Those dark-skinned Semites

Wesley Muhammad is at it again, now proposing Black Muhammad.

I'll point out here that Dr Muhammad is not entirely misguided. I was impressed by his ethnography of the Ọyọ, back in the day. I was very impressed actually. It led me to a wider study, or a deeper rabbithole if you like, on the phenomenon of paraIslamic prophethood generally. Check out the first essay in A Garden for the Poets.

Dr Muhammad's new article is like his other curates'-eggs: Good In Parts. It points out a longstanding linguistic relationship between those languages classed "Semitic" (including, now, Akkadian) and several language-families endemic to north and northwest Africa - and not further east of Sargon's Akkad. Indeed, the Tigris proved the end of the line for the Semites until the Assyrian Age. Where Dr Muhammad falls down, is on genealogy - on race.

Dr Muhammad is aware of this when he tries to slip in, “Semitic” is properly a linguistic designation, not racial. Much depends on "properly". In its base "Shem" is first seen in the Bible where it is a genealogic marker. It is only 19th-century linguists who noted the very-similar Near Eastern languages which mapped fairly-well to the Bible's Shem (appending, interestingly, Canaan ben Ham). 'Twere the linguists wot stuck Shem's name on the languages.

'Tis now 2019. We are no longer able to moot theories on race based on language alone. We have genetics these days.

Where it comes to the Horn of Africa and to the pre-Islamic "Berbers" in north Africa, we have evidence of vast population-movements during the worst winters of that last Ice Age, 14000 years BC. We know the African fringe's genetic turnover came from population-movements from two facts: they involved mitochondrial DNA - meaning, women; and they happened long before a commodity slave-trade was technologically feasible. (We could add a third fact, that the Horn of Africa was never wealthy enough on its own to import significant numbers of shiksas. Although Tunisia perhaps had its moments.)

It happens that the two Pleistocene Eurasian-to-Africa movements were of different peoples - at first. The Somalis got N1 women; the Algerians, U5. But there seems to be a movement from East Africa straight west, by land, toward the Green Sahara, after the Ice Age; then, from the Sahara, moving north. Certainly when the Garamantes went under, they exported many Imazighen northward (so say Elizabeth Fentress and Andrew Wilson); hence the Rif of today. If it happened in 400 AD it happened in 6000 BC.

To sum up, although the "AfroAsiatic" linguistic evidence is weighted toward the Afro Sahara as of, oh, 2000 BC (although, to turn around what I'd noted earlier, not south of that...), the genetic evidence points to a push from the north to the south in 14000 BC. And then we get to the linguistic nature of the AfroAsiatic languages themselves, which point to a very deep divergence between Semitic and, also, Egyptian, Tamazight, and Chadic. We're not dealing with anything like as recent as the separation between Sanskrit and Latin, here. Not even Hittite and Latin.

One more point, from the Bible which gave us the name "Shem"... "Ham" isn't so precise. Ham includes Egypt, and the Imazighen, and Lake Chad, and the Kushites of Somalia (and Canaan) - all alike. The Bible sees Shem as more-aligned with Ham. But it doesn't really know Ham; and its view of Ham will be weighted to the most-immediate trading-partners. That started with Egypt and moved more to the Mediterranean coast, where the Imazighen. These Hamites were darker than Greeks and Iranians; but they were not black.

As to Muhammad, he may not be the father of any of our men as the saying goes, but Muhammad's paternal grandfather was the father of a multitude. The male descendants of the Quraysh bear J-M267, sometimes named "J1". This is not a black gene; it is Near Eastern Farmer.

As to why the classical prohibition on sketching Muhammad as a Kushi, well... there was (and is) a lot of asabiya going on, in Islam as much as among whites. Much Islamic asabiya was shu'ubi from Iran, as Dr Muhammad notes, but it also existed on the Africans' behalf for instance in al-Jahiz's work. Pace Dr Muhammad I don't think the anti-black Muslims struck the first blow. I suspect that Yemeni or even Somali Muslims had made this play. This could not do other than annoy the ulema.

I desire no ill of Dr Muhammad, personally. But he is, sadly, zalam anfusah.