Resisting “Blackness” Muslim Arab Sudanese in the Diaspora (منقول)

Resisting “Blackness”
Muslim Arab Sudanese
in the Diaspora

A N I TA FA B O S


“Ya wahsha, ya suuda” (You ugly, black
girl!), Aliya playfully remarked to Nur,
her brown-skinned maternal cousin.
Aliya, a young Cairo teenager whose
mother was a Muslim Arab Sudanese
immigrant but who identified herself
culturally and racially after her Egyptian
father, then turned to me and said
in English, “I call her ugly because she
is from Sudan.” This explicit banter between
the cousins of this family, with
its (black) Sudanese and (white) Egyptian members, reflects a broader
racial hierarchy stemming from centuries of asymmetrical power relations
along the Nile Valley. In combination with historical migration
and recent forced migration from Sudan, the increased mobility of
Muslim Arab Sudanese into Western cultural spaces such as London,
Toronto, Houston, and Sydney brings them into contact with new and
less familiar racial frameworks. Sudanese, in their increasingly transnational
circumstances, must now negotiate racial categories in different
countries, most of which regard them as “black.”
The term “Muslim Arab Sudanese” here refers
to Sudanese nationals from the dominant ethnic
group in northern Sudan, representatives of
which have been in power since Sudan’s independence.
Following the Islamist military coup in
1989 and ensuing political and economic turmoil,
many Muslim Arab Sudanese left or fled Sudan,
joining millions of southern and western Sudanese
forcibly displaced by decades of civil war. In
countries like Egypt and the UK with large communities
of minority Sudanese, Muslim Arab Sudanese
resist being designated as “black,” a category
that in Sudan is pejorative and generally not
employed by the Muslim Arab ruling class to refer
to themselves. Muslim Arab Sudanese identity in
the UK and Egypt is increasingly shaped by negative
experiences of “blackness” in both of these
two receiving societies. Different historical, cultural,
and socio-legal contexts in each country,
however, give rise to two distinct approaches to
building a familiar and recognizable communal
identity in the diaspora.
Race and whiteness
The new field of “whiteness studies” is helpful
in thinking about how, in many societies where
people of European origins are the majority,
being “white” is often considered natural—the
norm—while being a minority implies having a
racial identity. The comparative study of race has
demonstrated that racial categories are quite
different from one society to the next, and that
these categories are learned and acted out in
ways that help to maintain the privileges of the
dominant group. “Whiteness,” like “blackness,”
can be similarly thought of as a learned cultural
category even though it characterizes the racial
majority. While I would argue that the
particular racial hierarchy in Sudan
predates the “black and white” European
colonial categories, it is useful
to think of Muslim Arab Sudaneseness
as the standard norm in Sudan against
which other minority “black” Sudanese
are measured.
Sudanese recognize a wide spectrum
of skin colours, describing abyad
(white), ahmar (red), asfar (yellow),
akhdar (green), azraq (blue), and iswid (black). These designations
resonate historically with the classification scheme used by slave
traders in the markets in Cairo, where slaves classified as asfar and
abyad were sold for larger sums of money than those who were labelled
azraq or iswid.1 Despite the fact that physical characteristics
in Sudan are by no means clear-cut markers of ethnic identity, the
social stigma towards “blackness” as an indication of African or slave
origins contrasts white skin with attractiveness, wealth, and leisure.
One of the ways that wealthy and powerful classes of Muslim Arab Sudanese
have maintained and perpetuated their dominance over time
is through promoting their own (lighter) skin colour as a sign of class
and beauty. Various traditions of body decoration have developed
that draw attention to lighter skin. Lip-darkening previously done
through tattooing but replaced by make-up in contemporary times is
thought to heighten the contrast between lips and skin, thus enhancing
the appearance of light skin. Henna patterns are also thought to
contrast with—and thus enhance—lighter skin.
