Black Moses Matters

illustration: Cincinius

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Black Moses was spiteful. He was not fond of slavery. And he was not fond of statues, whether they were of gold or stone or flesh or mind.

I was born in 1974 in Bosnia, which at the time was in the federation of socialist Yugoslavia. I’m of Bosniak ethnicity, which the government used to call Muslim ethnicity (yeah). Ideologically speaking, I come from a mixed Muslim-Communist family. Imagine that chimera, two scary things in one package, but do not be afraid. 

Now I live in Sweden, the home of the Nobel Prize. In December 2019, I was one of the organizers of a protest against the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the genocide denier Peter Handke in central Stockholm. This protest, the kind hitherto unseen in Swedish history, was, to the surprise of our little team, covered by world-wide media. My speech, which relied heavily on the wisdom of the late Toni Morrison, was quoted in The Intercept, The New York Times and The Washington Post, and in many European and Asian languages I do not speak.

And now, strangely enough for a Balkan boy, I want to discuss race. 

Speaking from my white-European-Muslim experience, these issues are not unrelated. Bosniaks were, in the 90s, exposed to genocide. To exterminate a people you have to tie them together the way you build the chimera of race. You have to fix them. You ascribe them a history of bloodlines. You turn a religious marker into an ethnicity label, and ethnicity into a racial category. You turn them into statues. 

Since I turned forty, that magical number, I’ve been thinking of old prophets and their beef with statues. And Moses is often on my mind. Mere mention of Moses, or Musa, or Moshe, will make you think this reflection will circle around religion. Yes, it will. But ultimately, of course, this is not a religious text. Nor is it a secular text. For me, as a chronicler of modern genocide and the survival of the weakest, it is a creative text. At least I hope it is. For the weak will inherit the earth, right? But they might not get their fair share of statues. 

There are many sites of struggle against racism. I want to focus on the politics of how we visualize history - and have visualized historically. Black Moses will lead the way through the desert of our histories and our languages. And he will guide me through the sands of race and otherness. And my own whiteness. 

For many years, I was not aware of my whiteness, what it meant, how it was made, how it worked in the world. I still don’t quite know, not really, not as much as I’d like to. I still discover things about myself. Some disturb me and some surprise me. I take this continuous discovery to be good. We are, after all, not statues. We develop. Not always for the better, but still I hope.

I discovered I was white when I first visited the USA, in a manner somewhat like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her novel, Americanah, describes the discovery of her character’s blackness. I remember the moment I had to fill in the form and state my race. I thought, well, white. But then there were subcategories. Which kind of white? I recognized the system. As a child of Bosnia, I have been labeled in many different ways, and some of those labels have been used in genocidal projects, but race did not even cross my mind until I came to Sweden as a refugee of war. Other things like ethnicity, religion and ideology were our Balkan chimeras. Race was not a subject at school. I only recall seeing a few PoC students, those whom mean kids called “čokoladni.” I think they were Egyptians. No one ever felt the need to discuss skin colour except to perhaps say bigoted things about the Roma. There was even the expression “crni ciganin” (black g*psy), but hardly any Black people in the movies we watched. Perhaps the most foreign-looking one, whom we adored, was Bruce Lee. 

In this reflection, I am white-European-Muslim. This label came out of a situation when I was studying creative writing in Hong Kong and an Asian man came to me in excitement and said he had heard there was a real white Muslim in the cohort. Later, I’d understand by “real” he meant I wasn’t a convert, or revert as one says now. He wanted to see for himself. Apparently there was talk among the students and the staff. Had he not told me, I would have spent my two years with my new friends without knowing this is how they saw me. This was also the first and the last time I had heard such a thing, but I am sure it must have been mentioned a few more times. I never asked. It did not affect me. Not knowing how often I was described as white-Muslim is, perhaps, symptomatic of my whiteness. It did not make me worried. I did not expect discrimination. My privilege was implied in my confidence.

The word “real,” from the man’s excited phrase, bears a heavy weight, especially for Bosniaks who are somehow always in-between, more in the neither-nor category of cultural reduction than both-and of cultural richness. For some in the West we are too Muslim and for some in the East not Muslim enough. Not real enough. Often I hear Bosniaks speak of themselves as if they were exclusively Eastern or exclusively Western, and yet no one would be able to tell the difference between these East-oriented and West-oriented kinds, not even themselves.

