section_path: History/Ethnocentrism and proto-racism/Medieval Arab writers
section_name: Medieval Arab writers
paragraph_text: Medieval Arab writers
  
  Bernard Lewis has also cited historians and geographers of the Middle East and North Africa region, including Al-Muqaddasi, Al-Jahiz, Al-Masudi, Abu Rayhan Biruni, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, and Ibn Qutaybah. Though the Qur'an expresses no racial prejudice, Lewis argues that ethnocentric prejudice later developed among Arabs, for a variety of reasons: their extensive conquests and slave trade; the influence of Aristotelian ideas regarding slavery, which some Muslim philosophers directed towards Zanj (Bantu) and Turkic peoples; and the influence of Judeo-Christian ideas regarding divisions among humankind. By the eighth century, anti-black prejudice among Arabs resulted in discrimination. A number of medieval Arabic authors argued against this prejudice, urging respect for all black people and especially Ethiopians. By the 14th century, a significant number of slaves came from sub-Saharan Africa; Lewis argues that this led to the likes of Egyptian historian Al-Abshibi (1388–1446) writing that "t is said that when the slave is sated, he fornicates, when he is hungry, he steals." According to Lewis, the 14th-century Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun also wrote:
  
  ...beyond to the south there is no civilization in the proper sense. There are only humans who are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings. They live in thickets and caves, and eat herbs and unprepared grain. They frequently eat each other. They cannot be considered human beings. Therefore, the Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.
  
  According to Wesleyan University professor Abdelmajid Hannoum, French Orientalists projected racist and colonialist views of the 19th century into their translations of medieval Arabic writings, including those of Ibn Khaldun. This resulted in the translated texts racializing Arabs and Berber people, when no such distinction was made in the originals. James E. Lindsay argues that the concept of an Arab identity itself did not exist until modern times, though others like Robert Hoyland have argued that a common sense of Arab identity already existed by the 9th century.