Islamic history sources which would appear to be racist towards black people.
They would use these narrations and assume that the ancient Arabs were
indeed Indo-Aryan or look just like North Africans or Gulf Arabic speaking
people do today.
These misconceptions and gross fabrications are also supported in docudramas, videos or films relating to the general history of Islam and Muslims,
the most famous being the movie The Message .
Although the producers went to great pains to make sure that the narrative
about the History of Islam and the early Muslims was correct according to
authentic sources, they did not take that same care when choosing the actors
to play the part of well known personalities or simply the general population at
the time. They even went as far as having a Caucasian actor, Anthony Quinn,
play the part of the Prophet Mohamed’s uncle Hamza ibn Abdel Mutalib!
Whenever a black was shown it was inevitably as a slave. The most famous
slave according to this biased and misleading media representation was and
most of the time is Bilal Ibn Rabah.
Bilal is also the centerpiece of another misconception: that his situation and
treatment in Makka illustrates that the Arabs at that time were white and
racist. In fact, details of his biography clearly indicate the opposite.
Bilal inherited his Ethiopian mother’s slave status. The fact that this Black
man was an abused slave to an Arab family is often taken as proof of the antiblack racism that allegedly characterized pre-Islamic and even Islamic Arabia.
This conclusion is falsified not only by the fact that most slaves in Arabia at
time were actually white Indo-Aryan, but also by a more telling fact: