Africanism: Blacks in the Medieval Arab Imaginary

Anti-blackness has until recently been a taboo topic within Arab society. This began to change when Nader Kadhem, a prominent Arab and Muslim thinker, published the first in-depth investigation of anti-black racism in the Arab world in 2004. This translation of the new and revised edition of Kadhem’s influential text brings the conversation to the English-speaking world.

Al-Istifraq or Africanism, a term that is analogous to Orientalism, refers to the discursive elements of perceiving, imagi...