256 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences I 0:2 

Book Review 

Race and Slavery in the Middle East: 
An Historical Inquiry 

By Bernard Lewis. New York: Oxford University Press. 
1990, 169 pp. 

This book is based mainly on an earlier small book entitled Race and
Co/,Or in Islam that was published in 1971. In this new edition, Lewis 
added more chapters and expanded the discussion of some of the material 
that he examined in the earlier edition. He mentions that scholarly work 
on the topic of slavery received only limited attention from researchers 
compared with studies on slavery in the Greek and Roman worlds. Only 
a few number of studies of high caliber could be cited. 

The main theme of the book, as Lewis states clearly in his concluding 
remarks, is that Islam's total racial hannony and ilUlocence is a myth 
created, maintained, and idealized by westerners as a rebuke to the ac­
tions of the white man in the Americas and South Africa. Moreover, the 
idea found relevance among missionaries in Africa who tried to seek ex­
planations for their failure in contrast to the success of Islam. 

In his analysis, Lewis tries lo distinguish between three distinct mean­
ings of Islam: 1) Islam as the religion taught by the Prophet and pre­
scribed in the Qur'an; 2) Islam as a larger body including the traditions, 
works, and fatwas of Islamic scholars and jurists. In this regard Islam in­
cludes the Shari'ah as developed over the centuries; and 3) Islam as the 
counterpart not of Christianity but of Christendom. Here, Islam means not 



Book Reviews 257 

what Muslims believed or were expected to believe but what they actually 
did-in other words Islamic civilization as known to us in history" (p. 
20). The book is divided into thirteen small chapters with nine docu­
ments, some of which have been translated from Arabic and Turkish. 

Despite his distinction between the three meanings oflslam, it is clear 
that Lewis emphasizes the third perception of Islam. His coverage of this 
era extends from the Umayyad and the 'Abbasid caliphates to the Otto­
man Empire. As many of us know, the early years of this period in Is­
lamic history marked the beginning of the gradual shift away from some 
of the important concepts that used to be practiced during the time of the 
Prophet and his four immediate political successors. At a later stage, the 
process of disassociation between the community and its Islamic ideals 
accelerated, which finally resulted in the degener-ation of Islamic civiliza­
tion. It is during this period and under such settings that a significant por­
tion of Lewis' hypotheses and conclusions are drawn. 

A major shortcoming is the failure to address any historical experi­
ences in r-ace relations that took place when different lslamic empires as­
similated many r-aces into the broader banner of Islamic brotherhood. 
Muslim Arabs spread throughout Asia and Africa and intenningled with 
the indigenous populations. This is especially obvious in some parts of 
Africa, where intermarriage between Arabs and Africans produced a new 
breed. If these historical cases had been included in the book, it would 
have provided more insight into the study of race relations in Islamic so­
cieties. Moreover, these cases may provide evidence contrary lo some of 
Lewis' remarks regarding the racial behavior of Muslims at that time. 

Hassan E. Ali 
Department of Political Science 

University of North Texas 
Denton, Texas