Bilal and his mother Hamam were slaves to the notorious Quraish tribe, Banu
Jumah.
Their owner, Umayya ibn Khalaf ibn Safwan, a Makkan Arab, was a leading
Quraish and head of the Banu Jumah.
Umayya is the Quraish Arab who so abused and tortured Bilal to make him
recant his monotheistic proclamation: Allah Ahad (“One God”).
And it is Umayya whom Bilal sought out and killed at the Battle of Badr in 624.
This is important here because the Banu Jumah were a famously blackskinned Arab tribe.
According to al-Dhahabi, they were, like Bilal, “exceedingly black-skinned,
shadīd al-udma.”
Thus the scene in Mustapha Akkad’s 1977 movie The Message depicting a
white-skinned Umayya (played by Bruno Barnabe) torturing in the hot sun the
black-skinned Bilal (played by Johnny Sekka) is all wrong.
A more accurate depiction would have an intensely black-skinned Bilal ibn
Raba tortured by an equally black-skinned Umayya.
Now, while this correction doesn’t make the enslavement and torture right, it
does make it about something totally different from the putative “white Arab
racism.”
There is one famous narration which highlights an incident which some people
may use to support the fact that Arabs were ‘Indo-European’ racist against
Black people.
Concerning Abu Dharr al Gaffari, a well known companion of the Prophet,
calling Bilal ibn Rabah "son of a black woman" (ibn Sawdaa), it's not clear that
he actually said that. There are different versions of the narration. One version
says that Abu Dharr said:
"I called a man names and I insulted his mother..."
And IT IS SAID that the man that he was referring to was Bilal. Another version
says that Abu Dharr said:
"...and his mother didn't speak Arabic clearly and I insulted her."
And another version says that he said: