their rhetoric and dogma. The issue of Islam, Arabs and people of African
descent was thoroughly addressed in an article by Wesley Williams PhD;
Islam and the Afro centric Crusades: The End of An Era ....in which he
addresses, refutes and challenges many of the gross exaggerations,
assertions, misinformation and misconceptions of Arabs, Islam and Africans
from well known scholars such as Dr Chancellor Williams, Dr Ben Jochanan
and John Hendrik Clarke.
The fact that the classical Arabs were Africoids explains the observations of
early twentieth century European observes and ethnographers who assumed
that the original Arabians were black-skinned Hamites, part of a supposed
‘black belt of mankind’ stretching from Africa to Melanesia.
Sir Arthur Keith, renowned anthropologist from the Field Museum of Natural
History, observed for example:
“The enigma of modern anthropology is the Black Belt of mankind. It
commences in Africa and peters out amongst the natives of the Melanesian
Islands of the Pacific. At each extremity of the belt, in Africa as in Melanesia
we find peoples with black skins, woolly hair, more or less beardless,
prognathous and long-headed.
We cannot suppose these negro peoples, although now widely separated,
have been evolved independently of each other. We therefore suppose that at
one time a proto-negroid belt crossed the ancient world, occupying all
intermediate lands, Arabia, Baluchistan, India, Further India, the Philippines
and Malay Archipelago.”
That this Black Belt of Mankind commenced in Africa and extended into
Arabia is an important suggestion to keep in mind when considering our
question. These ancient African immigrants to Arabia are the ancestors of
the black Arabs of a later time. That the aboriginal Arabians and their
descendants had kinship with the populations west of the Red Sea in Africa
was pointed out by several ethnographers. Major-General Maitland, Political
Resident in Aden for Britain, noted in 1932:
“The people of Arabia…belong to two distinct and apparently quite different
races. The common idea of the Arab type… (is) tall, bearded men with cleancut hawk-like face. The Arabs of South Arabia are smaller, darker, coarser
featured and nearly beardless…All authorities agree that the southern Arabs
are nearly related by origin to the Abyssinians’’