The whiteness of Bosniaks is fragile, precarious, incomplete and conditional. It depends on contextual and situational factors. Constantly in limbo, never fully realized, always negotiating. The attitude in Europe towards Bosniaks is perhaps similar to the attitude towards Jews, which Zygmunt Bauman described as allosemitism. Not necessarily falling into the binary of good/bad, the status of the Jews can change, but one thing is certain: they are always perceived as ambivalent, never fully belonging. 

Similarly, Bosniaks can be upheld as good, secular, white Muslims and, at the same time, be othered and dehumanized as …well … Muslims. In fact, the discourse on the Bosnian War is full of these contradictions. Whiteness in Europe has its specificities which the US conversation cannot quite capture. It is fundamentally tied to Christian supremacy and Islamophobia. This is also why white supremacists glorify Radovan Karadžić. They do not see the genocide of Bosniaks at all as white on white violence as some people in US academia do.

Both Muslim and white, we are a walking paradox in places we escaped to during the war, and maybe even in our own country. If we position ourselves negatively, we can present ourselves as good European (i.e. white) Muslims in contrast to the brown ones, and appeal to whiteness by supporting Trump in the diaspora, or by throwing Arab Muslims and Syrians under the bus. Or, if positively charged, our specific positionality allows us to empathize with others. For instance, we show solidarity with the Uyghurs and the Rohingya precisely because we know what it means to be the target of systematic persecution and execution. This sense of historical injustice, as well as the fact that our communities in the US share some of the same struggles, may also lead us to support Black Lives Matter without assuming we know what enduring centuries of anti-Black oppression really means. And we can reject the appeal to Europeanness because we know we will never be really accepted, which is obvious here in Sweden, when we use the Swedish slur “svartskalle” (blackhead) for ourselves. At first sight, this is ridiculous. And yet not entirely.

This weird whiteness that comes with both privilege and a curse is coded in our symbols, our icons, the statues of our minds. Yugoslavia, in its brief and intense life, was a country that had lots of statues of modern Communist icons in public spaces, and religious icons in places of worship and private homes. My entire childhood was shaped by various kinds of visual representations and symbolism. Bosnians who were Muslims did not have icons of Jesus and his mother, but they had portraits of President-for-life Tito in their homes. There were statues of Tito and other Communist icons in schools, parks, municipal buildings, you name it. Some of those Yugoslav statues have since fallen, for real or in people’s hearts and minds, but many do remain. After the war, instead of going back to massive statue-production, in my hometown, Banja Luka, many streets and other places got named after Četniks, that is, Serb ultra-nationalists infamous for the slaughter of other ethnicities in WWII. Mostar, by contrast, got a statue of Bruce Lee, that unifying global icon that defined my generation by kicking Chuck Norris’s white butt and destroying the sign that said, “No dogs and Chinese allowed.” Very postmodern. 

And now, twenty-five years after the end of the war and the genocide in Srebrenica, the genocidal creation that is Republika Srpska is getting a statute of Peter Handke. In my hometown. Happy days.

Most of the statues I grew up around were cast in black metal, but I don’t think anyone ever thought of those famous Partizan men and women as black. Their whiteness was unmistakable in the black busts, just as whiteness was shining through the black face of the slave trader Edward Colston, whose statue in Bristol was recently torn down by anti-racist protesters. In the same way, most members of Abrahamic religions do not visualize their prophets as black. Perhaps not even light brown. Sunburnt at best. Some form of whiteness is always implied. 

Class photo from the author’s first year in elementary school, which was named after Yugoslav Partisan hero Ajša Karabegović. In the 1990s, the authorities renamed it after Stanko Rakita, a local poet who worked his entire life in the school library.

It may all be Jesus’s fault. Or more precisely, not the fault of the historical prophet Jesus, of course, but his whitewashed image in our global heritages. This beautiful man with a long-wet-hair look may have set the standard for all prophets. The notion of a dark-skinned Jesus came up during my education in postcolonial literature at Stockholm University. At my first conference in Cyprus, I met a woman who was researching “Black Madonna,” that is, paintings of Mary, mother of Jesus, as a dark-skinned woman. I remember jokingly asking her if she was writing a sequel to The Da Vinci Code, but the notion stayed with me, as did the awkwardness of my laugh.

Like many of us global subjects, I first met Moses in the guise of Charlton Heston. I had never, at least not in my homeland, seen anyone react to that blasphemy. Neither Muslims nor Christians nor Jews. Nor Communists. This lack of reaction is proof that we thought his whiteness was a fact. In our imaginations, Moses was made in our image. I do think we would react if Tito was played by Sidney Poitier, or if the late president of Bosnia, Alija Izetbegović, was played by Morgan Freeman (though I myself would find that very cool). Interesting how all Balkan ethnicities have this blindness in common. Bosniaks may have been racialized and exterminated accordingly, and yet we fail to register racism amongst ourselves.

I’m white – nominally, questionably – and let me tell you (whitesplain perhaps), despite the privilege and blindness that I carry within me, I was struck when I discovered how much organic racism there was. Listening to some Bosniaks liken Somalis to apes, I often felt like Art Spiegelman when he discovered that his father, a survivor of Auschwitz, was a racist. Incomprehensible but true. There is no logic to it. It is not a state of reason. It is a statue of the mind.

Spiegelman illustrated, in the way only art can, how racism crosses national, ethnic, religious, gender, and all kinds of other borders with amazing ease. He showed how insanely close it can be. To recognize this unbearable closeness is to take the first step towards an ethical stance that will help us cross our borders. Of course, this is not a generalization. Just as for Spiegelman the darker side of his father did not translate to all Jews, I’m not suggesting all Bosniaks and/or Muslims are racist. It’s just that I want to focus on these two identities. For decades, Black Muslims have been drawing attention to the problem of racism in the Ummah and I think that the white Muslims of the Balkans should use their position and experiences to contribute something constructive to this global conversation.

Islam made racism a central problem of injustice and I was always proud of this anti-racist stance at the very core of this religion. Prophet Muhammad (saw), in his famous farewell sermon, found it important to state that an Arab is not better than non-Arab, a white person is not better than a Black person, and vice versa. And yet, racism exists and persists among Muslims, just as it does among any other religious groups, just as much as it rages among atheists and any other type of social group. Racism is in no way exclusive to anyone, and no one seems to be immune to it, though some groups excel in its practice. 

Is it plain arrogance or can it be chalked up to general ignorance? I find it fascinating how much we can have in front of our eyes and yet not see. It is also terrifying to note how much information is suppressed in our upbringing and education. I doubt many Muslims, especially we Europeans, can make an educated guess about the skin colour of the Prophet’s companions. I’m speaking of household names who are described as being “extremely dark” (shadīd al-udmah) in complexion. Fortunately, there is more than enough literature that can provide a remedy for this problem.

Sometimes I wonder if the Sunni-Muslim aversion to visual representation, which I very much appreciated as a child because I was sick and tired of statues, really prevented us from doing proper visualization in our hearts. Shia Muslims allow drawings of, for instance, Muhammad’s family and one can see stylized images of impressive figures such as the Prophet’s cousin Ali ibn Abi Talib, the famous fourth Khalifa and the first Imam. In some images, he is a Herculean figure with a lion at his feet. And yet the historical Ali was, although spiritually impressive, visually perhaps the opposite of this modern icon. And, we should ask, was he really as light-skinned as he is in many of those images? 

One story that has been depicted in classical paintings is that of Muhammad’s fantastic Night Journey, an event which some take as literal and some as a vision. I do remember seeing some pictures, but it was only when I read the complete narrative that I saw what is often omitted from popular discourse. During the ascension, the Prophet met some of the old prophets: Noah, Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Jesus, etc. His companions were curious about their looks. They may not have intended to paint them and make statues but they wanted to have a truthful image of those admirable predecessors. I find this fascinating because I grew up thinking one must not even try to visualize them – as if it was wrong, ideologically speaking. Apparently, traditionally, not only was it perfectly fine to visualize the prophets, it was educational. Jesus, for instance, is described as “a man of medium height and moderate complexion inclined to the red and white colors and of lank hair” (Sahih al-Bukhari, Book 59, Hadith 50) - so, not a white man. 

I’ve read stories of the prophets so many times and yet somehow never saw what was right there. I do recall one thing was nagging me though, and here I will speak from the Muslim part of my identity: in The Quran, when God tells Moses to try and convert the Pharaoh, one of the miracles Moses is supposed to perform is nothing as grand as the parting of the sea or turning his staff into a snake. He would merely show his hand and it would be white. In The Quran, God would often take as an example seemingly insignificant things like a fly and state they were grand miracles. That’s right. Not earthquakes. Flies. The white hand was to me one such example. I remember looking at my white-boy hand, at the time not really aware of my whiteness, and imagining it going whiter. I would squeeze it and it would go pale and that was my reproduction of the miracle. (Fascinating, right?)

It was only when I realized Moses must have been black-skinned that the white hand made sense. The sheer metaphoric potential of this emphasis on his blackness! This was not a coincidence. Moses is the single most represented prophet in this holy text. And yet, I had never heard anyone speak of this. It wasn’t in our books. As the great Bosnian writer Meša Selimović put it, “Ono što nije zapisano, i ne postoji; bilo pa umrlo.” What’s not written down doesn’t exist; it’s past and gone.

A still of the iconic fight scene between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris from the 1972 Hong Kong film The Way of the Dragon (猛龍過江)

Before I continue with Black Moses, I want to go even further back in time, to the fall of Iblees (Satan). Imagine this Quranic scene in Technicolor: Iblees and the angels are facing this new creation called Adam and they are all asked by God to bow to it/him. Iblees refuses, saying that he himself is made of fire while this new being is made of mud. God reacts to this arrogance, scolds him, but Satan persists and becomes cursed. Whether or not Satan was the first racist, according to The Quran, racism has existed from the very creation of Man. The human was dehumanized from the moment of coming into being. It is somewhat ironic that, although Iblees sees this humanity-to-be as inferior in essence, at least he/it sees us as one race.

Zooming in on my religious community, and thinking of all the work Muhammad had done in his 23-year mission, it is quite terrifying to witness so much racism among Muslims today. Only this cuts much deeper. It did not just get reinvented or imported from the West. Already a few decades after Muhammad’s death, especially when some of the greatest scholars emerged from non-Arab ethnicities, people fabricated racist hadith. But this is hardly the only thing that shows how deeply rooted racism was. 

When we speak of the Islamic mission, in order to point out that its goal was to overcome ethnic, racial, and class injustices, we mainly speak of the amazing Bilal ibn Rabah, a Black slave who was tortured for converting to Islam, then freed by the famous Abu Bakr, and then, years later, invented the Muslim call for prayer: the adhan. Whenever Muslims, even the racist ones, perform or answer the adhan, they are following the tradition established by a freed Black slave.

Yet the core of the problem is that Islamic history gets whitewashed by tokenizing Bilal’s story. His blackness seems to stand in contrast to the whiteness of the other companions – or rather, it makes them appear whiter than they may have been. The famous movie about early Islamic history called The Message only has one Black character, Bilal, while most of the others were played by white or white-passing actors. Barely any Arab actors were hired for speaking roles. Hamza, the Prophet’s uncle, was played by none other than Anthony Quinn (Charlton Heston’s contemporary)! The tokenization of figures like Bilal in popular discourse and educational gaps in our upbringing not only obscure historical facts about, among other things, the looks of Muhammad’s companions, but also create a framework which gets in the way of inquiry, to say the least. Unless you specifically delve into a topic, you will just assume the image you have is the right one and you will never dig deeper. 

When I read the stories of Julaybib and Sa’ad Al-Aswad As-Sulami, two of the Prophet’s companions who suffered discrimination in Medinah, I cannot but wonder why other Muslims would mistreat these individuals that the Prophet himself loved like a family. The stories of the two men are scant but it is clear that they were black-skinned and had lower social status, as well as other culturally-perceived inferiorities. They might have described themselves as “faqīr,” being in dire need, the word Moses used for himself when he escaped Egypt (Surah Al-Qasas, Ayah 24). Since they had a hard time marrying, the Prophet approached higher status families whose daughters were known for their beauty and character. In both cases, the parents refused, which to me smacks of racism and classism, but the daughters went against their parents’ will and married the men anyway. They knew the Prophet was suggesting something radical, that character trumps appearance. 