More recently, “whiteness” has become a public issue for Sudanese
in Sudan and in the diaspora, where the trend of using cosmetic skin
whiteners that contain bleach is noted and discussed in the Sudanese
media and in online sites. Beauty salons, pharmacies, billboards, and
television advertisements promote cosmetic products which purport
to lighten women’s complexions. Beswick summarizes the current
Sudanese preoccupation with race and visual appearance thus:
“Looking like an ‘African’ is bad; looking lighter is good, and the visual
markers of skin colour and hair texture define who is an ‘Arab’ (good)
and who is not (bad).”2
The attention that skin-bleaching in Sudan has recently received is
noteworthy. A beautician interviewed in Khartoum is quoted as saying,
“One hundred percent of women who come here have it done,”
she said. “People think it’s prettier to look white.”3 A young woman
quoted in a recent ethnography of middle class women in Khartoum
states, “Alhamdullillah, my hair is okay and I have got all the right features
from my mother, but I am dark, thanks be to my father [sarcastically].
Who would want to marry one with such a colour? Every man
wants ‘safra’. I myself use all these creams to find a man with a light
skin colour. If I stayed dark do you think a light man would want his
children to be ‘dirtied’?”4 Light skin also symbolizes wealth, as illustrated
by a woman quoted in a newspaper article posted on SudaneseOnline:
“People judge you here by your colour...If they see me and
someone else with lighter skin wearing the same clothes, they would
say she is living a comfortable life and I’m a poor woman.”5
The same article excited the following comment from a Sudanese
man: “Thanks for this interesting issue. It’s so important to discuss
such realities of Sudanese life. Such phenomenon can be interpreted
in terms of the influence of Arabic culture in the country. In school
curriculum, white colour, and particularly
a white woman, is associated with perfection
in all aspects of life. A woman is
praised if she’s white, sometimes regardless
of whether or not she’s beautiful. Even
in Holy Quran white color is always postive
with black color being negative. Sudanese
people were, and still, brought up with the
understanding that they are arabs, and part
of this identity is to acquire an aran [Arab]
feature: color.”6
Racial hierarchies along the Nile
Like Sudan, Egypt has played a historical
role in slave-trading and slavery along the Nile Valley. Egyptians whose
ancestors were slaves—from present-day Sudan, Ethiopia, Albania, and
elsewhere—are today part of Egypt’s ethnic mix. While subordinate
groups in Egypt are not necessarily distinguished by skin colour, mainstream
Egyptians use the term qamhi—wheat-coloured—to designate
the “typical” Egyptian skin tone. As in Sudan, people who look “African”
receive negative attention, and Africans who have become refugees
in Egypt are maltreated and regularly harassed by Egyptian security.
In Cairo, this differential treatment translates into
the reluctance of Muslim Arab Sudanese migrants
and exiles to consider themselves “African-looking”
in comparison to Egyptians. Unlike private,
cultural attributes such as food and music, physical
characteristics like skin colour are publicly recognizable,
if culturally constructed, markers of difference.
Muslim Arab Sudanese in Egypt, however,
do not tend to emphasize their comparatively
darker skin tone.
Muslim Arab Sudanese resist being classified by
Egyptians into socially disadvantaged categories
like “African,” and they actively pursue practices
and stress their belonging to a (white) “Arab” ethnicity
and the Muslim religion. One of the ways
this is accomplished is through espousing a morality
discourse that ties Sudanese firmly to Arab
and Muslim concepts of proper behaviour, which
I have described elsewhere as adab—propriety.7
Egyptians were largely portrayed as being less
proper, and in comparison Sudanese felt that their own behaviour was
more “Arab” and “Muslim” than their Egyptian hosts. Through this strategy,
Sudanese were also resisting blackness by distancing themselves
from their African compatriots while outperforming their “white” hosts
through proper behaviour. In this way, Muslim Arab Sudanese in Egypt
were able to avoid taking on a racial minority status yet maintain a
separate community identity.
Black and Muslim in Britain
In the British context, Muslim Arab Sudanese women and men similarly
seek to position themselves at an advantage in the national discourse
on race. In contrast to a lack of rights in Egypt under Egyptian
immigration policy, in Britain Sudanese are able to claim British citizenship.
