ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the travel narratives of medieval North African writers Ibn Battuta and Ibn Khaldun to help shed light on their views of blackness. Their writings also help us understand whether they viewed Black Africans as “other” in ways we think of as “racial” in the modern sense, based on the hierarchy of human types, or whether they assessed the difference in terms of religion, ethnicity, environment, and culture. This chapter examines the theories of race that were prevalent around the time of Ibn Khaldun's and Ibn Battuta's writings. The first is the curse of Ham theory, which characterized blackness as a divine punishment given to the descendants of Noah's son Ham. The second is the geographical theory of race which interpreted blackness scientifically and viewed it as a result of the natural environment inhabited by Blacks. Ibn Khaldun used the geographical theory of race which divides humankind into different regions not only to refute the curse of Ham theory but also to affirm racialized links between environment, biology, and behaviour. While Ibn Battuta used Islam to reject Malians, Ibn Khaldun's disparaging remarks about blackness offer an important insight into the racial construction of Black Africans prevalent at the time.
