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It’s Called the Biography of the First Anti-Racist, and You Should Read It

The life of the prophet of Islam could prove a prolific read at these tense racial times.

Pashew Nuri

Published in

Age of Awareness

6 min readJun 26, 2020

Racism did not make any sense to me until I started learning English as a foreign language.

After I graduated from high school in 2007, I wanted to become an English language teacher. I got accepted to a B.A program in English as a Foreign Language. By the time, I was not able to communicate in English, I only knew some sentences and some songs. I still remember Blue’s Show the Meaning of Being Lonely. How romantic of me!

I spent my first two years at university learning English mostly through self-education. University curricula were detached from the real world and it was very theoretical. Its campus life was completely disengaged in bringing about better exposure to language use. Hence I had to depend on self-education.

Brought up and educated a Muslim, I had nothing in me about racism. However, I knew all too well about nationalism, ethnic cleansing, forced disappearance, and genocide. As Kurds, we are known for these. They make part of our identity.

Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime caused 1) genociding an estimate of 182,000 Kurds, 2) chemicalizing the entire Kurdish city of Halabja killing 5000 civilians, and 3) burying 8,000 Barzanis in mass graves. That's just the big ones to mention. Moreover, Turkey’s historical conflict with the Kurds as a nation, and its attempts killing, and banning their culture and language use. Iran’s deep-rooted discriminations against Kurds violating their social, political, and cultural rights since Kurds were Kurds in Iran.

I was all too familiar with nationalism, but not so familiar with racism. At least not in the western historical sense of racism. I think the reason for this was my religious background. Race for Muslims is an identification adjective to describe how someone looks or who the person is. It never means “an ideology of racial domination” (Wilson, 1999: p. 14) or a category for human differentiation that brings or takes certain social, political, and economical privileges away.

I was very determined to learn English well. My freshman computer class taught me the basics of computer use. I also learned how to use the internet by using the 1 hour per day internet access I had in the college computer lab.

Do not be surprised at how late I was introduced to the world of technology. Access to certain means of/for education was a rare thing for someone's schooled in rural areas. Plus, we just got rid of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship.

I started looking for online lectures and documentaries on America, Islam, History, and other topics that I downloaded and listened to every day. I was trying to mimic in order to learn better pronunciations and gain confidence in speaking. My vocabulary grew and my exposure expanded.

My searches on the internet for these topics led me to people like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, Hamza Yusuf, and others. I started reading and learning about America’s historical struggle for racial justice. My reading journey made me cry, laugh, feel sorry, and reflect a lot. It frequently reminded me of stories of racial justice from the history of Islam. The most well-know of it all was the story of Bilal, the first ‘caller of prayer’ in Islam who was a non-Arab black slave when Islam was first announced in Mecca. He became a Muslim and was freed. He married a noble lady from a noble family of the Arabs. He also became the head of the treasury. He was very loved by the Prophet himself and the Muslim community. We Muslims usually utter his name as Sayyiduna Bilal (Bilal Our Master) until today.

“How come I call a black person my master, and how the United States treats the same black person?” I wondered!

I am writing another blog post on Bilal that’s coming up soon.

Racism in the sense manifested and acted in the United States caused me a paradigm shift in the way I looked at justice, the human story on earth, and education. It also recurrently reminded me of how people’s internal affairs are heavily affected by how you are educated.

The life of the Prophet Mohammad himself (peace be upon him) was dedicated to justice, including racial justice. An education model he brought forth was based on peoples’ merit and efforts in both “piety and good action”. An education that fought against rooting out tribalism (racism) and fought for building a sense of global community (Ummah).

The Prophet of Islam, Mohammad (PBUH) is considered to be (arguably) the first anti-racist in human history. Dr. Craig Considine, a professor of Sociology at Rice University states that “Prophet Muhammad was the first person in human history to declare, in no uncertain terms, that no person is above another by virtue of race or ethnicity.” (Reference).

Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) considered racism a trait of days of ignorance (Jahiliya). A period before the advent of Islam.

He said: ‘Whoever fights for a cause that is not clear, advocating tribalism, getting angry for the sake of tribalism, then he has died a death of Jahiliya (ignorance).” (Source)

The Prophet would call Umm Ayman (a black woman and former slave) his mother after his mother.

Moreover, there is the opinion that Satan is the first racist in history. He refused to obey God’s command to prostrate to Adam because Adam was created from clay while Satan was created from fire.

According to Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, a medieval Islamic theologian, racism is a form of Shirk (ascribing partners to God), which is among the highest sins in Islam.

Dr. Craig Considine goes on to say that “By distancing himself from the tendency to categorize others based upon ethnicity, the Prophet preceded the words of Martin Luther King Jr., whose “I Have a Dream” speech called for African Americans to be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

A Recommendation for the Western Reader

It is therefore that I suggest studying the life of the Prophet Mohammad or reading about him for western individual/reader. I believe it can provide self-reflections, a new perspective in approaching the race issue, and strategies for education. I intend to provide the following as recommended readings on his life. Please know that I made the list with a western reader in mind. The list might differ for, say, an Asian or Middeastern reader.