Islam Is Biased Toward Arabs. Why?

Most Muslims in the world today are non-Arabs. It’s an ironic fact, given that Islam and Arab chauvinism are inseparable.

Even though it’s not well-known, Islamic history paints a clear picture: Islam elevates Arabs over others.

To see this, we have to go back to the 600s and the Arab conquests. Then, Islam was unambiguously the faith of ruling Arab conquerors. “At first,” writes historian Bernard Lewis, “Arab and Muslim were virtually the same thing.” The Arabs constituted a ruling caste, with the conquered territories’ native populations as their subjects. Non-Arab converts to Islam (mawlas), when they did emerge, were treated as second-class citizens.

One justification for such attitudes, recounted by medieval Arab author Ibn Abd Rabbih, was that Muhammad had been an Arab. At meals, according to Ibn Abd Rabbih, mawlas had to stand while Arabs were seated, and mawla women had to be married off not by their male relatives, but by their Arab patrons.

Overall, Lewis concludes that “the struggle for equal rights of the non-Arab converts was one of the main themes of the first two centuries of Islam.” Even “half-breeds” were treated as inferior to pure-bred Arabs, though superior to non-Arabs.

Mawlas in territories conquered by Arabs faced heavy discrimination. They also depended on their patrons for financial security and legal protection. And it wasn’t just the convert himself who was placed in this category but also his descendants.

As historian Marshall Hodgson [says], “[Islam] was above all a badge of a united Arabism, the code and discipline of a conquering élite.”

Only as the balance of power gradually shifted in the non-Arabs’ favor did converts—at least, those who had not been slaves—cease to be called mawlas.

Despite this change, in Why I Am Not a Muslim, writer Ibn Warraq notes the erasure of non-Arab culture in Muslim societies. Partly to blame for this, he says, is “the official Muslim dogma that pre-Islamic times were times of barbarism and ignorance” and ought to be ignored. Many non-Arab Muslims, he stresses, are better acquainted with Arab history than with their own nations’ pre-Islamic past, while pre-Islamic monuments are allowed to fall into ruin. Tellingly, it was Western scholars who first practiced Egyptology, Assyriology, and Iranology.

Lewis further refers to the Islamic legal principle of Kafa’a. This doctrine, he explains, means that a woman’s male guardian can prevent her from marrying a man of lower status, or even revoke such a marriage after the fact. Status, in this context, is partly a question of ethnicity: “The jurists insist very clearly on the distinction between Arab and non-Arab. A non-Arab man is not the equal of an Arab woman in any circumstances.”

Not all schools of Islamic jurisprudence understand Kafa’a in the same way, and Lewis notes that Shi’ites make no use of the concept at all. Still, the viewpoint described by Lewis is at least a common one. The 14th-century legal tract Reliance of the Traveller has this to say:

The following are not suitable matches for one another: (1) a non-Arab man for an Arab woman (O: because of the hadith that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said, “Allah has chosen the Arabs above others”) […]

The book in question is a “Shafi’i manual of Islamic law that in 1991 was certified by the highest authority in Sunni Islam, Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, as conforming ‘to the practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community.’” The Shafi’i school is one of the four major schools of Islamic law. Unsurprisingly, one Islamic website calls Reliance of the Traveller “the primary Sunni manual of Islam in English.”

In this vein, we can note that one downstream effect of Islamic teachings is supporting Arab chauvinism. Thus, Ibn Warraq contends that Islam’s dualistic division between believers and infidels has influenced even some non-Muslim Arabs, leading them to blame Western nations for all the Middle East’s problems.

https://intellectualtakeout.org/2024/10/islam-is-biased-toward-arabs/