A new account of racial logics in premodern Islamic literature.
 
In Black Knights, Rachel Schine reveals how the Arabic-speaking world developed a different form of racial knowledge than their European neighbors during the Middle Ages. Unlike in European vernaculars, Arabic-language ideas about ethnic difference emerged from conversations extending beyond the Mediterranean, from the Sahara to the Indian Ocean. In these discourses, Schine argues, Blackness became central to ideas about a global, ethnically inclusive Muslim world.

Schine traces the emergence of these new racial logics through popular Islamic epics, drawing on legal, medical, and religious literatures from the period to excavate a diverse and ever-changing conception of Blackness and race. The result is a theoretically nuanced case for the existence and malleability of racial logics in premodern Islamic contexts across a variety of social and literary formations.

Rachel Schine is assistant professor of Arabic and history at the University of Maryland.

Introduction

Part One: Making Race
1. Origin Stories of the Black-Arab Hero
2. Conceiving ʿAbd al-Wahhāb
3. The (Popular) Science of Difference

Part Two: Race through Time
4. The Past
5. The Present

Part Three: Race through Space
6. Venturing Abroad
7. Returning Home

Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Appendix
Bibliography
Index