Islam did not consider owning slaves sinful,
although there were strictures against owning fel-
low Muslims. Even here, Blacks were at risk, as his-
tory shows that the law was not always strictly
enforced to protect African Muslims from slave
raids. Slaves historically were exported from Sennar,
Kordofan, Darfur, and Nubia to northern Sudan
and Egypt, as well as to many countries in the
Middle East.
Overlapping this color/race hierarchy was a gen-
der hierarchy: female slaves outnumbered male
slaves in Sudan by two to one, and by three to one
in Egypt. They not only provided domestic help but
were also a large part of the harems of wealthy
men. Islam did not forbid a slave master to have sex
with his slaves, and many slave women became
concubines (Baer 1967, Collins 1992, Cunnison
1966, Segal 2001, Lewis 1971, Marmon 1999,
Willis 1985), as it was openly acknowledged that
the sexuality of all enslaved women was a primary
aspect of their productive labor. A hierarchy
existed among the female slaves, with whites being
valued above their darker counterparts. This dis-
tinction between white and black women has
shaped the sociocultural landscape, as evidenced by
the interstitial position white women still occupy as
individuals who are simultaneously racially privi-
leged and sexually marginalized.
Moreover, the association of African women
with concubinage, a status lower than that of wife,
remains and has fed into stereotypes about them.
Children born of an enslaved mother and a free
Arab father were considered members of their
father’s lineage and ideally, therefore, free Muslim
Arabs. In reality however, there were degrees of
Arabness, and this attitude showed itself most
clearly when the slave mother was of African ori-
gin. The many negative proverbs, anecdotes, and
stereotypes about Africans, slaves, black skin, and
Black slaves bears this out: “son of a Negress” is
still a customary pejorative epithet in many areas
of the Arab world (al-Afif Mukhtar forthcoming,
Drake 1987, Lewis 1971). The impact of the
race/color hierarchization, therefore, is reflected in
the institution of marriage, whereby some families
may be reluctant to align themselves with those
that obviously possess Sub-Saharan African ances-
try, and by the over-accentuation of particular
white ethnic heritages such as Turkish.
In addition to nineteenth-century slavery, no-
tions of race and ethnicity in the Egyptian context
have been greatly influenced by the colonial aspira-
tions of Egyptians. Egypt’s leading scholars in the
nineteenth century initially viewed humankind in
terms of social evolutionary thought propounded690 race, gender, and difference
by its British colonizers. But by the end of the nine-
teenth century, this perspective was overshadowed
by their desire to colonize Sudan. Egypt attempted
to demonstrate the legitimacy of its claims to
Sudanese territory by asserting that the Sudanese
were its kinsmen rather than racially distinct peo-
ple. Although during his presidency Gamal Abdel
Nasser often extolled pan-African unity in his
speeches, reminding his fellow Egyptians that they
were Africans as well as Arabs, the more persistent
construction was of the Sudanese as inferior and
“in need of Egyptian guidance” (Powell 1995, 29).
In contemporary times, remnants of this ideology
can be found in discourses about Sudanese-
Egyptian relations within Sudanese communities in
Cairo, and in popular culture (Armbrust 1996,
Fabos 1999, Morsy 1994, Powell 2000, 2001). In
Egypt the Sudanese number as many as four mil-
lion, due to their migrations north throughout the
twentieth century. They live in rural and urban cen-
ters there, and have an ambiguous relationship with
the rest of the society. Legally granted full rights,
including the right to own land, the Sudanese are
not classified as refugees. However, they are often
unable to obtain legal authorization to work and
housing, and are subject to intense discrimination
and abuse at the hands of the Egyptian authorities.
Arab nationalism, which claims that all members
of the society could be unified through a common
ancestry that was based primarily on Islam, but also
upon a sense of shared history, language, and cul-
ture, underscores conceptualizations of race and
ethnicity in Egypt. This ideology disregards ethnic,
religious, and linguistic differences, and at key his-
torical moments, calls for cultural assimilation (for
example, the inundation of ancient Nubia due to
the raising of the Aswan High Dam). This desire
to deny and purge difference in Egyptian culture
can be viewed as “an insidious albeit unsystematic
racism” (Harrison 1995, 55).
As non-Egyptian segments of Egyptian society
(from Palestine, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, and
Ethiopia) continue to grow as they seek political
asylum in Cairo, scholars are beginning to carry out
more in-depth analyses of the cultural construction
of race and racism. A review of newspaper articles
and journals suggests that the Sudanese are subject
to harassment and bodily harm, as evidenced by the
Sakakini Riot in 2000, which was sparked by the
reported harassment of southern Sudanese women
by Egyptians on the streets of Cairo (Apiku 2000a,
2000b, Fabos 2000).
In Sudan, to be an “Arab” is to embody a com-
posite of ethnicity, language, skin color, and culture
(Deng 1995). Although there are over 500 different