Race and Ethnicity, Part 2

Not everyone believed that race and ethnicity were purely a result of being descended from the sons of Noah. Some felt the natural world/environment played a part.

An Afro-Arab Islamic philosopher named Al-Jahiz (c.776 - 869) took on the issue of different skin colors in the 9th century. Living during the Abbasid Caliphate, he produced at least 140 books and essays, of which we still have 75 available. In one work, he wrote about the Zanj, a word used by Muslims to refer to the southeast coast of Africa and its inhabitants:

The Zanj say that God did not make them black to disfigure them; rather it is their environment that made them so. The best evidence of this is that there are black tribes among the Arabs, such as the Banu Sulaim bin Mansur, and that all the peoples settled in the Harra, besides the Banu Sulaim are black.

This sounds simplistic, but he continues:

These tribes take slaves from among the Ashban to mind their flocks and for irrigation work, manual labor, and domestic service, and their wives from among the Byzantines; and yet it takes less than three generations for the Harra to give them all the complexion of the Banu Sulaim.

He extends this beyond human beings, and rejects the "Curse of Ham" hypothesis:

This Harra is such that the gazelles, ostriches, insects, wolves, foxes, sheep, asses, horses and birds that live there are all black. White and black are the results of environment, the natural properties of water and soil, distance from the sun, and intensity of heat. There is no question of metamorphosis, or of punishment, disfigurement or favor meted out by Allah.

A later Arab scholar, the sociologist Ibn Khaldun, decided that the hot climate of sub-Saharan Africa was the cause of black skin, not a religious myth.

The debate over genetics versus environment continued well into the 17th century at least. But in Medieval England, how were other people perceived and treated? As curiosities? As just more children of God? As dangerous outsiders? Let's look at some of the encounters and interactions between different people.