, and by 1700 BCE it was connected with urban-based civi- lizations in the Indus valley, the Iranian plateau, and China. Situated in Africa, Egypt was also a global crossroad for various populations and cultures, its participation in this intercontinental zone a major feature of the African Diaspora’s opening chapter.

Just who were these ancient Egyptians? While none can reasonably quibble with identifying them as northeastern Africans, the discus- sion becomes more complex when the subject turns to “race.” Race, as it is used currently, lacks scientific value or meaning; it is as a so- ciopolitical concept that race takes on decided import and gravity. Our understanding of ancient Egypt is complicated by our own conversa- tions about race, and by attempts to relate modern ideas to ancient times. A contemporary preoccupation, race was of scant significance in ancient Egypt, if the concept even existed. For example, while some paintings depict the Egyptians as dark skinned, it is more common to see males painted a dark reddish-brown and females a lighter brown or yellow. Such varying representations were not meant to simply convey

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10 REVERSING SAIL

physical traits, but social standing as well; a woman portrayed as light brown suggests privilege and exemption from the need to work out- doors, her actual skin tone a matter of conjecture.

Ancient Egyptians were highly ethnocentric, regarding themselves as “the people” and everyone else as uncivilized, a distinction having more to do with land of birth and culture than outward appearance. Foreigners included Bedouins from Arabia, “Asiatics” from Asia Mi- nor, Libyans from the west, and the Nehesi from the area south of Egypt, called Nehesyu or Khent (“borderland”) by the Egyptians, oth- erwise known as Nubia or Kush. But given Egypt’s long history, its gene pool periodically received infusions from Asia Minor, southern Europe, the Arabian peninsula, and, of course, subsaharan Africa. What Egyptians may have looked like in the third millennium BCE is not necessarily how they appeared 1,000 years later, let alone after 4,000 years. Swift and dramatic changes in the North American gene pool between 1500 CE and 2002 caution that sustained and substan- tial immigration can produce startling transformations.

Egypt and the South

During the Old and Middle Kingdoms (3400–2180 and 2080–1640 BCE), Egypt sought to militarily control Nubia and parts of Syria and Palestine. Under the New Kingdom (1570–1090 BCE), Egypt repeat- edly invaded Palestine and Syria in its competition with Assyria and (subsequently) Babylon for control of the region. Africa was therefore a major foreign power in what would become the Middle East for thou- sands of years, years that were formative, in lands destined to become sacred for millions of people.

While especially interested in Nubia’s gold, Egypt also recruited the Nubians themselves for the Egyptian army, as their military prowess, especially in archery, was highly regarded (Egyptians referred to Nubia as Ta-Seti, or the “land of the bow”). Nubians were also sought as laborers, and some were even enslaved. However, with the possible exception of the Hebrews, Egypt’s enslaved population was never very large, with slaves from Europe and Asia Minor often more numerous than Nubians or other Africans.

While extending its control over Nubian territory and tapping Nu- bian labor, Egypt also relocated select Nubians to its capital at Thebes, where an institution called the Kap provided a formal, rare Egyptian

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ANTIQUITY 11

education. Nubians learned the ways of Egypt, but their presence as elites, workers, and soldiers also led to the spread of Nubian culture in Egypt. This phenomenon was similar to later developments in the Americas, where the convergence of African, European, Asian, and Native American elements led to a flourishing of African-inspired cul- tures, among others.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the New Kingdom’s eigh- teenth dynasty’s involvement with Nubia was the determinant role Nubian women played in the royal court. Indeed, Nubian women be- came Egyptian royals, wielding tremendous power as queen mothers and royal wives. As wives, they ruled at times with their husbands, at times as regents, and in some instances alone. Ahmose I inaugurated the eighteenth dynasty and ruled with Nefertari, a Nubian who enjoyed tremendous prestige and popularity with native Egyptians. Their great- granddaughter Hatshepsut ruled as both queen and regent from 1503 to 1482 BCE. Ties to Nubia were later strengthened when Amenhotep III married thirteen-year-old Tiye, another Nubian. Their seven chil- dren included sons Amenhotep IV and Tutankhamen. Renowned and emulated for her beauty, Tiye was also well educated and quite the political force; funerary sculptures depict her as an equal to Amen- hotep III. She may have been responsible for affairs of state under Amenhotep IV, who changed his name to Akhenaton (from aton, solar symbol of supreme deity) as part of his promotion of monotheism. As Akhenaton’s wife, Nefertiti, was yet another Nubian, we can see that it is not possible to discuss the New Kingdom without acknowledging the Nubian presence and contribution.

Nubian Ascendancy

Nubia, also located along the Nile, was called Qevs by its inhabitants. None of its various names – Nubia, Qevs, Cush, Kush, Ta-Seti, Ne- hesyu, Khent – refer to skin color; one can surmise that whatever dif- ferences existed between Egyptians and Nubians, skin color was not one that elicited elaboration.

Nubia was likewise divided into Lower and Upper regions: The former was associated with bows, shields, and other manufactures as well as raw materials; the latter with gold, semiprecious stones, leopard skins, and cattle. A Nubian state may have existed prior to Egypt’s Old Kingdom, and at least one was its contemporary. The three major

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12 REVERSING SAIL

Nubian kingdoms came later and are named after their capitals: Kerma (1750–1550 BCE), Napata (750–300 BCE), and Meroë (300 BCE– 350 CE).

Scholars point to the distinctiveness of Nubian history and culture, that Nubia was not simply an outpost of Egyptian civilization or an imitation of Egypt on a smaller scale. The history of Napata, however, features Egyptian and Nubian convergence. Under Napata’s leader- ship, the Nubians not only freed themselves of Egyptian domination but also turned and conquered Egypt. Establishing the twenty-fifth dynasty, the Nubians ruled as Egyptian pharaohs, their acceptance by the Egyptians a reflection of the long familiarity of the Egyptian with the Nubian.

The twenty-fifth dynasty was a time of contestation between Egypt and Assyria for control of Palestine. Assyria invaded Egypt in 674 BCE but was defeated. Three years later they were successful, driving the Nubians south where they eventually reestablished their capital at Meroë. Removed from the interminable conflicts in the Near East, neither the Ptolemies nor Rome mounted any serious effort to con- quer Meroë, opting instead to maintain trade relations. Commerce and defensible terrain allowed Meroë to flourish and export such com- modities as gold, cotton, precious stones, ostrich feathers, ivory, and elephants (the latter for war and amusement), while producing large quantities of iron.

Meroë was a unique civilization, with large stone monuments of stelae and its own system of writing, Meroı̈tic. Nubian women played major roles in government (Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty may reflect this custom); queen mothers were especially powerful, and, together with royal wives, were called Candaces (from Kentakes). The renown of the Candaces in the ancient Near East was such that they reappear in accounts connected with the Bible; they were a source of dramatic and powerful images reverberating to the present day.

Africans in the Graeco-Roman World

The ancient Mediterranean world, successively dominated by the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Romans, came to know Africans from a number of places and in varying capacities. Most Africans, especially during the Roman period, entered the Mediterranean from both Egypt and Nubia. They also came from areas south of the Nile, North Africa

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ANTIQUITY 13

(from what is now Libya west to Morocco), the southern fringes of the Sahara Desert, and West Africa proper.

In sharp contrast to the impressions that Egyptians and Nubians had of each other for millennia, southern Europeans were completely struck by the African’s color; the darker the color, the stronger the impression. Although stunned, southern Europeans generally did not ascribe any intrinsic value or worth to skin color, and, unlike con- temporary notions of race and racism, did not equate blackness with inferiority. Modern day racism apparently did not exist in the ancient Mediterranean world. In fact, there is evidence that just the opposite was true, that Africans were viewed favorably.

The Greeks were so taken with the pigmentation of Africans that they invented the term Ethiopian (from Aethiops). The term means “burnt-faced person” and reflects the European belief that the skin color and hair of the African were caused by the sun. “To wash an Ethiopian white” was a common expression in the Graeco-Roman world, indicating enough familiarity with blackness to use it in con- veying the futility of attempting to change the unalterable. The term Ethiopian was at times also applied by the Greeks to Arabs, Indians, and others of dark hue, and it is often used inaccurately to refer to Nubians. It should be borne in mind that the ancient state of Ethiopia did not begin until the first century CE.

The combined vocabulary of the Greeks and Romans could include terms of distinction. Color variation was one scheme by which groups (rather than individuals) were categorized, located as they were along a continuum from dark (fusci) to very dark (nigerrimi). Ptolemy, for example, described the population around Meroë as “deeply black” and “pure Ethiopians,” as opposed to those living in the border region between Egypt and Nubia, who, according to Flavius Philostratus, were not as black as the Nubians but darker than the Egyptians. While these classifications are nonscientific and subjective, they demonstrate that blackness varied in the ancient world, much as it does today.

In addition to pigmentation, diet also formed the basis of categoriza- tion, so that the work of second-century BCE geographer and historian Agatharchides, as recorded in On the Erythrean Sea and surviving in part in the writings of Diodorus (born 100 BCE) and Photius, speaks of the Struthophagi or ostrich eaters; the Spermatophagi, consumers of nuts and tree fruit; the Ichthyophagi or fish eaters; and the Pamphagi, who ate everything. Of course, some groups were purely fanciful, as is evident by Pliny the Elder’s (born 23 CE) list that includes the

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14 REVERSING SAIL

Trogodytae (voiceless save for squeaking noises); the Blemmyae (head- less, with eyes and mouths in their chests); the Himantopodes, who crawled instead of walked; and the three- and four-eyed Nisicathae and Nisitae.

Greek and Roman attempts to account for unknown parts of Africa represent an acknowledgment of the limitations of the former’s knowl- edge. But what the Greeks and Romans did know of Africa, they tended to admire. Their attitudes toward Africans can be deduced from their accounts of actual encounters, as well as from their literature (such as poetry and drama). Artwork is also a source of information. These views come together in yet another Graeco-Roman division of the African population, this time along lines of civilizational achievement; African societies deemed high in attainment were greatly acclaimed. Egyptians and Nubians had established literate, urban-based, tech- nologically advanced civilizations long before there was a Rome or an Athens, so there was every reason for African achievement to be praised and even emulated. It is not surprising that Homer speaks of the Olympian gods, especially Zeus, feasting with the “blameless” Ethiopians, the most distant of men, who by the time of Xenophanes (d. circa 478 BCE) had been identified as black and flat nosed, and by the fifth century located to the south of Egypt. Herodotus maintained that the Ethiopians were the tallest and most handsome of men, and the most pious. He added that Meroë was a “great city,” and that the Nubians had supplied Egypt with eighteen pharaohs. Diodorus wrote that the inhabitants of Meroë were the “first of all men and the first to honor the gods whose favor they enjoyed,” and, together with Lucian, who maintained that the “Ethiopians” had invented astrology, claimed that many Nubian practices and institutions were subsequently bor- rowed by the Egyptians. Meroë was to be distinguished, however, from “primitive” Ethiopians, who went about “filthy” and naked (or nearly so) and who did not believe in the gods. Celebrated sexual encounters in the Greek and Roman imagination are yet another measure of the regard for the Nubian. Examples include Zeus, who may have been portrayed in the Inachus of Sophocles (circa 496–406 BCE) as black or dark, and whose child by Io is described by Aeschylus (525–456 BCE) as black and by Hesiod (fl. circa 700 BCE) as the ancestor of the Ethiopians and Libyans. Delphos, the founder of Delphi, was be- lieved to be the son of Poseidon or Apollo and a woman whose name means “the black woman.” There is also the example of Perseus, who married the daughter of the king of the Ethiopians, the dark-hued Andromeda.

