Medieval Arabic literature often included Black African characters, offering a window into historic perceptions of race and race relations. This examination reveals how ideas about race developed during the Middle Ages and their lasting impact on contemporary views. The narrative explores the significance of these Black heroes within the storytelling traditions of Arabic-speaking Muslims, highlighting the moral, geographic, and cultural contexts they represent. The book aims to shed light on race concepts that emerged in predominantly non-Black spaces and their implications for understanding social history today.
This book asks: why these Black heroes? What did their blackness do within the worlds built through storytelling among Arabic-speaking Muslims in the Middle Ages? What possible futures did it conjure and delimit, what present orders did it explain, and what pasts did it help to index morally, geographically, and culturally?
I am less interested in the intellectual history of Arabic epics as such than in what this corpus of thousands of pages of lore that, uniquely among Arabic prose-works of their time, extensively narrativizes the lives of legendary people raced as Black in predominantly non-Black spaces, can allow us to see if treated as part of the social-historical archive.
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