The standard story in Islam is that Muslims are color-blind because Islam is color-blind. Islam preaches absolute submission to God in the context of perfect equality of all races. No one race or ethnic group is superior to any other because all are equally inferior before God. That's the standard story, at any rate, but it's not the full story.

In the February, 1990 issue of Political Quarterly, Tariq Modood writes:

The Quranic teaching is that people are to be valued in terms of virtue not colour or race. Muslims insist that there is no divinely favoured race and that the Quran is God’s message to the whole of mankind. They take pride in the fact that Islam is a genuine multi-ethnic religion (Christianity is the only other) and point to the fact that one of the first converts to Islam was Bilal, a black slave (Arab trade in black slaves having pre-dated the same by Europeans) and that in Muslim history there have been several black rulers and generals in racially mixed societies. This then is the standard Muslim view on racial equality.

Tariq Modood then explains how and why this standard view isn’t the full truth...

Like all “colour-blind” approaches it has two weaknesses.

Firstly, it is too weak to prevent racial and ethnic prejudice. While it was strong enough, unlike its Christian and secular Western counterparts, to prevent the development of official and popular ideologies of racism it is not the case that Islam has banished racism.

Arab racism is such that most Pakistanis would prefer to work in Britain than in Saudi Arabia for a higher income; racist humiliations from shop-keepers, taxi- drivers, catering staff and so on have become a regular feature of the pilgrimage to Mecca for the diverse ethnic groups of Islam. Asians have no fewer racial stereotypes about whites and blacks than these groups have about Asians or about each other.

So, Islam may not sanction official programs that encourage, endorse, or are based upon racism, but Islam doesn’t really prevent people from being racist and acting on their racism in the context of their personal and professional lives. There is an interesting parallel here to evangelical Christianity in which the existence of any social structures that cause racism or make things difficult for racial minorities is generally denied.

The second weakness flows from the first. A “colour-blind” approach is unable to sanction any programme of positive action to tackle the problem once it is acknowledged to exist. ... Some very recent Muslim position statements seem to express a reluctance for, what is essential to positive action, heightening racial categories.

Indeed, one goes as far as to say that “we believe that it is very unhelpful to look at human relations in Britain on the basis of race”, while another asserts “there is only one race, the human race”. This is, as I have said, because Muslims (and indeed most other minority communities) do not see themselves in terms of colour and do not want a public identity that emphasises colour.

The absence any official and racist social structures seems to lead Muslims to deny that there is any problem with race — much like what we see among conservative, white evangelical Christians. Personal expressions of racism exist, that can’t be denied, but the “solution” to that can only be personal changes of heart. Both Muslims and evangelicals seem to deny that there can or should be any broad social solutions to racism — just personal ones.

Do they fear what would happen if race and racial issues were socially and publicly acknowledged? Why do they want to keep questions about race and racism on the personal level, hidden away where there can’t be a full public debate?

 

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