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ANTIQUITY 15

Just as individuals like Herodotus actually traveled to Africa and gathered information, Africans also entered southern Europe. The context was often one of war, both for and against the Greeks and Ro- mans. Nubians were a part of the Egyptian occupation of Cyprus under Amasis (569–522 BCE), and there is the account of Memnon and his black soldiers coming to the aid of the Greeks in the possibly mythical Trojan Wars. A large number of Nubians fought under Xerxes of Per- sia in the very real Battle of Marathon in 480–79 BCE. These Nubians experienced liaisons with Greek women, resulting in the “brown ba- bies” of the Persian Wars. Carthage, founded no earlier than 750 BCE by the combination of Phoenician settlers and Berber natives referred to as Numidians, developed a society in which the Berber masses were treated harshly. Although transsaharan trade in the hands of the Gara- mantes was not very important during Carthaginian ascendancy, a sufficient number of subsaharan Africans made their way to Carthage, where they were inducted into military service. Frontius records the presence of “very black” auxiliaries among the Carthaginian prisoners taken by Gelon of Syracuse in 480 BCE. The Punic Wars (264–241, 218–201, and 149–146 BCE) also saw Maghribian (North African) “Ethiopians,” possibly West Africans, employed in the invasion of Italy, serving as mahouts aloft elephants. Rome would go on to conquer Egypt and occupy it from the time of Augustus to the sixth century CE. Its relations with Nubia and the south were relatively peaceful until the third century CE, when it incurred difficulties with the Beja of the Red Sea hills, called “Blemmyes” in the Roman sources.

Africans enslaved in the Graeco-Roman world were only a small fraction of the total number of slaves in these territories. Enslaved Africans also only represented a portion of the overall African popu- lation living in southern Europe. A number of Africans were attracted to places like Rome for trade and occupational opportunities, and they could be found working as musicians, actors, jugglers, gladiators, wrestlers, boxers, religious specialists, and day laborers. Some became famous, such as the black athlete Olympius described by sixth-century poet Luxorius. In addition to entertaining and fighting the Romans, Africans also served in the Roman armies, as was the case with the elite Moorish cavalry from northwest Africa under Lusius Quietus, himself of possible Moroccan heritage. Black soldiers even served in the Roman army as far north as Britain.

Potentially more far-reaching than the actual presence of Africans in southern Europe was the impact of their cultural influence. Scholars debate the extent to which Egyptian science, engineering, architectural

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16 REVERSING SAIL

forms, and philosophy influenced developments in Greece. There can be no question, however, that Egyptian and Nubian religion was deeply influential throughout the Mediterranean world for many centuries if not millennia, especially the worship of Isis, adopted and worshiped in many places under several names. Her worshipers made pilgrim- age to the island of Philae, near the border of Egypt and Nubia, and Nubian specialists in Isiac worship were welcomed in various centers throughout southern Europe, where the Isiac rites were known as the Eleusianian mysteries.

From all that can be determined, it would appear that the racial at- titudes of the ancient Graeco-Roman world differed significantly from the contemporary West. Africans were seen and treated as equals, the representatives of homelands both ancient and respected. Their recep- tion in southern Europe and the Near East underscores the power and prestige of African realms and leaders as a factor that distinguishes this phase of the African Diaspora from what takes place much later. In the ancient world, Africa and Africans were forces to be reckoned with; indeed, for thousands of years, they were the leaders of the ancient world.

Suggestions for Further Reading

Useful general histories of Africa include Philip Curtin, Steven Feier- man, Leonard Thompson, and Jan Vansina, African History: From Earliest Times to Independence (London and New York: Longman, 1995, 2nd ed.), and J. Fage and R. Oliver, eds., The Cambridge History of Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1975–86), an eight-volume collection.

Concerning ancient Egypt, works providing general reconstructions include Ian Shaw, ed., The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Karol My’sliwiec, The Twilight of An- cient Egypt: First Millennium B.C.E., trans. David Lorton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U. Press, 2000); and Sergio Donadoni, ed., The Egyptians, trans. Robert Bianchi et al. (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1997). Studies with foci on women, gender, and society are Lynn Meskell, Archaeologies of Social Life: Age, Sex, Class Et Cetera in Ancient Egypt (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999); Zahi A. Hawass, Silent Images: Women in Pharaonic Egypt (Cairo: American U. in Cairo Press, 2000); John Romer, People of the Nile: Everyday Life in Ancient Egypt

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ANTIQUITY 17

(New York: Crown, 1982); Susan Walker and Peter Higgs, Cleopatra of Egypt: From History to Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 2001). Regarding religion, see Dimitri Meeks and Christine Favard-Meeks, Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U. Press, 1996); and Aylward M. Blackman, Gods, Priests and Men: Studies in the Religion of Pharaonic Egypt (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1993).

The issue of race in Egypt and antiquity is engaged by Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, trans. Mercer Cook (New York: L. Hill, 1974). St. Clair Drake’s two-volume Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology (Los An- geles: Center for Afro-American Studies, U. of California, 1987–90) certainly addresses identity in ancient Egypt but goes well beyond this period and place.

The question of Graeco-Roman indebtedness to early Egypt is taken up in Martin Bernal’s controversial Black Athena: The Afroasi- atic Roots of Classical Civilization, 2 vols. (London: Free Association Books, 1987–91), in the course of which race is considered. An oft- overlooked work making parallel arguments, but preceding Bernal by three decades, is George G. M. James, Stolen Legacy (New York: Philo- sophical Library, 1954). One of the responses to Bernal (and others) is Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996).

A rather comprehensive discussion of Nubian history is provided in P. L. Shinnie’s massive Ancient Nubia (London and New York: Kegan Paul International, 1995). Nubia’s rise and eventual takeover of Egypt is examined in Robert G. Morkot’s The Black Pharaohs: Egypt’s Nubian Rulers (London: Rubicon, 2000).

A bridge connecting Egyptian, Nubian, and Graeco-Roman so- cieties via race are Frank M. Snowden, Jr.’s Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard U. Press, 1970), and his Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1983). Leo William Hansberry’s Africa and Africans as Seen by Classical Writers, ed. Joseph E. Harris (Washington, DC: University Press, 1981), is also useful.

Finally, Stephen Quirke and Jeffrey Spencer, eds., allow for printed visualization of antiquity in The British Museum Book of Ancient Egypt (London: British Museum Press, 1992).

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CHAPTER 2

Africans and the Bible

The Bible has affected the lives of Africans and their descendants in the Diaspora possibly more than any other document in human history. This phenomenon can be divided into at least two spheres: The first features the roles and experiences of Africans in the Bible, while the second concerns the ways in which these roles and experiences have influenced Africans living in post-Biblical times. Because the Biblical account is seen by many as prescriptive, the interpretation of African roles in the narrative is critical, as it has often determined how post- Biblical Africans were treated. In particular, the Bible has been crucial to slavery, with both benefactors and detractors of the institution taking solace in its pages.

Egypt and Nubia in the Bible

Pharaohs of the twenty-fifth dynasty appear in the Old Testament as allies against the Assyrians, and Taharka (690–664 BCE) is mentioned by name (Isaiah 37:9; 2 Kings 19:9). Egypt and Nubia’s union under this dynasty is demonstrated by the prophet Isaiah’s conjoined mes- sages to each (Isaiah 18–20). In language corresponding to Herodotus, Isaiah (18:2,7) writes this of Nubia:

Go, swift messengers to a nation tall and smooth, To a people feared far and wide,

18

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AFRICANS AND THE BIBLE 19

A powerful and oppressive nation Whose land the rivers divide.

Such esteem for Nubia is consistent with the view of states along the Nile as powerful neighbors of Israel, ever present in regional affairs. In- deed, the very formation of the Hebrew people is intimately associated with Egypt and Nubia. Egypt in particular features large in the Old Testament, playing successive roles as asylum, oppressor, ally, and foe. The enslavement and subsequent divine deliverance of the Hebrews was a source of consolation and hope for enslaved Africans and their descendants thousands of years later. But while many identified with the Hebrews, others celebrated the connection to Egypt.

Assuming a historical basis for Hebrew enslavement, it is unreason- able to believe they would have avoided sexual unions with Egyptians and Nubians for 400 years; indeed, individual stories suggest that the interaction between Hebrews and Egyptians or Nubians may have been significant. Even before the Hebrew community in Egypt, Egyptian women figured prominently in the lives of the prophets. Abraham, the father of revelatory monotheism, had a son Ishmael by the Egyptian Hagar, and Ishmael in turn married an Egyptian woman. Upon en- try into Egypt, the patriarch Joseph also married an Egyptian woman, Asenath, who bore Manasseh and Ephraim, so that at least one of the twelve tribes was of partial African origin. Moses himself mar- ried a Nubian woman (Numbers 12:1). These examples suggest such women were desirable and instrumental at critical junctures, birthing clans and nations.

Beyond the question of intermarriage is the issue of cultural in- fluence. The Hebrews were necessarily affected by their long stay in Egypt; after all, Joseph was embalmed. Such influence probably re- mained with the Hebrews for many years, as they exited Egypt with a “mixed multitude” (Exodus 12:38). Much of the Old Testament is concerned with eradicating that influence, along with others from Mesopotamia. If the Exodus is afforded credibility, it gives pause that the Hebrews, every one of them, came out of Africa after a 400-year so- journ. The story is not unlike the human birthing process, the crossing of the Red Sea a movement through the amniotic fluids of an African mother.

Mention of individual Egyptians and Nubians in the Bible is rel- atively rare. Some are in servile positions; others are associated with

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20 REVERSING SAIL

the military. They include the unnamed Nubian military courier or messenger who told King David of his son Absalom’s death in battle (2 Samuel 18:19–33). Then there is Ebed-melech (or “royal slave”), a Nubian eunuch in the service of Zedekiah, king of Judah. He rescued the prophet Jeremiah from certain death by interceding for him be- fore Zedekiah; for his intervention, Ebed-melech would be spared the coming judgment (Jeremiah 38:1–13; 39:15–18). Others with possible blood ties to Egypt or Nubia include Aaron’s grandson Phinehas, pos- sibly an Egyptian name meaning “the Nubian” (Exodus 6:25); and the prophet Zephaniah, son of “Cushi” or the Cushite (Zephaniah 1:1). Perhaps the most famous involves the Queen of Sheba, a complicated story involving a King Solomon already married to a daughter of the Egyptian pharaoh (and eventually hundreds of other women; see 2 Chronicles 8:11).

Africans and Origins

The question of identifying Africans in the Bible is influenced by as- sumptions brought to the text. The exercise of “discovering” Africans in the Bible often presupposes that the document is essentially con- cerned with non-Africans. But what if the assumptions are different, and the Bible is presumed to be primarily concerned with “people of color,” including Africans?

Independent of anthropological and archaeological records, the Bible has its own tradition of human origins. In the interpretation of that tradition over the centuries, the Garden of Eden story has rarely been situated in an African setting. A forced correlation be- tween Biblical narrative and scientific findings, however, directs at- tention to East Africa and would suggest to those concerned with Biblical teachings that the earliest actors were Africans. The notion of an African Eden, however, was far from the imagination of Western slaveholding societies. Instead, a tale condemning Africans was widely accepted.

The account concerns the prophet and ark-builder Noah, and it is possibly the most dramatic example of how the interpretation of holy writ can have life-altering consequences. After the flood, the progen- itors of the entire human family are listed in the “Table of Nations” (Genesis 10). According to a conventional reading, Ham became the father of “the black people,” as his sons are listed as Cush, Mizraim, Put or Punt, and Canaan; that is, Nubia, Egypt, possibly Libya or

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AFRICANS AND THE BIBLE 21

lands beyond Nubia proper, and Palestine. Such a reading assumes that Noah’s other two sons, Japheth and Shem, were “white” and “Asian,” or at least not black.

