The four other zones are intemperate, and the physique and character of their inhabitants show it. The first and second zones are excessively hot and black, and the sixth and seventh zones cold and white. The inhabitants of the first and second zones in the south are called the Abyssinians, the Zanj, and the Sudanese (Negroes).
These are synonyms used to designate the (particular) nation that has turned black. The name "Abyssinians," however, is restricted to those Negroes who live opposite Mecca and the Yemen, and the name "Zanj" is restricted to those who live along the Indian Sea. These names are not given to them because of an (alleged) descent from a black human being, be it Ham or any one else. Negroes from the south who settle in the temperate fourth zone or in the seventh zone that tends toward whiteness, are found to produce descendants whose color gradually turns white in the course of time. Vice versa, inhabitants from the north or from the fourth zone who settle in the south produce descendants whose color turns black. This shows that color is conditioned by the composition of the air. In his rajaz poem on medicine, Avicenna said:
Where the Zanj live is a heat that changes their bodies
Until their skins are covered all over with black.
The Slavs acquire whiteness
Until their skins turn soft.
The inhabitants of the north are not called by their color, because the people who established the conventional meanings of words were themselves white. Thus, whiteness was something usual and common (to them), and they did not see anything sufficiently remarkable in it to cause them to use it as a specific term.--Ibn Khaldun, The Muqadimmah (translated by F. Rosenthal), Third Prefatory Discussion.
The larger context is (recall here and yesterday) Ibn Khaldun's articulation of how to evaluate historical evidence and what principles to bring to bear on source criticism. In specific context, lbn Khaldun is attacking the claim that "Negroes are the children of Ham, the son of Noah, and that they were singled out to be black as the result of Noah's curse, which produced Ham's color and the slavery God inflicted upon his descendants." Ibn Khaldun admits that the Hebrew Bible mentions a curse, but denies the asserted effects. Ibn Khaldun's position is notable because one need not be an attentive reader of his book to see that he shares in non trivial prejudices against black people. But he clearly dislikes the (illicit) use of Scripture(s) to justify domination of others.
As the passage above suggests, Ibn Khaldun explains ethnic characteristics primarily in terms of features of the environment and common descent with the former being far more important than the latter (in explaining ethnic characteristics). I don't want to suggest that common descent is irrelevant to Ibn Khaldun's theorizing, but its significance -- the purity of a line -- is more connected to the way it sustains (recall) group feeling and, in turn, can be shaped by it. As the passage reveals, ethnic characteristics are not immutable; a change of place and interbreeding can quickly cause a shift in these.
Ibn Khaldun's environmental theory of ethnic identity is, as the quote from Ibn Sinna reveals, rooted in medieval, neo-Aristotelian science and geography (and go back to various sources in Antiquity). It survived the demise of scholasticism for one can find traces of it throughout the early modern period (see, for example, Justin Smith's learned and entertaining tour of the evidence).
What is notable is that Ibn Khaldun calls attention to what we may call discursive power in categorization of group identity. Participation in Whiteness is, in part, the effect of such discursive power. Civilizations that can sustain a scholarly community -- and so by his lights have an extensive division of labor, sedentary culture, and wealth -- have the advantage of controlling naming rights.
That one has discursive power is, in part, a contingent affair. Civilization is a fragile matter. Ibn Khaldun is explicit that he is writing not just in the aftermath of the black plague (devastating to the population), but also that much non-Greek Ancient knowledge was never passed on.
On the other hand, discursive power is not wholly a contingent affair: for environmental reasons both the blacks who live in the torrid zones as well as the whites who live in the northerly zones, that is, the ones whose Whiteness does not track other salient cultural and political facts, are thought locally incapable of civilization and so cannot have such discursive power.
This particular example of Ibn Khaldun's analysis of discursive power has an unmasking quality. But that's compatible with the thought, anticipating Foucault, that discursive power can also be used with the grain. That is, it is a feature not a bug of civilization that the pen can facilitate the entrenchment of the sword against those that lack scholars. But about that some other time more.*
*UPDATE: I thank Chike Jeffers for suggesting some corrections to an earlier draft.
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