An interview with Touria Khannous
Souffles: What made you write this book?
Khannous: I wrote this book because I noticed how often conversations about race are avoided—not just in everyday life, but even in academic spaces. Academics rarely discuss race at schools or universities; people in general avoid talking about race whether in public or academic settings. This silence felt like a missed opportunity to understand our shared history and culture. I wanted, through this book, to contribute to the academic discussions on race, which are undeniably awkward and difficult because they often involve unequal relations of power and privilege. I also wanted to address gaps and silences in the Arabic literary canon, given that there are not many studies that focus on race in Arabic literature. I wanted to explore how race has been represented in Arabic literature and film from the pre-Islamic period to today. Surprisingly, this vibrant tradition has often been overlooked, and I wanted to bring it to light. In putting together a Black literary canon, I was fascinated by how much Arab literature and film have engaged with the idea of race, spanning from the Arabian Peninsula before Islam right up to the present day. But what really became obvious to me is how much of this work has been overlooked. I think it is largely because it does not fit neatly into the existing frameworks or categories that academia tends to prioritize. As a result, it has been sidelined or excluded from the broader conversation. It is such a vibrant and meaningful tradition, and it is a real loss that it has not received the recognition it deserves. This is also partly because the Arabic literary tradition has been classified according to genre and other criteria, which has resulted in race politics being obscured or neutralized. I also wanted to show that the history of black Africans in this region is not associated only with race, since the book also highlights relationships of solidarity, kinship, trade as well as intellectual and cultural exchange between black Africans and Arabs, such as in the case of Mali. Ultimately, I hope this book sparks conversations about race that highlight the deep connections between Black Africans and Arabs throughout history.
Souffles: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address?
Khannous: The book explores how race has been understood and represented in Arab literature and film across different time periods, from pre-Islamic poetry to modern literary texts.
For instance, I examine how medieval scholars debated whether traits like skin color were influenced by environment, and how these ideas evolved over time. The book dives into these scholarly debates about race, looking at how ideas about lineage, ancestry, and identity have changed over time. For example, there is this ongoing discussion about whether traits are fixed or if they’re influenced by factors like climate, or even how language can be used to trace descent. I explore how some writers focused on geography as a key factor shaping human groups, while others leaned into theories like the racialized Hamitic theory. I also track how these ideas about race evolved over centuries—from the pre-Islamic period all the way to today—and how the vocabularies of race developed in the region. What is really interesting is seeing the range of perspectives from different authors across a range of time periods and locations. It is like a mosaic of thought, showing how diverse and complex the conversations about race have been in this region. The texts I examine really highlight these debates as well as other theoretical questions, and the authors I discuss come from different time periods and experiences, which adds so much depth to the conversation.
Souffles: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous
research and writing?
Khannous: My earlier work focused on African women’s literature and film, exploring how women writers and filmmakers address issues like feminism, nationalism, and postcolonial politics. This new book builds on that by examining how Black Africans, including women, are represented in Arab narratives. Both projects are rooted in my interest in the connections between Africa and the African diaspora, and how these relationships are reflected in literature and film. My book, Generational Shifts in African Women’s Literature, Film and Internet Discourses (2013), delved into some of the big questions that come up in postcolonial novels and films by African women writers and filmmakers from countries like Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. While each of these countries has its own unique trajectory, they also have a lot of common when it comes to their social, cultural, and political histories, especially given their shared colonial contexts. I explore how these women writers position themselves within broader conversations about feminism, nationalism, modernity, and global politics—and how they use their work to build platforms for social and political change in their home countries. I highlight how their perspectives and priorities have evolved across different generations. I also dig into the many ways they exercise agency—whether it’s through politics, culture, religion, or art—and how they are actively pushing for legal reforms and driving civil society movements. Throughout my scholarly career, I have been deeply interested in the dynamics and reciprocal interactions between Africa and the African diaspora, and this previous work on African women is relevant to my book, Black-Arab Encounters, which looks at how Black Africans, including African women, have been represented in Arab narratives.
Souffles: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you
like it to have?