The term Cush probably derives from Qevs and is simply a place- name, bearing no racial or ethnic connotations. The Greek terms Ethiopia and Ethiopian do not appear in the Hebrew and Chaldean Old Testament, but rather the words Cush and Cushite, suggesting Nubian features were not a concern for Old Testament writers but became one with the rise of Alexander and the ensuing period of hellenization, when translators of the Septuagint, the Old Testament in Greek, opted to substitute Ethiopia for Cush.

Although the physical features of the Cushites or Nubians were not a significant matter for early Jews, an incident that precedes the presentation of the Table of Nations would eventually be interpreted in a way that would affect issues of slavery and race for centuries to come. The incident concerns a drunken Noah whose “nakedness is uncovered” by his son Ham, a phrase with multiple possible meanings. When Noah awoke from his stupor and realized “what had been done to him,” he uttered words that would have profound implications for people of African descent:

Cursed be Canaan; The lowest of servants He shall be to his brothers.

(Genesis 9:24–27)

The ambiguity of the passage lends itself to conflicting interpretations. Who was being cursed, Ham or his son Canaan? Did Noah’s curse carry divine sanction, or was it the innocuous expletives of an angry mortal?

The interpretation of Noah’s curse depends upon the perspective. Believers are divided over its meaning. To the cynical, the curse was written after the entry of the Hebrews into Palestine to justify the ap- propriation of land. For the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave- holder, it became “the Hamitic curse” and meant that African slav- ery had been providentially decreed. In this reading, the European slaveholder was simply fulfilling the will of God, as God’s chosen instrument.

To the extent that the curse enjoys divine sanction, the likelihood that it was meant to apply to all of the descendants of Ham is miti- gated by the record of the Bible itself. The only person discussed in any detail in Genesis Chapter 10, site of the Table of Nations, is one

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22 REVERSING SAIL

Nimrod, son of Cush, who “became a mighty one on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord,” and credited with establishing such cities as Babel and Nineveh in Assyria. If anything, Nimrod represents a tradition of imperialism and domination rather than subservience. Another example is Egypt itself, as it was the Egyptians, descendants of Ham, who were the slaveholders. Again, it was to the Nubians that the Israelites turned for help against the Assyrians out of recognition of their ascendancy. There is also the fascinating account of Moses and his Nubian bride (Numbers 12), a marriage opposed by Moses’ siblings Miriam and Aaron for reasons unclear. In a stunning rebuke, Yahweh not only supports Moses but also turns Miriam’s skin into a leprous, luminous white that persists for days, an unusual punishment laced with humor if not sarcasm.

Unfortunately, the import of the divine rebuke did not endure. Scholars of the revered communication would produce additional lit- erature to accompany the scriptures and unfold their meaning. In con- trast to the Jewish Talmud (a collection of laws and rabbinical wisdom and the second most holy text in Judaism), another tradition began, perhaps around the fifth century BCE, that may have characterized blackness itself as a consequence of and punishment for Ham’s trans- gression. This tradition that can be found in the fifth-century CE liter- ature of the Midrashim and the sixth-century CE Babylonian Talmud. However, some scholars argue that the idea of blackness as scourge ac- tually derives from mistranslations of these texts, rather than the texts themselves.

African-born persons rarely appear in the New Testament. Jesus is said to have spent an unspecified number of his childhood years in Egypt, where in all likelihood he would have lived in the large Jew- ish community at Alexandria (Matthew 2:13–23). Simon of Cyrene (North Africa) is remembered for helping Jesus carry the cross (Luke 23:26; Matthew 27:32; Mark 15:21). The “Ethiopian” eunuch, who will be discussed in more detail, is prominently featured in the book of the Acts of the Apostles.

It is striking that the formation of the early Jewish state involved the literal transfer of a community from one land of Ham to an- other. It is therefore not possible to hold an intelligent discussion of the Old Testament without understanding the contribution of the African. It is not a question of a lone Nubian here and an odd Egyptian there; rather, the Old Testament world was awash in Africa’s colors and cultures.

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AFRICANS AND THE BIBLE 23

The Queen of Sheba

While the Hamitic curse would be used in the future with devastat- ing effect, another account in the Old Testament forms the basis for perhaps the most significant and certainly most hallowed tradition in- volving Biblical Africa, linking the continent to the African Diaspora from ancient times to the present. In arresting defiance of, and in dia- metric opposition to, the damnation of Canaan, the very glory of God is held to have rested upon a favored Ethiopia. The explanation of how that happened is a fascinating journey into an African reading of the Bible, and it links the continent to three separate faiths in fundamental and enduring ways.

The story begins with King Solomon, who already had ties to the Nile valley by his marriage to an Egyptian princess and possibly by way of his mother Bathsheba, whose name may signify “from the house or land of Sheba.” Word of his fabled wisdom spread far and wide, eventually attracting the Queen of Sheba, who journeyed to Israel with a large retinue to hear Solomon’s wisdom for herself (2 Chronicles 9:1–12; 1 Kings 10:1–13). More than favorably impressed, the Queen gave the king a large quantity of gold, spices, and precious stones. In exchange, Solomon gave unspecified gifts of his own.

According to the Ethiopian holy book Kebra Nagast or “Glory of Kings,” completed in the early fourteenth century and drawn from the Bible, the Qur’ān, apocryphal literatures, and other sources, Solomon and the Queen, identified as Makeda in the Ethiopian manuscript, struck up a romance consummated through Solomon’s guile. After nine months and a conversion to Judaism, Makeda gave birth to Menelik (literally, “son of the wise man”), who years later returned to Jerusalem where he was acknowledged by his father, crowned the king of Ethiopia, and implored to remain in Jerusalem to inherit the throne of Israel. Longing for home, Menelik instead returned to Ethiopia with a number of priests and the Tabot or the Ark of the Covenant (or Tabernacle of Zion). The Ark, symbol of Yahweh’s presence and Israel’s unique status, henceforth rests, according to this tradition, in Ethiopia, thereby transferring to the Ethiopians the honor of “God’s chosen people.” Likewise, the kings of Ethiopia are descendants of Solomon, each a “lion of Judah.”

There are multiple layers to the story. To begin, the location of “Sheba” is in dispute: many cite Saba in Yemen as the most likely site, while some insist upon Nubia or Ethiopia. Interestingly, Jesus simply

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24 REVERSING SAIL

refers to the “Queen of the South” who came “from the ends of the earth” to hear Solomon’s wisdom (Matthew 12:42; Luke 11:31), a characterization of space and distance in remarkable resonance with Homer’s Odyssey, wherein the Ethiopians are described as “the most remote of men,” dwelling by the streams of Ocean, “at earth’s two verges, in sunset lands and lands of the rising sun.” As Ethiopia did not exist during the time of Solomon, the only viable alternative to Yemen for Sheba’s location is Nubia, where the queen may have been one of the Candaces. In the end, Sheba’s precise location may not matter very much, as populations and cultural influences regularly crisscrossed the Red Sea in antiquity; in fact, southern Arabia was periodically dominated by powers on nearby African soil, particularly from 335–370 CE and 525–575 CE, when Ethiopia ruled portions of the southern peninsula.

Another complication is the Kebra Nagast ’s claims of an initial as- sociation with Judaism. Ethiopia is better known as a Christian state. Founded at Aksum (Axum) in 59 CE, Ethiopia became home to Amhara-Tigrean, Galla, Afar, Somali, and Omotic populations, dis- tinguishing it both culturally and territorially from Nubia (which lay to the north). Christianity entered Ethiopia early; tradition links mis- sionary activity to the apostle Matthew, but Ethiopia’s definitive turn to Christianity took place in the middle of the fourth century CE, when King Ezana and the royal court embraced the new religion, and in the fifth century CE, when large-scale conversions occurred. In 1135, the Aksumite rulers were overthrown by the founders of the Zagwe dynasty, whose greatest achievement was the creation of a re- markable ceremonial center at Lalibela (or Roha, named after the dy- nasty’s most illustrious ruler), site of churches hewn from “living rock,” fashioned deep in the earth. The Zagwes were in turn overthrown by the Solomonids in 1270, claiming descent from Solomon and Makeda.

The Solomonids drew upon traditions enshrined in the Kebra Na- gast to legitimate their seizure of power, claiming the best of both worlds by trumpeting their alleged hereditary connections to Israel while simultaneously championing Christianity. Led by a literate elite who wrote in Ge’ez (or Ethiopic), Christian Ethiopia experi- enced an efflorescence under the Solomonids, particularly from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Although severely chal- lenged by Ah.mad Granye’s sixteenth-century Muslim campaign that saw widespread destruction of churches and monasteries, only to be

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AFRICANS AND THE BIBLE 25

followed by incursions of Galla or Oromo in the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Ethiopia’s unique Christian legacy survived. Ethiopia would become an icon in the modern African Diaspora, a symbol of independence and fierce pride, and the focus of a new reli- gion developed in the Caribbean.

Beta Israel

The Solomonids were not the only ones to draw from the Kebra Nagast for legitimation. The Jews of Ethiopia, who refer to themselves as the Beta Israel (“House of Israel”) and take umbrage at the term Falasha (“stranger, wanderer,” coined by non-Jewish Ethiopians), also claim descent from Solomon and Makeda. The Beta Israel have a differ- ent account of what happened following Menelik’s return to Ethiopia: With the Ark of the Covenant in tow, Menelik’s entourage came to a river and separated into two companies. Those who crossed even- tually became Christians, while those who paused remained Jews: a marvelous allegory at the least.

Scholars and politicians have debated whether the Beta Israel are “true” Jews for centuries. Aside from the Solomon–Makeda tradition (given little credence by many scholars), there are other, competing theories attempting to explain how Jews came to Ethiopia. In 1973, for example, Israel’s Sephardic Chief Rabbi recognized the Beta Israel as true Jews, a remnant of the lost tribe of Dan (one of the ten who seemingly vanished after their capture by Assyria in 722 BCE). Other scholars cite evidence of a Jewish military garrison at Elephantine Is- land, near the traditional border of Egypt and Nubia, between the seventh and the fifth centuries BCE. Yet others point to the proxim- ity of southern Arabia, in which communities of Jews have lived since the seventh century BCE, with most arriving after the destruction of Jerusalem’s Second Temple in 70 CE.

Whatever their origins, the Beta Israel’s subsequent history in Ethiopia is also a matter of scholarly contention; some maintain they were persecuted and harassed for most of their existence, while oth- ers argue the relationship between Jews and the Christian state was at times complementary and cooperative. The Beta Israel took refuge in the mountain fastnesses of Ethiopia and were cut off from world Jewry. There they continued to sacrifice animals, observe the Sabbath, fol- low other religious laws and dietary proscriptions, and circumcise on

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26 REVERSING SAIL

the eighth day. They lost the Hebrew language, however, speaking in Amharic (a modern language) and praying (while facing Jerusalem) in Ge’ez. Armed with the Torah but unaware of the Talmud, Ethiopian Jews managed to survive. Toward the end of the twentieth century, they participated in the general immigration of Jews to Israel (the aliyah) in spectacular ways: In 1984, so-called Operation Moses brought 16,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel, followed by the airlifting of thousands more in 1991. Media images of these “black Jews” arriving in Israel was noth- ing less than electrifying. That there were verifiable African Jews with a venerable past raised new questions about the scope of the African Diaspora.