This makes me wonder, how did those parents, being fresh converts to Islam, visualize the prophets they were hearing about in daily recitations of The Quran? Was Noah like their own version of Russell Crowe and Moses some local Christian Bale type? Even today, when we see reactions to the whitewashing of Moses in Hollywood movies, the problem is many people would just give him a tan, find a light-skinned Egyptian actor, or someone whose sunburnt face just barely covers, if not accentuates, the implied whiteness.

This is why Black Moses matters. This bears repeating: Black Moses Matters.

Was Moses really Black or are we doing interpretational acrobatics when we read how he “drew forth his hand (from his bosom): and lo! it was white for the beholders” (Surah Al-A’raf, Ayah 108)? Notably, several eminent mufassirun like al-Qurtubi, at-Tabari and al-Baydawi concluded from this ayah that Moses was black-skinned. Such interpretations are backed up by canonical hadith collections like Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, which contain many descriptions of Moses. The most important detail for me was to find that the Prophet often described Moses as being “ādam” (very dark to jet-black) in complexion and compared him to the Azd Shanu’ah, a Yemeni tribe, and the Zutt, whose roots lay in Sindh and northwest India. As Habeeb Akande explains in Illuminating the Darkness: Blacks and North Africans in Islam, “ādam” comes from the expression “the face of the earth,” which denotes the colour of the mud from which Adam, the father of mankind, was made. 

Put simply, according to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic heritage, the heritage of Abrahamic monotheism that collects, though not always properly connects, billions of people, including all the ethnicities in the seemingly insignificant Balkans, the most prominent prophet, the man to whom God spoke directly from the burning bush, was not a Charlton Heston look-alike but a Black man. 

The fact that the burden of proof is on us who oppose the whitewashing of Moses speaks volumes about the conditions of our seeing today. That is, whiteness is seen as neutral. I sense this in the very need to dig into these sources and linguistics to prove that Moses was not white when such a notion should be obvious. And the shady discourse of racism makes us ask: just how Black was he? Is “ādam” Black enough? 

As Akande shows, the classical Arabic words for skin colour did not have our connotations of racial identity. They were used descriptively and varied in meaning depending on who was being compared to whom, which is why the Prophet described Moses’ skin colour with references to specific tribes. No doubt, as Spiegelman shows with his animal metaphors, skin colour and ethnicity have been conflated historically and now we are stuck with our modern notions of race. It is not by chance that Muhammad, quite prophetically, used his last speech to emphasize the problem of discrimination by highlighting these two markers of social belonging/division: “An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also a white has no superiority over Black nor a Black has any superiority over white except by piety.” 

Cover of Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain, published by HarperCollins

Moses himself may not have been discriminated against due to his skin colour but his iconic image has come to also symbolize the struggle against ethnic and racial persecution as such. The African-American author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made him the hero of her 1939 novel Moses, Man of the Mountain, creating an allegory for African-American emancipation: “Wherever the children of Africa have been scattered by slavery, there is the acceptance of Moses as the fountain of mystic powers.” 

Alas, decades have passed, and the persistently whitewashed image of this great prophet still dominates, symbolizing our contemporary understanding of race and human value. Affirming the blackness of Moses matters because centuries of white supremacy and racial oppression are still preventing us from collectively imagining Moses as a person with dark skin. So far, Hollywood has found it easier to cast a Black actor as God than Moses, although any other choice than Charlton Heston would be more historically accurate. 

If we were to cast Moses’s sculpture now, not in white marble like Mosè di Michelangelo but black stone or black steel, would he still, in our eyes, be white like the heroine Ajša Karabegović in front of my elementary school? Would whiteness still shine from the black visage? 

And, harking back to myself for a moment, I cannot but wonder how much longer some people will see me as too white to be Muslim or too Muslim to be white.

It does not matter if you, dear reader, subscribe to the channel of any Abrahamic religion, or whatever ideology you may follow. All knowledge matters and I find it terrifying that some things that could have had an impact on a huge number of people of faith, have been systematically neglected, buried, erased, and then just forgotten. 

This is why, just as science traces our ancestry to this one Lucy in Africa, or this one Adam (also in Africa), we need to embrace our cultural fathers and mothers.

This is why Black Moses Matters.