الرحمن الرحيم
بسم
Ali Ibn Abu Talib and Bilal ibn Rabah
Two sides of the same coin
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One of the best and most effective ways of proving the dark
skinned origin of the original Arabs is the descriptions of Bilal ibn
Raba and Ali ibn Abu Talib.
Any and everyone knows that Bilal was Black. He is always
referred to as ‘the black slave’. They have made slavery
synonymous with the name Bilal forgetting the fact that he was a
pious Muslim, a loyal companion of the Prophet and was given
the responsibility as The Treasurer of the Muslim community in
Makka.
Bilal’s experiance is often used by Muslims to prove that there is
no racism in Islam and his former slave status is often cited as
evidence that Islam is open to all races of humanity.
This of course is partially true and no one doubts the universality
of the Quranic message, but what people fail to realise is that in
5th, 6th and 7th century Arabia 90% of the people looked just like
Bilal and it was pale skinned people who were the ones who
stood out from the crowd!
The important Syrian Muslim scholar and historian of Islam, alDhahabī (d. 1348), in his entry on Bilal ibn Rabah in his
encyclopaedic Siyar alam al-nubala’, reports the following
tradition attributed to the Prophet Mohamed:
“There are four Forerunners (in Islam, al-Subbaq): I am the sabiq
(forerunner) of the Arabs; Salman [al-Farsi] is the sabiq of the