The “Ethiopian” Eunuch and the Call to Christianity

In addition to the Queen of Sheba and the Beta Israel, the account of the “Ethiopian” eunuch has also fired imaginations across time and space. The New Testament records the baptism of “an Ethiopian eu- nuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure” (Acts of the Apostles 8:27–40). As Ethiopia either did not yet exist or was just coming into being, and as a series of female rulers of the Nubian state of Meroë held the title Candace, this encounter probably refers to a Nubian court official who, after his baptism, “went on his way rejoicing,” presumably all the way to Nubia. Christianity had certainly entered Nubia by the second cen- tury (following the establishment of the Coptic church in Egypt), but Nubia did not convert en masse to Christianity (according to area tradition) until the mid-sixth century and the arrival of missionaries from Byzantium. For the next 800 years Nubia flourished as a Chris- tian culture, its literacy based upon Old Nubian, a language written in Greek form with Meroitic vowelization. Meroë itself had ended by 350 CE, but Nubia continued on, splintering into Nobatia (or Nu- bia), Alwa, and Makuria. The rise of S. alāh. al-Dı̄n and the Mamluks in Egypt in 1169 began Christian Nubia’s gradual decline until 1323, when a Muslim ruler took power. Nubian Christianity survived into the sixteenth century, in retreat from a growing Islamized and Arabized Nubian population and government.

Like Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia, North Africa also converted to Christianity, although the region’s rapid embrace of Islam in the sev- enth and eighth centuries raises doubts about the depth of its preceding

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AFRICANS AND THE BIBLE 27

commitment. Even so, North Africa was the site of a brilliant Chris- tian civilization, producing the likes of Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–440), born in North Africa and likely of Berber descent. Chris- tian scholars and leaders located throughout Egypt and North Africa played major roles in the various schisms and doctrinal disputes char- acterizing the troubled history of the early church. However, while North Africa and Egypt provided the setting, European languages dominated the religious discourse; Latin was used in the North African church, and Greek in the Coptic.

An African past filled with splendor and pageantry would serve to defend against the onslaught experienced by the enslaved in the Ameri- cas, who were repeatedly told that Africa held no historical significance. Though ancient and in a corner of the continent from which the vast majority of the enslaved did not hail, Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia were yet in Africa, and therefore they represented the dignity of the en- tire continent, a place of honor bestowed largely through exposure to Christianity and Judaism. By the nineteenth century, the prophesy that “Ethiopia shall soon stretch her hands out to God” (Psalm 68:31) would be interpreted by many as a call to convert masses of Africans and their descendants to Christianity, thereby shaping Africa and its Diaspora in profound ways.

Suggestions for Further Reading

In addition to some of the relevant suggested readings for Chapter One, especially that of St. Clair Drake, works covering the general history of Ethiopia include Harold G. Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1994); Jean Doresse, Ethiopia, trans. Elsa Coult (London: Elek Books and New York: Putnam, 1959); and Sergew Hable Sellassie, Ancient and Medieval Ethiopian History to 1270 (Addis Ababa: United Printers, 1972).

Regarding the Kebra Nagast, the only English translation available remains, curiously, E. A. Wallis Budge’s The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek (Kebra Nagast) (London and Boston: The Medici Society, Ltd., 1922). Given the date of the translation and Budge’s rep- utation as something of a racist, a modern translation is sorely needed. Donald N. Levine’s Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic So- ciety (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1974) provides a critical read- ing of both Kebra Nagast and the development of Ethiopian society.

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28 REVERSING SAIL

An excellent work on the Beta Israel is Steven Kaplan’s The Beta Is- rael (Falasha) in Ethiopia: From Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century (New York: New York U. Press, 1992), which can be joined with a study edited by Tudor Parfitt and Emanuela Trevisan, The Beta Israel in Ethiopia and Israel (Surrey: Curzon Press, 1999).

Concerning the Hamitic curse, see David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 2003), for a discussion of its devel- opment as an idea, and Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: the Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2002), for an indication of how the myth came to be exploited. Finally, among the most important works addressing blacks or Africans and the Bible are James Cone, For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1984); Charles B. Copher, Black Bib- lical Studies: An Anthology of Charles B. Copher (Chicago: Black Light Fellowship, 1993); Cain Hope Felder, Troubling Biblical Waters: Race, Class, and Family (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1989) and his Scan- dalize My Name: A Critical Review of Blacks in the Bible and Society (Silver Spring, MD: Beckham House, 1995).

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CHAPTER 3

Africans and the Islamic World

We tend to know more about Africans in the Americas than elsewhere in the Diaspora. However, as this chapter makes clear, millions of Africans entered Islamic lands, where they made important contribu- tions to extraordinary civilizations, from the heartlands of the faith to Muslim Spain. An extended discussion of this major component of the African Diaspora is warranted, as the juxtaposition of the similarities and differences between this experience and that of Africans in the Americas yields far greater insight into the condition of displacement than does a lone hemispheric focus.

We begin with a brief consideration of Muh.ammad, born circa 570 CE in the city of Mecca, an oasis important as both marketplace and site of religious shrines. Muh.ammad was sensitive to the disparities between rich and poor, and his meditations resulted in a series of rev- elations that began when he was forty years of age; three years later, he began heralding a message centering on the oneness of God, his own role as God’s messenger, the Last Day, and the need for a response of submission, gratitude, worship, and social responsibility. Encounter- ing resistance and harassment, Muh.ammad and his companions found asylum in Medina, and in 630 they accepted Mecca’s peaceful surren- der. By the time of his death in 632, the whole of the Arabian peninsula was united under Muh.ammad’s control. By 656, Islam had expanded into Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and North Africa, and by 711, Muslim armies had conquered parts of the Iberian peninsula as well.

29

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30 REVERSING SAIL

Sahara

Taghaza

N iger R.

Takedda Walara

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Timbuktu Kouinbi

Atlantic Ocean Atlantic Ocean Atlantic Ocean

Sofala

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Indian Ocean Atlantic Ocean

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un is

ia

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.

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L. Victoria

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Mozambique

Songhai Empire at Height of Power: 1475Mali Empire at Height of Power: 1325Ghana Empire at Height of Power: 1060

Battle site

Major African Empires, 1000–1500

Songhai Empire (see map below, right)

Mali Empire (see map below, middle)

Sahara

N iger R.

Taghaza

Walara

Gao 1325 Sorsa

Niani

Kouinbi x 1240

Karina x 1235

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.

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Egypt (Ottoman Empire)

Tripoli

0°

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Red Sea

Benin

Zeilia

Ghana Empire (see map below, left)

Aksum

x

MAP 2. Major African empires, 1000–1500.

Islam’s move into Egypt (or Misr) and North Africa (or al-Maghrib al-Aqs.ā, “the far West”) was accompanied by the gradual Arabization of the population (the spread of Arabs and their language and culture). As part of a larger Muslim world that was quickly becoming a mighty empire, Egypt and North Africa once more became destinations for other Africans, while simultaneously serving as sources of emigration to such places as Portugal and Spain.

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AFRICANS AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD 31

Golden Lands

Where Muslim armies spearheaded Islam’s expansion into North Africa and Egypt, Muslim traders and clerics led the religion’s spread into regions south of the Sahara. Regularized trade between North and subsaharan Africa became possible with the first-century CE introduction of the camel from the Nile valley to the Sahara’s southern fringes near Lake Chad, after which they spread further west. By the fourth century, camel caravan patterns crisscrossed the desert.

West Africa became associated with gold early in the history of Is- lam; indeed, one of the earliest West African states, Ghana, became known as “the land of the gold” through the Arabic writing of ge- ographers between the eighth and eleventh centuries. Ghana, home to the Serakole (northern Mande-speakers), was located in the sāh. il (“shore”) between the Sahara and the savannah (flat grasslands) fur- ther south, as were Gao (on the eastern Niger buckle) and Kanem (along the northeastern side of Lake Chad); together they were intro- duced to the ninth-century Islamic world as Bilād as-Sūdān, or “land of the blacks.” A brief review of developments within this region and East Africa is important, for as these lands were in direct contact with the Muslim world, they constitute the beginning of this component of the African Diaspora.

West African gold was exchanged primarily for salt (from desert mines and evaporating ponds at the mouth of the Senegal River and elsewhere). The gold was transported to North Africa, then east to Egypt and as far as India, where it served as payment for spices and silks; it was transported across the Mediterranean to pay for Euro- pean goods and currency. Trade from the West African hinterland to the sahel was organized and controlled by West Africans, who over the centuries developed an extensive network operated by the Juula (Mande for “merchant”) and Hausa traders. Once in the sa- hel, gold and other commodities were transported north through the Sahara by the Tuareg, Berber-speaking desert-dwellers, along with Arab merchants. The arrangement was to the immediate advan- tage of West Africans, who maintained secrecy of the gold’s sources, but ultimately it was to their detriment, as they did not control the trade through the desert. A pattern developed early in West Africa, whereby external powers acquired long distance, multiregional trade experience. Those with such expertise eventually took command

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of the trade and dictated its terms, notwithstanding West Africa’s ap- preciable influence.

Ghana, though still in existence in the twelfth century, was eclipsed in the thirteenth by Mali, populated by southern Mande-speakers fash- ioned into an empire by the emperor Sunjaata around 1230. As was true of Ghana, Mali was also associated with gold in the Muslim world, but unlike Ghana, Mali slowly became a part of that world through the early conversion of its rulers. The fourteenth-century travels and eyewitness accounts of Ibn Bat.t.ūt.a (d. 1368) reinforced the image of Mali as a land of wealth, as did the pilgrimage to Mecca of Mansa Mūsā (reigned 1312–1337). Although a diminished Mali would con- tinue through the seventeenth century, its stature in the western Su- dan (from the Atlantic Ocean to the Niger buckle) was eclipsed in the fifteenth century by imperial Songhay, whose origins go back to the seventh century and Gao. By the fifteenth century, Islam had become the religion of the court and the merchant community; commercial towns such as Timbuktu and Jenne were transformed into centers of Islamic education and intellectual activity, a development begun un- der Mansa Mūsā of Mali. As was true of Ghana and Mali, Songhay was known as a major source of gold, and the disruption of the gold trade under Sunni ‘Alı̄ (1464–1492) was a principal factor in Askia Muh.ammad Ture’s 1492 seizure of power.

Viewed as a wealthy land, the western Sudan was increasingly incor- porated into the Islamic world. North Africa, Egypt, and the western Sudan exchanged emissaries and written communication (in Arabic). Houses of wealthy merchants were often allied to leading clerical and political families through marriage. All of this resulted in the rise of an elite in the western Sudan, connected through religion, marriage, and commercial interests and accorded prestige by coreligionists in North Africa and Egypt. Muslim West Africa would therefore be differenti- ated from non-Muslim West Africa, for whom the Islamic world held contempt. Stated differently, the Muslim world entertained no single image of subsaharan Africa, distinguishing its various populations on the basis of Islam and related notions of civilization. The status of the land as opposed to the individual was critical; a Muslim was one who practiced the religion, but a Muslim land was one over which Mus- lim rule had been established. Songhay, with a majority non-Muslim population, was a Muslim land.

Part of the central Sudan (from the Niger buckle to the Lake Chad area) had a decidedly different trade relationship with North Africa.

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The independent city-states of Hausaland were apparently slower to embrace Islam than their western Sudanic counterparts, but by the sec- ond half of the fifteenth century such cities as Kano and Katsina were under Muslim control and were integrated into long-distance trade. In contrast to Hausaland, the states of Kanem and Bornu near Lake Chad had an Islamic pedigree with considerable historicity. Kanem, for example, was under Muslim rulers by the tenth century, who per- formed the h. ājj (pilgrimage) as early as the eleventh, while establish- ing Islamic offices in Kanem’s government. They eventually fled anti- Islamic forces to the southwestern edge of Lake Chad and established Bornu.

