Who is this 'Abd al-Wahhāb, and why do I keep calling him "black-Arab" or "black-skinned" rather than "Afro-Arab" or some such? It turns out he's black due to a medical anomaly that says a lot about how race was thought, scientifically, to operate at the time...

Stay tuned! https://twitter.com/Tweetistorian/status/1186865673919557632

Ok, time to put that lunchtime espresso to use!
CW: rape, abuse

Violence against women is not uncommon in the Arabic epic tradition: 'Antar's mother is captured, Maymūna is nearly forcibly wed to a Byzantine general...

...even the heroine of Sīrat Dhāt al-Himma, Fāṭima, whose moniker means "Possessor of Ambition," is subject to abuse. She is forced to wed her cousin despite wanting the unbound life of a knight. He drugs and rapes her "until her blood pours." So 'Abd al-Wahhāb's story begins...

...Nine months later, a son is born to Fatima. To everyone's shock, "his color was like the thick, turbid night, dusky, taut of limbs, black of eyes, and with beautifully arched brows." The immediate assumption is that Fatima has had an affair with a slave (a bit cliché, no?)...

...Fatima, who has always preferred the company of women anyway, refutes these charges and secrets 'Abd al-Wahhab away. When his father discovers him and his coloring, he demands a paternity trial...
(Nielsen: Illustration for "The Tale of the Three Elder Women")

...In Mecca, our family meets a team of physiognomists who divine legitimate parentage from footprints. This vignette is like when the Prophet Muhammad's foster son, Zayd b. Haritha is confirmed as Usama's b. Zayd's father bc of their matched feet...

...As the Hadith says, "During the jāhiliyya, the people of lineage [nasab] would attack Usāma’s pedigree because he was deeply dark black, and his father Zayd was whiter than cotton." Physiognomic sciences were one way of confirming biological relationships that looks belie...

...But they were also a way of vilifying somatic traits by ascribing them a dispositional essence, often by linking non-normative traits to imbalances in one's humors and therefore in mental/physical well-being
(quote: Ghersetti trans. of Pseudo-Aristotle, "Firasa & Intelligence)

...Notice anything... uh... racialized about that? ...

(other excellent to check out if this interests you are @krisrich's Difference & Disability in the Medieval Islamic World and Robert Hoyland's article "Physiognomy in Islam")

...But to go back to 'Abd al-Wahhāb, the family sallies forth to the highest court in Mecca, where the imam Ja'far al-Sadiq offers a final judgment: the reason for his blackness is that he had been conceived during Fatima's menses (hence the blood), and her issue dyed the fetus..

...Now, obviously there's a menstrual sex taboo issue here (in hadith, the Ibn Hayda, or child conceived during the menses, is said to be like an Ibn Zina, or bastard; the Talmud portends leprosy for one's offspring), but there's also a "scientific" line of reasoning afoot...

...It's almost more syllogism than science, but the logic is that the nuṭfa, or seminal fluid, is contributed to by both the male and female ejaculates (thanks, Hippocrates!), if you add a colored liquid to the mix, poof, different-colored baby...

...there's another major instance of this in Islamic lore, in the Qisas al-Anbiya (stories of the Prophets) tradition as recorded by al-Kisa'i (d. 805). In his narrative, when Noah curses his son Ham and dooms him to servility, they are still aboard the arc...
(Read this book!)

... Ham sleeps with his wife some time later, and God "opens their gall vesicles" (famously the place where black bile is produced acc. to Greek/Galeno-Islamic medicine), and their nuṭfas are colored, producing black offspring, & onward unto eternity...

...Generally, when racial difference that is somatically inscribed gets explained in the medieval period, this is done in one of two ways, one is Divine fiat (the Curse of Ham, or the marking of Cain in the case of medieval Jews in Europe), the other is climate's effect on humors

...But what 'Abd al-Wahhāb's story shows is that there is another explanation circulating in society, no less scientifically-reasoned than climatology but almost as damning as the curse of Ham, and that is this theory of fluid contamination...

...Other sira characters are also blackened by menstrual sex, including a villain in Sirat 'Antar. And, in other medieval
Arabic works, other speculative theories of racial change in offspring get posed, i.e. "parental imprinting." Wendy Doniger/Gregory Spinner discuss it here:

...another common belief is in "atavism" as defined in Aristotelian biology, namely that traits from several generations past can suddenly reemerge in one's offspring. This gets mentioned in both Sirat Dhat al-Himma and in some versions of Abu Zayd's birth in Sirat Bani Hilal...

...Of course, none of these theories are innocent (Ibn Khaldun infamously uses climate theory to portray Africans as of deficient intellect--the hot sun warps not just their features but their minds), but is this "scientific racism?" (often associated esp. with Nazism)..

...As David Nirenberg has argued, the "scientific" racism of early modernity didn't look so different from medieval scientific conceptions, the Enlightenment thinker Immanuel Kant explains race as arising from climate, after all...
(speaking of, *someone* needed more sun)

...but perhaps the best way to think about it is what do these theories do? At base, they lend a veneer of rigor to venality, chauvinism, & the regulation of (women's and minorities') bodies, & they abet legal and political systems (religious & secular) in reifying these dynamics

...if race is not that which is biological (it's not, folks) but that which society has *biologized* for the purpose of articulating certain kinds of power, then I think that's what we've got here in our medieval Arabo-Muslim milieu, too...