Khannous: I hope that my book Black-Arab Encounters in Literature and Film will resonate with anyone interested in understanding the complexities of race, whether they are scholars, students, or simply curious readers. The book is not just about Arabic literature—it is about how we think about race, identity, and belonging. It invites readers to compare Arab and Western perspectives on race and to see how these ideas have shaped our world. I hope it encourages readers to question their assumptions about race and to explore the rich, often overlooked, connections between Black Africans and Arabs. Due to its multidisciplinary character, my book is a reference for readers of Arabic literature and Middle Eastern studies. African studies and Black diaspora specialists and those interested in the history of Arabic literature and the Black communities of the Middle East will also be interested in reading the book. As a study of the issue of race, the book will also interest critical race theorists and scholars on race. The book will impact the way readers venture into the Arab world’s racial complexities and provide them an opportunity to compare Arabs’ conception of race with the Western ideas of race within the framework of various disciplines. This approach will help readers identify connections between different works that might seem unrelated at first glance. It also opens up a way to explore how race adds layers of complexity to how we traditionally understand Arabic literature.
Souffles: What other projects are you working on right now?
Khannous: Looking into the future, my next project will explore how race and white supremacy have shaped the Middle East in the postcolonial era. I will examine a range of issues from beauty standards that privilege whiteness to discriminatory practices in hiring and marriage laws. By examining these issues, I hope to challenge the orientalist idea of the Middle East as a static, unchanging region and show how it has been impacted by global racial formations. I will look at the different manifestations of white supremacy in the Middle East, against the backdrop of its history as a place that witnessed slavery as well as experienced colonialism and postcolonialism. White supremacy is manifested in different arenas from the privileging of “whiteness” in beauty standards to the governmental and non-governmental institutions’ active promotion of whiteness and bias against blackness in their hiring practices, to discriminatory marriage politics in the region, etc.
Excerpt from Black-Arab Encounters in Literature and Film (2021):
Al-Jahiz’ theories of blackness
Al-Jahiz’s treatise, which touches on slavery, ethnicity, race, religion and racism within the context of ninth century Iraq, is advanced for its time because of the issues with which it engages. The author’s defense of blackness signals the necessary and urgent instant of intellectual analysis of the situation of the Zanj and black people in general. It is also a moment during racial tension and slave revolts when blackness must be politically asserted. Al-Jahiz’s project is to rescue blackness from racist, colonizing practices. Wresting blackness from its colonizing connotations requires what Stuart Hall (1997) calls “a politic of criticism” (p. 444). This is evident in Al-Jahiz’s outright denunciation of racial thinking when he asserts that “Truly God Most High did not make us black out of dislike for His Creation—only the nations have done this to us” (p. 58). It thus becomes possible to approach Al-Jahiz’s text as a racial project that—to paraphrase Howard Omi and Michael Winant—explained racial formations in ninth century Iraq (Winant, 1994, p. 56).
Central to Al-Jahiz’s racial perceptions are racial cosmology and hierarchies in ninth century Iraq. The question is: to what extent did people in ninth-century Iraq rely on different notions of race, compared to Europeans and Americans, especially given the cultural and ethnic heterogeneity of the region at the time Al-Jahiz wrote his treatise? Arab scholars of different periods and origins emphasized black difference with regards to culture and biology. In the pre-Islamic era, one’s biological and genetic heritage defined one’s racial and ethnic identity. Al-Jahiz is obviously critical of inherited racial essences, as he points out:
Blackness and whiteness come from before the creation of nations, before what God imprinted on the Earth and on the water, before the proximity and distance of the sun, and before the strength of its heat and its brightness. It was originally not anything dirty, not something ugly, not a punishment and not a disadvantage. (p. 59)
Here, Al-Jahiz breaks with the idea of “Nasab,” or hereditary racial differences, and postulates that there is no obvious explanation for the origin of color differences. He falsifies the Hamitic theory of race, which claims that blackness is the result of Noah’s curse, and that there are human races that came from the three sons of Noah. Such speculation on the origin of blackness and whiteness might be a subtle hint at how racial difference was viewed in ninth-century Iraq where belief in the myth of Ham was widespread and might have been used to justify slavery. It is often assumed that all Muslims accept the myth of Ham, while for authors like Al-Jahiz, blackness is not a curse from God as the proponents of the Ham myth proclaim, but a manifestation of nature, for Blacks, like other racial groups, are subject to their natural environment:
…there are black tribes among the Arabs, such as Banu Sulaym Iban Mansur and all those not of Banu Sulaym who stay in Al-Harra. . . It has been demonstrated that because of the nature of Al-Harra (a volcanic area), its gazelles, cattle, beasts of burden, flies, foxes, sheep, donkeys, horses and birds are all black (p. 59).