Unlike their western Sudanic counterparts, Kanem and Bornu’s ex- ports were primarily captives (captives were also exported by Mali and Songhay but were of secondary importance), which were exchanged for cloth, firearms, and other commodities. A major trade route linked Lake Chad to Tripoli by way of the Fezzan. The route was a noto- rious highway for captives well into the nineteenth century. Captives were supposedly non-Muslims, but there is evidence that many Mus- lims were taken as well. Mai Idrı̄s Alooma (reigned 1570–1602), “the learned, just, courageous and pious Commander of the Faithful,” de- veloped quite the reputation as a slave raider.

The question of African captives arises again in conjunction with the history of East Africa, specifically the Swahili coast. To be sure, maritime trade in the Indian Ocean is of significant antiquity. By the second century BCE or earlier, regular traffic linked East Africa to Ara- bia, India, and southwest Asia by way of prevailing monsoon winds. The dhow, far more efficient than the camel, sailed the Indian Ocean in one-third the time of a Saharan caravan crossing, carrying the equiv- alent of 1,000 camel loads. Seafaring was dominated more by Arabs and Indians than Africans, while Africans along the coast controlled access to the East African interior, analogous to the western Sudan’s relations with Tuareg and Arab merchants, with sea and sand as barrier and bridge. In the case of the Swahili coast, however, the bridge is the more appropriate metaphor, as the East African littoral was more fully integrated into the trade of the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, a commer- cial complex both massive and lucrative. In exchange for such imports as Chinese porcelain, cowry shells, glass beads, and large quantities of cotton cloth from India and China, East Africa exported ivory, gold, mangrove poles (for housing in the Persian Gulf), and human beings.

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To speak of East Africa is to discuss Swahili culture and language, which incorporates Arabic and (to a lesser extent) Malagasy words and concepts. Arabs (and apparently Persians) settling along the coast often intermarried with the local population, resulting in a fusion of genes and lifestyles. The apogee of the Swahili coastal towns lasted from the ninth through the fifteenth centuries CE; this was an age of royal courts, stone palaces, beautiful mosques, and internal plumb- ing in the best houses. Trade and urban growth corresponded to changes in the Islamic world, as the Muslim political center shifted from Damascus and the Umayyad caliphate (661–750) to Baghdad and the Abbasids (750–1258), thereby elevating the Persian Gulf’s importance. This period in East African history came to an abrupt halt with the arrival of Vasco da Gama and the Portuguese in 1498. Seven years later, Portuguese men-of-war returned to destroy Kilwa and inaugurate a new era in the Indian Ocean.

Pilgrims and Scholars

Many subsaharan Africans entered the Islamic world as fellow believ- ers, usually by traveling to the Middle East and North Africa to make the pilgrimage, to study, or to teach. A number of individuals from subsaharan Africa were regarded as learned and pious. Examples in- clude the eminent scholar Ah.mad Bābā, taken captive from Timbuktu to Marrakesh in 1594 following the Moroccan conquest of Songhay, where he was imprisoned for two years and taught classes for large numbers until his return to Timbuktu in 1608. A second example is S. ālih. al-Fulānı̄, an obscure West African scholar from Futa Jallon (in contemporary Guinea), who headed for Cairo and finally Med- ina, where he studied and eventually taught from 1791 to his death in 1803–1804.

A tradition of royal pilgrimage dates back to the eleventh century in West Africa and includes the rulers of Kanem, Mali, and Songhay. However, the quintessential hajj was that of Mali’s Mansa Mūsā in 1324. With a retinue of thousands of soldiers, slaves, and high offi- cials, he brought such large quantities of gold to Egypt that its value temporarily depreciated. Less significant for the Muslim chroniclers of the trip, but more stunning in its implications and symbolism for our purposes, was the manner in which Mansa Mūsā entered Egypt. In what must have been a sight for the ages, Mūsā and his thousands

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encamped around the pyramids prior to entering Cairo. For three days, the glory of imperial Mali and the wonder of ancient Egypt, two of the most powerful icons of the African Diaspora, became one.

The Enslaved

In contrast to those making the pilgrimage, other subsaharan Africans entered the Islamic world as slaves. Muslim societies made use of slaves from all over the reachable world. Europeans were just as eligible as Africans, and Slavic and Caucasian populations were the largest source of slaves for the Islamic world well into the eighteenth century, espe- cially in the Ottoman empire. Race was therefore not a factor – at least not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when European ex- pansion forced a closer association between blackness and slavery.

When the discussion is restricted to Africa, tentative estimates for the transsaharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean slave trades are in the range of 12 million individuals from 650 CE to the end of the sixteenth century, and another 4 million from the seventeenth through the nine- teenth centuries. In other words, as many or more captive Africans may have been exported through these trades as were shipped across the Atlantic, although the latter took place within a much more com- pressed period (fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries). To be sure, these estimates are imprecise and possibly misleading. It is difficult to separate, for example, the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trades, and not all who were transported through the Indian Ocean landed in Islamic lands. Even so, the number of enslaved Africans in the Islamic world was clearly significant.

Slavery in Arabia was already an accepted practice by the time Muh.ammad was born; the Qur’ān assumes as much and, far from simply condoning it, attempts to improve the servile condition while promoting manumission at the same time. Islam held that freedom was the natural condition of human beings, and only certain circumstances allowed for slavery. According to a strict interpretation of Islamic law, or sharı̄ ↪a, only those non-Muslims who were without a protective pact (↪ahd ) with Muslims, who rejected the offer to convert to Islam and were then captured in a war ( jihād ), could be enslaved. However, after the first century of Islam, reality diverged from theory, and most were in fact captured through raids and kidnaping and then sold to mer- chants. Stated another way, slavery in the Islamic world was a business.

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Keeping in mind the theory–reality divide, Muslims slaveholders were to treat the enslaved with dignity and kindness. Slaves could marry with the slaveholder’s consent, and they were not to be over- worked or excessively punished; those seriously injured were to be freed. They were to be provided with material support and medical at- tention into old age. The enslaved were property, to be bought and sold like any other chattel, yet their undeniable humanity created tensions that Islamic law attempted to resolve. Above all, slaveholders were enjoined to facilitate the conversion of the enslaved; uncircumcised males were circumcised from the outset, and they were given Arabic names. In an interesting parallel with the Americas, these names com- prised a “special” category of nomenclature, names of “distinction” for the enslaved. Such appellations included Kāfār (“camphor”) and ‘Anbar (“ambergris”) for males; and Bakhı̄ta (“fortunate”), Mabrūka (“blessed”), and Za’farān (“saffron”) for females. The majority of the enslaved were therefore converted to Islam, and some became literate in Arabic and were taught to read the Qur’ān.

However, conversion to Islam did not obligate slaveholders to free their slaves; slaveholders were only encouraged by the Qur’ān to do so. The ideal was to enter into a manumission contract (mukātaba), whereby the enslaved person would be allowed to make and save enough money to pay an agreed upon amount to purchase her or his freedom. As would also be true in the Americas, the acquired freedom was qualified in that the freed person remained a client of the former slaveholder and always in his debt, a condition passed down through several generations.

One of the most arresting aspects of the transsaharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean slave trades is that they were primarily transactions in females and children. Young girls and women were used as domestics and concubines, and often both, as the male slaveholder enjoyed the right of sexual access. The concubine is referred to in the Qur’ān as “that which your right hands possess” (mā malakat aymānukum). Do- mestic work included cooking, cleaning, and wet-nursing (tasks that would become just as familiar to many African-descended women in the Americas), and there is evidence that some were (illegally) forced into prostitution. A slaveholder on occasion married an enslaved fe- male, but in those instances she first had to be freed. As for concubines, the Muslim world had an order of preference, beginning with white females, many of whom were obtained from the Balkans and lands in the southwest of what was formerly the Soviet Union and referred

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to as the saqāliba or Slavs (although the term would come to include non-Slavs). Next in order of preference were Ethiopian, Nubian, and other women from the Horn of Africa, called the h. abashiyyāt (or sim- ply Habash when men were included), often found in the service of middle-class slaveholders. They enjoyed greater status and privilege than did other African women, who were allegedly the least preferred. According to Islamic law, the concubine who bore the slaveholder’s children (thereafter known as an umm walad ) could never be sold away, and she was automatically freed upon his death. In contrast to what would develop in the Americas, the children of a slaveholder and a concubine followed the status of the father and became free. An exam- ple of how this could work is found in imperial Songhay, where every one of the askias following Askia al-h. ājj Muh.ammad (d. 1529) was the son of a concubine. Yet another illustration concerns the ↪Alawid ruler Mūlāy Ismā↪ı̄l (reigned 1672–1727) of Morocco, whose mother was a black concubine.

Some concubines and female domestics were kept in large harems, where sexual exploitation was erratic and unpredictable. Women in such circumstances inhabited a world of instability, as advancing age and the failure to bear children or secure slaveholder interest could result in their sale. Central to the organization of such large harems was the eunuch or tawāshi, also referred to as khādim (“servant”), fatā (“young man”), and aghā (“chief”). The primary responsibility of the eunuch was to maintain order; his emasculation “perfected” him for such purposes, as he remained physically strong but incapable (for the most part) of posing a sexual threat. As was true of concubines, those transformed into eunuchs came from Europe and Asia and Africa, but in this instance it was the African eunuch who appears to have been preferred (at least in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul). Because they were privy to the inner workings of the household, these individuals could amass significant influence in both the household and the soci- ety (assuming a prominent family). The authority of the Kislar Aghā, the Ottoman sultan’s head eunuch, was legendary. In apparent viola- tion of Islamic law, such eunuchs were allowed to own other eunuchs and concubines. According to one nineteenth-century account of the chief African eunuchs of Mecca, they were even married to enslaved Ethiopians, a most curious arrangement.

The procedures by which males became eunuchs rank among the most inhumane. Young boys were commonly forced to endure the operation, which involved removal of the testes or both testes and penis.

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Because the operation was abhorrent to Muslims, it was performed by Christians (and perhaps Jews) in such places as Baghirmi near Lake Chad, in Ethiopia, and in other locations. Accounts of the process veer toward the macabre, as young males were gelded and placed in the sand up to their navels to heal. Those able to urinate after some days were herded off through the Sahara; those who could not were left to die. In addition to serving in the harems, some were chosen to serve in the mosque of the Ka↪ba in Mecca and in Prophet Muh.ammad’s mosque in Medina. Many who began the desert trek did not complete it, expiring along the way. The number of eunuchs in the Muslim world is difficult to estimate, but the claim that the sultan Mūlāy Ismā↪ı̄l personally owned over 2,000 suggests their numbers were significant. Indeed, so many more entered the mutilation process than exited; a credible estimate is that only 10 percent survived the operation, which meant that some 20,000 young males perished to achieve Mūlāy Ismā↪ı̄l’s 2,000.

Africans were also used as laborers in large agricultural ventures and mining operations. They supplied the backbreaking, bloodcurdling labor for the salt mines of Taghāza in the western Sahara and the copper mines of Tegidda in what is now Niger. The model of exploiting subsaharan labor may have been provided by the Tuareg and Arabo- Berbers of the Sahara, who had a long-standing tradition of using subsaharan African slaves to herd animals and collect wood and water.

