Black knights : Arabic epic and the making of medieval race / Rachel Schine.

Black knights : Arabic epic and the making of medieval race / Rachel Schine.

Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2024.

2024

367 pages ; 23 cm

"Black Knights is the first book to offer a broad, theoretically grounded exploration of race in the creative literature of the Islamic Middle Ages (ca. eighth to fourteenth centuries). Rachel Schine reveals how the creators of popular epics of the period were already adept at incorporating and assimilating ethnic and color difference, in some ways more nuanced and less provincial than Christian European epics of the period. Schine moves comparatively, across regions and across time, demonstrating that the creators of these texts treated Blackness and race-key components in these grand Muslim social narratives-with a high degree of sophistication. She samples Arabic literature's large body of popular epics that feature many Black heroes, alongside Abrahamic scriptural and interpretative materials, Hellenistic philosophical and geographical sources, legal debates, and medical treatises, allowing her to discuss how these texts became key expressions of racial thought from their earliest beginnings in the eighth century. She shows how these writers used their Black characters to suggest aspirational and inclusive histories of Islam and the Islamic world community during the Middle Ages, with implications for today"-- Provided by publisher.

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Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction
Part one: Making race. Origin stories of the Black-Arab hero; Conceiving Abd al-Wahh ab; The (popular) science of difference
Part two: Race through time. The past; The present
Part three: Race through space. Venturing abroad; Returning home
Conclusion.

PJ7529 .S35 2024