Al-Jahiz situates blackness in nature, which is indicative of his racial naturalism. It is obvious that he is drawing on the racial naturalist argument that posits blackness as part of nature to undermine the curse of Ham theory. Al-Jahiz associates blackness with exotic regions such as “al Harra” where heat and climate cause people and other creatures to be black. Not only is Al-Jahiz writing about humans here but also about animals. Al-Jahiz promotes a racial naturalism in his writing by postulating that climate and geography shape the characteristics of whiteness and blackness. Such racial naturalism resonates with tenth-century geographer Muhammad Al-Idrissi (1100-1165) who has noted that the very hot climates of Swahili coast and nearby islands, and even plants and animals were uniformly black.
Arab writer Ibn Al Jawzi (1116 –1201) also posits such racial naturalist discourse in his treatise entitled “Illuminating The Darkness: The Virtues of Blacks and Abysinnians,” where he extols the natural virtues of blackness, and associates it with black bodily organs such as the blackness of the eye: “The eye is constructed of ten parts of which there are seven layers and three are wet, and its layers are reminiscent of the peeling of an onion. From them the place of the vision is black (i.e. the pupil), which displays the prestige of the color as it has been selected for this prestigious organ. Furthermore, the eyelashes were made black so as to absorb light” (35). Ibn Al Jawzi also gives examples of other organs of the body that are black such as the liver, the heart and the hair which “if it is dark, it denotes human beauty, and when it becomes white, this beauty abates” (37). He also draws analogies between blackness and different objects in nature such as the black stones of the Kaaba. Drawing on scholar Al Mussanif, Ibn Al Jawzi states that “the stone named maghnatis (magnet) is a black stone which has a unique and marvelous characteristic in that it pulls iron towards it without touching it” (47). Ibn Al Jawzi adds that “the stone which---through rubbing it---reveals the inner secret of gold, and the stones which kindle fire are mainly of the Abyssinian colour. From the stones of which their benefits are widespread are the Kohl stones named al-ithmid, and they are extremely black in colour” (47). He argues that black natural products like ebony, musk and other plants are valuable regardless of the climes in which they are found. Ibn Al Jawzi also points to the healing powers of natural herbs such as Black seeds and savin. He describes savin “as the fruit of the mountain Juniper plant, of which the best ones are the black,” (44) thus underlining the way blackness manifests in nature in a variety of climates as well as its healing powers.
Both Ibn Jawzi and Al-Jahiz draw on objects in nature and observations about animals to give the reader insights about their view of racial difference. Al-Jahiz’s empirical observations about animals in his eight-volume treatise Kitab Al Hayawan [The Book of Animals] might shed light on his view of race. In this treatise, Al-Jahiz discusses the natural behavior and breeding practices of three hundred fifty animal species, which happen to display disparate natures and dispositions. To critique racial essentialism, he uses recurring themes of mixture, hybridization and impurity to highlight the genetic diversity of different species of animals. Even though Al-Jahiz and Ibn Al Jawzi associate blackness with the physical, biological world, their notion of biology is different from the modern European biological theory of race, since Al-Jahiz’ idea of what constitutes the body is different from the modern understanding of biology. Also, the biological theories of race that pre-modern Arab racial naturalists like Al-Jahiz generated to praise blackness are different from the European biological theories of race which divided humans into subspecies, using pseudo-science to classify black people as inferior.
Al-Jahiz’s treatise also includes a clearly stated philosophy of climatic determinism, which makes him a forerunner of Ibn Khaldun’s geographical theory of race. Lacking any scientific studies for evidence, Al-Jahiz has to rely merely on his own observations of nature. In trying to prove that black skin color is not a flaw but a manifestation of nature, he draws upon the names of animals and plants to indicate the esthetic value of the shades and hues of black. Skin color is a significant part of the author’s argument, since he is aware of the cultural associations of the color black with moral evil and physical ugliness. Thus, he draws on positive visual imagery of the color black from the natural world to convince the reader of the natural beauty of blackness:
They say, ‘. . . the night is more striking than the day.’ They say, ‘Black is always more striking.’ Indeed, when the Arabs describe their camels they say, ‘Red-brown and fast, but Red is plentiful and black is beautiful. And that is only for camels.’ They say, ‘Blackness in horses is more beautiful and stronger, and the Black cow is better and more beautiful, its skin more valuable, useful and long-lasting. Black donkeys are more valuable, better and stronger. Black sheep give richer milk and more butter, and dark beasts are more fertile than red beasts. And every black hill and stone is harder and dryer in texture, and nothing can overcome the black lion. There is no date sweeter than the black date…and the date palm is stronger than the others if its trunk is black. (p. 45)
In vaunting the natural manifestations of the color black, Al-Jahiz’s work in a way resonates with the modern black aesthetics movement and its slogan “Black is beautiful.”