Agricultural projects in the Islamic world generally did not approach the magnitude of the American plantation until the emergence of clove cultivation in such places as Zanzibar in the nineteenth century, but African enslaved labor was used in date production in Saharan oases and in tenth-century Arabia, near Bahrain. African slave labor was also used in the cultivation of sugar in the Ahwāz province of what is now western Iraq in the ninth century, together with the large-scale use of East African slave labor in nearby southern Iraq and Kuwait, in what was called the Sawād. There, captives from the interior of East Africa, the Zanj, were expended to drain vast marshlands. The condi- tions under which the Zanj labored were so stultifying, so deplorable, that they produced one of the most spectacular slave revolts in the history of both the African Diaspora and the world as a whole. Unify- ing under the charismatic leadership of ↪Alı̄ b. Muh.ammad, son of an Iraqi father and a mother from Sind (the lower Indus valley), the Zanj waged insurrection for fifteen years, from 868 to 883, capturing the city of Basra and marching on Baghdad itself, center of the Muslim

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world. With their defeat, the Zanj were ruthlessly exterminated, the experiment using their labor in southern Iraq abandoned. In fact, some scholars speculate that the Zanj left such a bitter taste in the mouths of the Abbasids that it influenced the brutish depiction of blacks in The Thousand and One Nights.

One of the more visible uses of enslaved African labor was in the military, one of the few institutions allowing for any degree of upward mobility for persons of African descent throughout the history of the entire Diaspora. Slave armies were in a number of places in the Is- lamic world by the ninth century. The concept was to create a military that, as a result of its very foreignness and alienation, owed its total allegiance to the ruler. Those destined for such armies were usually acquired through purchase rather than war, and they included Turks, Slavs, Berbers, and other Africans. In fact, most military slaves were non-African and were often organized into separate units based on ethnic origin and background. Specific terms were used to identify armies as both servile and ethnically distinct: the Mamlūks, a servile army that eventually seized power in Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517, were mostly from the Black Sea region; the Janissaries (or kuls), who took control of the Ottoman empire in the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries, hailed from the Slavic and Albanian populations of the Balkans. The term ↪abı̄d, however, was apparently used exclusively for subsaharan African slave armies.

The ‘abı̄d army was developed in Egypt under the Turkish gover- nor Ah.mad T. ūlūn (d. 884), who garrisoned them separately from the Mamlūk division. This particular ‘abı̄d army was probably Nubian. The immediate successors to the T. ūlūnids also maintained servile black troops, as did the Fāt.imids, who began in North Africa (in 909) before moving their capital to Cairo in 969, maintaining large numbers of black servile soldiers in both places. In Egypt these soldiers grew powerful, and skirmishes between them and nonblack units increased in number and violence. A final conflict, the “Battle of the Blacks” or the “Battle of the Slaves,” took place in 1169, when S. alāh. al-Dı̄n led his nonblack forces against some 50,000 black soldiers and drove them out of Cairo into southern Egypt. All-black units would not be used again in Egypt until the nineteenth century under Muh.ammad ↪Alı̄.

Black slave soldiers were also used in North Africa by the ninth- century Aghlabid dynasty and thereafter under successive regimes. Further west, in what is now Morocco, the Almoravid leader Yūsuf

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b. Tāshı̄n (d. 1106) was surrounded by a bodyguard of 2,000 black soldiers, and the successors to the Almoravids, the Almohads, also used black soldiers. The ultimate in the use of servile black soldiers took place under Mūlāy Ismā↪ı̄l (reigned 1672–1727), son of the black concubine, who along with his 2,000 black eunuchs was reported to have maintained 150,000 black troops, having ordered the seizure of all black males throughout the kingdom. The troops were provided black females and were forced to swear personal allegiance to Mūlāy Ismā’ı̄l upon the h. adı̄th (traditions of Muh.ammad) collected by al-Bukhārı̄, and they were therefore known as ↪abı̄d al-Bukhārı̄. This ↪abı̄d army grew enormously powerful, determining the succession to the throne for thirty years after the death of Mūlāy Ismā↪ı̄l, choosing from among his 500 sons. In 1737 the ↪abı̄d army was brought under control by Mūlāy Muh.ammad III using an Arab force. Black soldiers continue to serve in the Moroccan army to the present day, only no longer as slaves.

Iberia

Mention of the Almoravids and Almohads redirects our attention to Iberia (Spain and Portugal), site of a remarkable Muslim civilization from 711 to 1492. When Muslim forces crossed Gilbraltar into Spain in 711, it was a combined army of Berbers, subsaharan Africans, and Arabs. The invading Muslim armies renamed the peninsula al- Andalus (an apparent corruption of the term Vandal, from the former occupiers). By 720, the Muslims laid claim to territory south of the Pyrenees and parts of southern France, and in 732 they encroached further into France, where they were engaged outside of Tours and defeated at the Battle of Poitiers by Charles Martel. Celebrated in Eu- rope as a major victory over Islam, the event known as the “Highway of the Martyrs” (Balāt. al-Shuhadā’) by the Muslims was, from their perspective, little more than an insignificant border raid. The “land of the Franks,” as France and much of western Europe were known, was culturally unremarkable, economically unimportant, and of little interest to Muslims.

Those portions of Iberia under Muslim control answered to the Umayyads of Damascus until 750, when the Abbasid caliphate arose and shifted the center of the Muslim world to Baghdad. A member of the Umayyad family fled to Iberia where he restructured the Umayyad caliphate, rupturing the dream of a single Muslim empire. Muslims

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AFRICANS AND THE ISLAMIC WORLD 41

Asia

Asia Am

ur R .

Pacific Ocean

South China Sea

Mindanao

Philippine Islands

Java

Sumatra

Ceylon

Arabian Sea

Indian Ocean

Madagascar

Red Sea

Mediterranean SeaAtlantic Ocean

Europe

Iberia

Ethiopa

Europe

Danube R.

Black Sea

Beghdad Persia

Samarkand Constaninople

Asia Minor

Arabia

Mecca Nubia

Africa

Tunis

Timbuktu

Zeila

Mombasa

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Steppe Steppe

Delhi

India

In du

s R .

Aral Sea

Vo lga

R.

Yello w R

.

M ebong

R .Niger R.

Co ng

o R

.

Za mbezi R.

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China

Yunnan

Boneo

Australia

Yangtz e R.

Caspian sea

MAP 3. Spread of Islam to 1500.

would conquer Sicily between 827 and 902 and move into parts of southern Italy, but the eleventh century saw the return of Sicily to Christian control, as well as the slow erosion of Muslim power else- where in Italy and Iberia.

Al-Andalus was a Muslim state controlled by Arabs in command of Berbers and subsaharan Africans. However, conflict between Berbers and Arabs stemmed from an almost uninterrupted history of in- vasion and occupation of North African territory, beginning with the Carthaginians and followed by the Romans, the Vandals, the Byzantines, and lastly the Arabs. Berbers resisted Arab domination militarily, but they also resisted by embracing an aberrant form of Islam, Kharijism, which advocated democratic and egalitarian prin- ciples. The strategy of adopting altered expressions of an oppressor’s religion, thereby transforming it into a tool of liberation, would also be used in the New World. Berbers further resisted by creating politically autonomous space, establishing a number of Kharijite states in North Africa after 750; Kharijite communities remain in the mountains and remote areas of Algeria and Tunisia. In this way, they were not unlike the maroons of the Americas.

Yet another path of resistance was direct confrontation, a road lead- ing back to ancient Ghana. The West African savannah was crucial to the rise of the Berber Almoravid movement in the eleventh century.

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Berbers in southern Morocco noted Ghana’s spectacular growth and trade, and they concluded that it was the key to both the transsaharan trade and al-Andalus. Like the leaders of Egypt’s eighteenth dynasty, who secured their control over Nubian resources before launching campaigns into Palestine and Syria, the Almoravids began their ac- tivities by first focusing on West Africa. Their bid for power became part of a religious reform movement, and by the mid-eleventh century the Almoravids seized control of the southern and northern termini of the transsaharan trade. Financing their operation with West African gold, the Almoravids also used West African soldiers, slave and free. By century’s end, the Almoravids succeeded in bringing not only all of Morocco and western Algeria under their control, but also al-Andalus as well, founding Marrakesh as their capital. For the first time in his- tory, a single Berber power controlled much of North Africa and Iberia, and Africans would rule the “kingdom of the two shores” for nearly 300 years.

The Almoravids were succeeded by the Almohads (1146–1269), who also used West African soldiers. Like Mūlāy Ismā↪ı̄l of the seven- teenth century, al-Mans.ūr (reigned 1184–1199) was a leader who was possibly of West African ancestry. Another was Abū al-H. asan (reigned 1331–1351) of the later Marinid dynasty. Earning a reputation for cru- elty, Abū al-H. asan exchanged embassies with Mansa Mūsā prior to the latter’s death, and he was a great patron of the arts. The examples of Abū al-Has.an, al-Mans.ūr, and Mūlāy Ismā↪ı̄l demonstrate the diffi- culties in distinguishing between Berbers and subsaharan Africans, as extensive, centuries-long interaction between these regions necessar- ily meant a significant sharing of genes; an ostensibly Berber-looking individual may have in fact had considerable subsaharan ancestral ties. Europeans could and did distinguish between African groups, but their tendency to label all as Moors (literally, “blacks”), suggesting all Africans were part of a continuum of related characteristics, is not without warrant. Whatever the nature of their congenital relations, Africans of varying backgrounds in Iberia tended to participate in cul- tures knitted together by Islam. In this way, it may be better to read the designation Moor as a cultural rather than racial or ethnic qualifier.

Africans were present in al-Andalus throughout the 800-year period of Muslim domination, contributing to an intense period of intellec- tual and cultural production. It was during the Muslim domination of Iberia that the sciences and technology and the arts, including astron- omy, medicine, alchemy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, literature,

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and philosophy, received a tremendous boost. Indeed, the knowledge of the ancients, including Greek philosophy, had been lost to Europe for hundreds of years, as Latin and Greek had nearly disappeared. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars uncovered and translated the mostly Greek texts into Arabic, by which Europe reconnected with its past. The works of Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid, and the physi- cians Hippocrates and Galen were among the many reintroduced to Europe during this period. Prominent scholars of the period include Ibn Sı̄nā (or Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (also known as Averroës), who was born in Córdoba under Almoravid rule in 1126 and went on to translate and comment on the works of Aristotle as well as establish a reputation as a scientist, mathematician, philosopher, and poet. Made possible by the support of Almohad ruler al-Mans.ūr, Ibn Rushd’s work, some thirty-eight volumes of it, became popular largely through Spanish Jewish scholars, a circle that included Mūsā Ibn Maymun (or Maimonides). Students from all over Europe, including France, Germany, England, and Italy, came to study in al-Andalus, often be- coming literate in Arabic. The intellectual productivity of Muslim Iberia, as well as other parts of the Muslim world, was an important foundation for the Renaissance of western Europe.

In addition to their contribution to various branches of knowl- edge, Muslims introduced styles of architecture resulting in stunning blends of structure and landscape, of which al-Hambra is a prime example. Cities they founded include Córdoba, Seville, Toledo, and Granada, each known for a particular quality. Córdoba was a city of libraries; Seville was associated with music. Muslim cities were well planned, featuring aqueducts, gardens, public baths, and fountains to embellish mosques, hospitals, and other buildings public and pri- vate. Supplying the urban centers were fields given enhanced fertil- ity through revamped irrigation systems and the introduction of such crops as cereals and beans. However, the Muslim geographic imag- ination was by no means confined to the Iberian city and country- side; rather, Muslim scholars refined geography by more accurately measuring distances (although they remained hampered by ancient models), and they introduced to the Western world seafaring tools and techniques such as the astrolabe, the lateen sail, and the method of tacking. Some of these innovations were modified from their use in the Indian Ocean, and in any event they proved critical to the develop- ment of European seafaring and subsequent commercial and imperial expansion.

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India

While there are numerous scholarly works on al-Andalus or Moor- ish Spain, what is known about the subsaharan African contribution to this brilliant civilization is far from satisfactory. Research on the African presence in India is similarly in its infancy. Matters are com- plicated by an ancient, pre-Islamic society in which the four major castes (Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra) are hierarchically arranged in a manner corresponding with color (varna). Thus, the lowest, servile caste, the Shudra, is characterized in the ancient Vedic literature as “black” and “dark complexioned,” but as there are many dark-skinned populations throughout the world, attempting to locate Shudra origins in Africa may be pointless.

Given the historicity and expanse of Indian Ocean trade, Africans necessarily voyaged to the Indian subcontinent prior to the rise of Islam. However, it is with that religion’s movement into the subcon- tinent that the African presence becomes better documented. India initially experienced Islamic incursions as early as 711, and in the late tenth century Muslim forays from what is now Afghanistan and Iran resulted in considerable plundering. Islam reached its political zenith in the subcontinent under the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) and the Mughals (1526–1739).

Free Africans (as well as non-Africans) operated in Muslim-ruled India as merchants, seafarers, clerics, bodyguards, and even bureau- crats. Regarding slavery, African women and men assumed famil- iar roles as concubines and servile soldiers; in 1459, for example, some 8,000 served in Bengal’s army. Called “Habshis” (from the word h. abashiyyāt) and “Siddis” (from the title sayyid, afforded cap- tains of vessels), Africans settled in a variety of locales. Enclaves of Siddis can presently be found in such places as Gujarat (western India), Habshiguda in Hyderabad (central India), and Janjira Island (south of Bombay); the names Habshiguda and Janjira reflect an African ancestry.

During the time of the Mughals, there were a number of African Muslim rulers in the subcontinent. At least several Habshi rulers were in the breakaway province of Bengal (eastern India), including Mālik Andil (or Saiffuddı̄n Firuz, 1487–1490) and Nās.iruddı̄n Mah.mūd II (1490–1491). There were also several rulers in the Deccan break- way province of Ahmadnagar who were of African descent, including

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Chand Bibi (d. 1600), a princess who led Ahmadnagar resistance against the Mughals. Perhaps the most famous of all was Mālik Ambar (d. 1626), who supported Chand Bibi’s struggle against the Mughals until her assassination. Mālik Ambar, possibly Ethiopian born, was brought to India as a slave and eventually served as a highly educated military commander. Noted for his religious tolerance and patronage of the arts and learning, he ruled for twenty years and earned the admiration of Indians and Europeans alike.

The Image of the African in the Islamic World

The Muslim view of the African was an evolutionary process, informed by changing circumstances over time. Whatever the initial attitude toward the African, the trade in slaves via the Sahara, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean had some impact, but the fact that enslaved Europeans and Asians were also imported into the Islamic world, and in greater numbers until the eighteenth century, suggests that the slave trade alone was not solely responsible for a less than complimentary view of the African. Other factors, essentially cultural, must have played a role.

There is no trace of racism in the Qur’ān. Rather, there is the as- sertion that difference is of divine decree:

And among His signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your languages and colors. In that surely are signs for those who know.

(sūra or chapter 30, al-Rūm, verse 23)

This nonevaluative acknowledgment of what is now called racial diver- sity is indicative of the early Muslim period in the Arabian peninsula. There, color was both insignificant and variable, depending upon who was being compared. While Bedouins were usually described as brown or olive, Arabs at times characterized themselves as black vis-à-vis red Persians, but in comparison with black Africans these same Arabs be- came red or even white. Furthermore, the concept of red took on metaphoric meaning with Islam’s early expansion, as the hated red Persians were now the subjects of the Arabs, and redness took on a pejorative connotation. In this way, Greeks, Spaniards, and other Mediterranean populations also became red.

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It is not surprising that the Qur’ān is devoid of racial bias, or that Arabs depicted themselves as black and brown. Seventh-century Ara- bia was surrounded by far more powerful Sassanian (Persian), Byzan- tine, and Ethiopian empires, who fought each other for influence in the peninsula. The dominant peninsular power was Yemen in the south- west (called Arabia Felix by the Romans), which was distinct from the rest of the peninsula because of its urban-sustaining agriculture and because of extensive ties with Ethiopia. The latter had both invaded and conquered southern Arabia in the fourth century, taking control of the spice and silk trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean that passed through Arabia. With Sassanian help, the Yemenis pushed the Ethiopians out around 375, but the Ethiopians returned triumphantly in 512. The subsequent defeat of Ethiopian garrisons led to another Ethiopian expedition around 525. A few years later, divine intervention, according to the Qur’ān (sūra 105, al-Fı̄l, or “the Elephant”), turned back an Ethiopian assault on Mecca.

Ethiopian incursions are but one example of interaction between the Horn of Africa and Arabia that has existed for millennia; related languages and cultures are another. Such interconnectedness suggests that Ethiopians and Nubians made contributions to the Yemeni and Arab gene pool, along with other populations from the Horn. It is therefore no surprise that one of the greatest poets of pre-Islamic Ara- bia was ↪Antara (or ↪Antar), son of an enslaved Ethiopian or Nubian mother and an Arab father. Born in the pre-Islamic jahilı̄yya period (“time of barbarism”), ↪Antara followed his mother’s status and was a slave, but he earned his freedom through military prowess. His back- ground is similar to that of another figure of the early Islamic period, Khufāf b. Nadba, son of an Arab father and enslaved black mother who rose to become head of his (Arab) group or “tribe.” On the other hand, many Arabs had black skin but apparently were not descended from Africans; such was true of ↪Ubāda b. al-S. āmit, an Arab of noble birth and a leader of the Arab conquest of Egypt.

The impression that blackness was no barrier is bolstered by the example of Muh.ammad himself, who, facing mounting opposition to his message, sent seventy of his followers to seek asylum with the Ethiopian ruler in 615, presaging the official hijra or “flight” to Medina in 622. Muh.ammad’s action revealed his esteem for the piety of the Ethiopians, a sentiment consistent with Homer’s much earlier charac- terization of the “Ethiopians.” There were also a number of persons of Nubian or Ethiopian descent among the Companions of the Prophet,

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perhaps the most famous having been Islam’s first muezzin (who calls the faithful to prayers), Bilāl b. Rabāh. , born into slavery in Mecca and an early convert to Islam. Purchased and manumitted by Abū Bakr (Islam’s first caliph or successor to Muhammad as well as his father- in-law), Bilāl became the Prophet’s personal attendant. In addition to Bilāl, notables of known African descent include the caliph ↪Umar (634–644), the grandson of an Ethiopian or Nubian woman, and the conqueror of Egypt; and ↪Amr b. al-↪Ās., similarly descended from an Ethiopian or Nubian female ancestor. The Prophet himself may have been of partial African descent, as his grandfather and paternal un- cle Abū T. ālib were both reputed to be “black.” Therefore, significant Ethiopian or Nubian influences were circulating at the very core of Is- lam’s foundation. Given Ethiopia’s ascendancy, if anyone felt inferior in the seventh century, it would have been the Arabs.

And yet, there is something unsettling about these relations. One wonders if the potential for bias was not already present in pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia, for, despite the prominence of all of these men of Ethiopian or Nubian descent, it is striking that so many of them descend from enslaved mothers. Perhaps free Nubian or Ethiopian- born males were much rarer in Arab society than enslaved Nubian or Ethiopian women, so that the most common African figure in Arab society was a female slave. If so, Arab society may have begun associ- ating Africans with slavery before the rise of Islam. ↪Antara reflects an Arab acceptance of difference, but his own background suggests that Africans within the Arab world largely entered by way of the servile estate.

The expansion of Arab armies in the seventh and eighth centuries was probably the period during which Arab views of Africans began to change. Arabs were already suffering from ethnocentricity, as Islam had been revealed to an Arab and the revelation forever sealed in his language. It was not even clear that Islam was meant for non-Arabs. With the world now divided into believers and infidels, the rise of the transsaharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean slave trades did not bode well for Africans, especially those with whom Arabs had little experience. Their high regard for the Ethiopian and Nubian continued, but they were distinguished from other Africans such as the Nūba, Bujja (Beja), Zanj, and the Sūdān (from West Africa). Lack of familiarity played some role, but since most Africans entered Islamic lands as young fe- males, the Arab view of Africans was also informed by the perception of African women. Whatever the answer, Muslim societies became

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increasingly accustomed to seeing Africans as enslaved menials. The struggle over the meaning of blackness in early Islamic society can be seen in the poetry of “the crows of the Arabs” (aghribat al-↪Arab), men who lived during the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods and who were dark-skinned but not necessarily of African ancestry. These po- ets alternately bemoaned and defended their blackness. One Suh.aym (d. 660), whose name means “little black man,” wrote this:

If my color were pink, women would love me But the Lord has marred me with blackness.

Though I am a slave my soul is nobly free Though I am black of color my character is white.

A century later, one of the most popular of these poets, Abū Dulāma (d. ca. 776), was a court jester for the Abbasids in Baghdad; he wrote the following in derision of his mother and family:

We are alike in color; our faces are black and ugly, our names are shameful.

One hundred years later, one of the best-known composers of prose in classical Arabic literature, Jāh. iz. (d. 869), also alleged to be of partial African ancestry, wrote (among other things) that the Zanj “are the least intelligent and the least discerning of mankind.”

Some of this literature comes out of the Persian Gulf, where one of the consequences of the Zanj revolt may have been an anti-Zanj back- lash of sentiment. Some scholars see the revolt as the principal cause of antiblack expressions, but the revolt did not begin until 868, well after many of these black poets were already dead. Yet another argument is that Persian Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, with their emphasis on conflict between darkness and light, associated darkness with dark skin and light with white skin and influenced Muslim thinking. While this is all speculative, one source makes clear the view of the African in the Persian Gulf. The Thousand and One Nights, an apparent com- pilation of stories developed by Persian, Indian, and Chinese travelers and merchants, is associated with the early days of Baghdad’s Abbasid caliphate. Black folk are mentioned frequently in the book, principally as slaves or servants of some kind. Enslaved black men are also fea- tured at the book’s beginning, engaged in sexual escapades with King Shahzāmān’s wife and twenty other female members of his household. Some of the most pervasive stereotypes of black folk known in the

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Western world were therefore already taking shape in ninth-century Iraq and elsewhere in the Islamic world.

Those Muslims arriving at a negative assessment of the African did not do so on their own, but in dialogue with other traditions and pre- ceding opinions. One influence was Galen (fl. 122–155), whose work on anatomy remained the seminal text in medicine for both Chris- tians and Muslims through the medieval period. Galen was the official physician for gladiators at the Pergamum circus, and there presumably came into contact with blacks. In an interesting and fateful conjunc- tion, it was the famous al-Mas↪udı̄ (d. 956) who introduced Galen to the Muslim world by quoting the Greek physician’s observations of black men. Galen, al-Mas↪udı̄ stated,

mentions ten specific attributes of the black man, which are found in him and no other; frizzy hair, thin eyebrows, broad nostrils, thick lips, pointed teeth, smelly skin, black eyes, furrowed hands and feet, a long penis and great merriment. Galen says that merriment dominates the black man because of his defective brain, whence also the weakness of his intelligence.

Besides Galen, other sources were interpretations of Christian and Jewish texts condemning black skin as the curse of Ham.

Not all Muslims adopted unfavorable views of blacks. There were those who respected Africans, citing their roles as Companions of the Prophet as well as their virtues. The “defenders of the blacks” included such leading intellectuals as Jamāl al-Dı̄n Abū’l-Faraj b. al-Jawzı̄ (d. 1208), who wrote The Lightening of the Darkness on the Merits of the Blacks and the Ethiopians; and the Egyptian scholar Jalāl al-Dı̄n al- Suyūt.ı̄ (d. 1505), who wrote The Raising of the Status of the Ethiopians. Individuals such as al-Suyūt.ı̄ had substantial experience with subsaha- ran Africans and knew a number of their scholars and political leaders personally. One must therefore be careful not to paint the entire Mus- lim world with the same broad stroke.

Furthermore, it is not clear that prior to the sixteenth century the Muslim view of Europeans was any better than their assessment of Africans. The idea that geography and climate determined group char- acteristics was popularized by the tenth-century Persian physician Ibn Sı̄nā. Because of western Europe’s cold climate and cultural unattrac- tiveness, Muslims by and large held little respect for it, enslaving many from southeastern Europe. Arab and Persian Muslims who may have

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felt contempt for Africans also felt superior to Europeans, as the follow- ing quote from an Arab living in eleventh-century al-Andalus reflects:

For those who live furthest to the north . . . the excessive distance from the sun in relation to the zenith line makes the air cold and the at- mosphere thick. Their temperaments are therefore frigid, their humors [dispositions] raw, their bellies gross, their color pale, their hair long and lank. Thus, they lack keenness of understanding and clarity of intelli- gence, and are overcome by ignorance and dullness, lack of discernment, and stupidity. Such are the Slavs, the Bulgars, and their neighbors.

In view of the symmetry in opinions toward select Africans and Eu- ropeans, the divergence in the Muslim view between the two groups may well have come after the sixteenth century, when the trade in Europeans began to diminish as its counterpart in Africans contin- ued. By the eighteenth century, there was a fast association between subsaharan Africans and slavery in the central Islamic lands, whereas the enslavement of Europeans had largely become a thing of the past, confined to memory and books.

Slavery’s Aftermath

What became of all these African slaves in the Islamic world? The an- swer is by no means obvious, as descent traced through the free male line obscures if not erases African maternal ancestry. A look at con- temporary Arab populations in North Africa, Palestine, the Arabian peninsula, and even the Saudi royal family reveals discernible African features, but studies are insufficient to make conclusive statements. In Morocco the fate of subsaharan blacks is clearer, as the descendants of slaves, the h. arat.ı̄n (called bella further east), continue in servile subjec- tion to Arabic- and Berber-speaking masters to the present day. The free descendants of the h. arat.ı̄n also continued in subordination and second-class citizenship through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, heavily dependent upon patron families. Like their Ameri- can cosufferers, large numbers of the h. arat.ı̄n found themselves share- cropping in southern Morocco, along the fringes of the Sahara, effec- tively barred from any meaningful social mobility and virtually shut out of systems of education. Nevertheless, also like their American counterparts, the dispossessed of Morocco have experienced changes for the better with the twentieth century’s progression. One famous

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community of blacks in Morocco are the gnawa, noted for their distinct musical traditions. In Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria, the descendants of subsaharan Africans (and North Africans, for that matter) practice Islam along with bori, a cosmology concerned with the spirit world’s interaction with the corporeal. Bori is a mixture of spirits – infants, nature gods, spirits of deceased Muslim leaders, Muslim jinn (spir- its), and so forth – who cause illness and who are appeased through offerings, sacrifice, and dance possession. West African communities practicing bori, such as the Songhay, Bambara, and Hausa, were dis- tinguished in North Africa at least through the mid-twentieth cen- tury. The practice of bori within dominant Muslim societies parallels a similar persistence of subsaharan African religions in the Christian- controlled Americas, and it is a testimony to the tenacity of African culture even under duress.

In India and Pakistan, the descendants of the Habshis and Sid- dis no longer speak African languages, but their worship and music and dance are suffused with African content, influencing adherents of both Hinduism and Islam. Hindu Siddis in India, for example, use only Siddi priests for guidance in life, who have expertise in engag- ing Siddi spirits; in Pakistan, the “Sheedis” venerate the Shi’ite leader Imam H. usain (martyred at Karbala in 680) in a way that transforms the latter into an active force. In addition to those of clear African de- scent are the vast millions of Dalits, with whom the former may have intermingled, along with the Shudra caste. Dalits, formerly referred to as “untouchables,” were considered ritually polluting and outside of the caste system, even below the Shudras. The Shudras, Dalits, and Siddis have all experienced severe discrimination, their darker skins not unrelated to their suffering.

Perhaps the greater mystery concerns the old Ottoman empire. Ap- proximately 362,000 Africans were imported into its heartland during the nineteenth century alone. The slave trade was abolished there in 1857, at which point all freed persons were required to serve as domes- tics in designated households (presumably to preserve slaveholder in- terests). Perhaps the disproportionate use of eunuchs, combined with the high ratio of females to males, explains the apparent disappearance of blacks there. It should be noted, however, that diffused settlements of “Negroes” existed along the western slope of the Caucasus moun- tains, in what is now Abkhazia and Georgia, until recent times. They may have been descendants of the enslaved brought to the Black Sea re- gion by the Ottomans; alternatively, they may be related to the ancient

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people of “Colchis,” as the area was called by the Greeks, where, records Herodotus, the inhabitants were “black-skinned with wooly hair.”

Suggestions for Further Reading

On the early or classical period of Islam’s history, one may begin with Albert Habib Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard U. Press, 1991). More challenging is the first volume of Marshall G. S. Hodgson’s three-volume The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1974) and Fred Donner’s The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1981). For Muhammad, see W. Montgomery Watt’s classics, Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford: Claren- don U. Press, 1953) and Muhammad at Medina (Oxford: Clarendon U. Press, 1956). An accessible reading of the sayings and traditions of the Prophet is Alfred Guillaume, The Life of the Prophet: A Translation of Ishaq’s Rasul Allah (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1967).

The scholarship regarding Islam in early West and East Africa is voluminous, as is obviously true of the literature on Islam in general. One could begin with Mervyn Hiskett’s The Development of Islam in West Africa, although it is more concerned with what becomes Nigeria. Nehemia Levtzion’s Islam in West Africa: Religion, Society and Politics to 1800 (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1994) and his Ancient Ghana and Mali (London: Methuen, 1973) are also useful. There are excellent articles in Nehemia Levtzion and Humphrey J. Fisher, eds., Rural and Urban Islam in West Africa (Boulder, CO: Rienner, 1986). More chal- lenging but thorough are the contributions to the first volume of J. F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder, eds., History of West Africa (London: Longman, 1985), 3rd ed. Though dated, two enjoyable classics re- main Félix Dubois, Timbuctoo the Mysterious, trans. Diana White (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896) and E. W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors (London: Oxford U. Press, 1968). For African ur- ban areas, see Graham Connah, African Civilizations. Precolonial Cities and States in Tropical Africa: An Archaeological Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1987). For East Africa specifically, see J. F. Safari, The Making of Islam in East Africa (Dar es Salaam: Benedictine Pub- lications Ndanda-Peramiho, 1994). Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti’s Islam in East Africa, New Sources: Archives, Manuscripts and Written

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Historical Sources, Oral History, Archaeology (Rome: Herder, 2001) is a collection of data from a 1999 conference, and it is helpful. For more focused studies, consider Randle L. Pouwells, Horn and Crescent: Cul- tural Change and Traditional Islam on the East African Coast, 800–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1987) and Frederick Cooper, Plan- tation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale U. Press, 1977).

Mention of Cooper’s work provides a segue into the topic of slavery. Ralph Austen’s African Economic History: Internal Development and Ex- ternal Dependency (London: J. Curry; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1987) contains an important discussion of the volume and organi- zation of the various external slave trades, while Paul E. Lovejoy’s Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge U. Press, 1983) and Patrick Manning’s Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1990) combine these insights with discussions of domestic slavery and arguments about the implications of slave trading for Africa. Moving to the actual sites of enslavement, John O. Hunwick’s “African Slaves in the Mediterranean World: A Neglected Aspect of the African Diaspora,” in Joseph E. Harris, ed., Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora (Washington, DC: Howard U. Press, 1993), is an excellent overview. R. Brunschvig’s “Abd,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1960), new ed., addresses the equation of African slaves with this term. Bernard Lewis’s Race and Color in Islam (New York: Octagon Books, 1971) and his Race and Slav- ery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York and Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1990) are probably the most thorough discussions of the African presence in the Islamic world, although they are somewhat controversial in that translations from Arabic to English tend to favor the more pejorative of possible meanings. Compare with Murray Gor- don, Slavery in the Arab World (New York: New Amsterdam, 1989), who emphasizes the sexual component of slavery. Important studies in various sites of the Islamic world include John Ralph Willis, ed., Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa (London, England, and Totowa, NJ: 1985), 2 vols.; Y. Hakan Erdem, Slavery in the Ottoman Empire and Its Demise, 1800–1909 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Alexan- dre Popovi’c, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd/9th Century, trans. Léon King (Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner, 1999); and Ehud R. Toledano, Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East (Seattle: U. of Washington Press, 1998). Graham W. Irwin’s Africans Abroad (New

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York: Columbia U. Press, 1977) provides translations of important documents. Information and accounts of the movement and experi- ences of slaves in Africa and the Middle East can be found in Martin Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1998); Paul Lovejoy and Jan Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897– 1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1993); and John O. Hunwick and Eve Trout Powell, eds., The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Markus Weiner, 2002).

Concerning more contemporary subsaharan communities in North Africa and their cultures, see Mohammed Ennaji, Serving the Master: Slavery and Society in Nineteenth-Century Morocco, trans. Seth Graeb- ner (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); Émile Dermenghem, Le culte des saints dans l’islam maghrébin (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1954); Vin- cent Crapanzano, The Hamadsha: A Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1973); A. J. N. Tremearne, The Ban of the Bori: Demons and Demon-Dancing in West and North Africa (Lon- don: Heath, Cranton, and Ouseley, 1914); and Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zār Cult in Northern Sudan (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1989).

Context for the question of Africans in India is provided by K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the In- dian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1990). Joseph E. Harris was one of the first to pursue this topic in The African Presence in Asia; Consequences of the East Asian Slave Trade (Evanston: Northwestern U. Press, 1971). Fitzroy A. Baptiste’s “The African Presence in India,” in Africa Quarterly 38 (no. 2, 1998: 92–126), is a fine analysis, linking the discussion to Trinidad. V. T. Rajshekhar raises vexing issues in Dalit: The Black Untouchables of In- dia (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 1995), while Vijay Prashad argues for coalitions that are based on racial categories in “Afro-Dalits of the Earth, Unite!,” in African Studies Review 43 (no. 1, 2000: 189–201). The most recent literature is to be found in Edward Alpers and Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, eds., Sidis and Scholars: Essays on African Indians (New Delhi: Rainbow; Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003).

Concerning Moorish Spain, one should begin with Jamil M. Abun- Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (Cambridge: Cam- bridge U. Press, 1987). For the adventurous with interest in North Africa, look at Ibn Khaldun’s The Muqadimmah, trans. Franz Rosen- thal (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958) and his Histoire des Berbères

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et des dynasties musulmanes de L’Afrique septentrionale, trans. (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1925–56). Other references include L. P. Harvey, Islamic Spain, 1250–1500 (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1990); D. Fairchild Ruggles, Gardens, Landscape, and Vision in the Palaces of Islamic Spain (University Park: Pennsylvania State U. Press, 2000); Ivan Van Ser- tima, Golden Age of the Moor (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992); Mark D. Meyerson and Edward D. English, eds., Christians, Muslims and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Interaction and Cultural Change (Notre Dame, IN: U. of Notre Dame Press, 1999); Thomas F. Glick, From Muslim Fortress to Christian Castle: Social and Cultural Change in Medieval Spain (Manchester, England: Manchester U. Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); and Hugh Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of al-Andalus (London and New York: Longman, 1996). Bernard Lewis’s The Muslim Discovery of Eu- rope (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982) and Maribel Fierro, Judı́os y musulmanes en al-Andalus y el Magreb: contactos intelectuales (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2002), provide a discussion of Europe’s intellectual engagement with Muslims in Iberia and elsewhere.

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