However, Britain’s legacy of racial discrimination and the heightened
social and political anxiety with immigration, especially of Muslims,
places Sudanese—who, in the British paradigm, are both black
and Muslim—in a vulnerable position. In comparison to the Egyptian
context, Muslim Arab Sudanese are not able to reconstitute their identity
as part of mainstream British culture, and feel somewhat alienated
by “immoral practices” (such as premarital sexual relations) that are
seen to be part of British society. At the same time, Sudanese seem
unwilling to define themselves as part of Britain’s black minority.
Nagel points out that, in Britain, Arabs and Arab migration have been
“excluded from ‘race relations’ debates and discourses. They seldom are
treated as a separate, identifiable cultural entity or as a ‘problem’ minority
group” in mainstream discourse except in reference to terrorism,
Middle East politics, and oil wealth.8 Nagel describes the strategy of her
Arab research participants in the UK whereby Arabness is disassociated
from recognized minority identities and from racialized groups like “Pakistanis”
who use the term “black” to underline commonality with other
visible minorities.
This disassociation from blackness debates in Britain is difficult for Sudanese
Arabs to maintain. Anwara is a Muslim Arab Sudanese refugee
interviewed by Nagel who has rejected colour-based identities, despite
feeling that she is considered “black” in British society. In the context of
her Sudanese middle class background, embedded in Sudanese racial
hierarchies Anwara “is disturbed by the thought that she is now black.”
Rather than searching for commonality with other black groups, she
has chosen instead to avoid association with them. Revealing her sense
of black as a stigmatized category, she states, “We
look at the underclasses here and we say, look at
those people, how they behave, how loud they
are. They are in a low position.”9
For Sudanese women and men in the diaspora,
the particularities of negotiating a Sudanese
Arab Muslim belonging in Egypt and the UK are
not only shaped by their social and legal status
as immigrants and refugees, but also by negative
experiences signified by blackness. As familiar
aliens in Egypt and foreign citizens in Britain,
Sudanese may hold on to
their Muslim Arab identity
in both places but it is given
different social meaning in
these contrasting contexts.
The position of Sudanese in
an Egyptian racial hierarchy
wherein blackness is associated
with slavery requires
them—with their own legacy of enslaving Africans
and participating in the development of racial
categories in Sudan—to distance themselves
from other darker skinned people and maximize
their association with the dominant—and lighter
skinned—Egyptian majority. In the UK, however,
Sudanese, as Muslims, do not seek a position for
themselves among the white Christian-identified
majority yet neither do they aspire to a black identity,
which would embroil them in the charged debate
about racism in British society. “Whiteness” is
as much of an aspiration for Sudanese in the UK
but with the goal of inclusion into an Arab Muslim
identity that sidesteps British racial categories.
Notes
1. Terence Walz, “Black Slavery in Egypt
During the 19th Century as Reflected in the
Mahkama Archives in Cairo,” in Slaves and
Slavery in Muslim Africa, ed. John Ralph Willis
(London: Franck Cass, 1985).
2. Stephanie Beswick, “How to Make
Sudanese Islamic Fundamentalism Work
for you,” H-Net Reviews in the Humanities
and Social Sciences, no. 2005, http://
www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.
cgi?path=11411138813867.
3. Mohammed Abbas, “In Sudan, Pale Is
Beautiful but Price Is High,” Reuters, 2 August
2006.
4. Salma Ahmed Nageeb, New Spaces and
Old Frontiers: Women, Social Space, and
Islamization in Sudan (Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2004).
5. Abbas, “In Sudan, Pale Is Beautiful but Price
Is High.”
6. Posted by Al-Sadig Yahya Abdalla, 1 May
2006, www.sudaneseonline.com. Spelling as
in original.
7. Anita H. Fabos, “Brothers” Or Others? Muslim
Arab Sudanese in Egypt (Oxford and New
York: Berghahn Books, 2007).
8. Caroline R. Nagel, “Constructing Difference
and Sameness: The Politics of Assimilation
in London’s Arab Communities,” Ethnic and
Racial Studies 25, no. 2 (2002): 268.
9. Ibid., 275.
Cosmetic skin
lighteners
emphasize
whiteness as a
beauty ideal.
In countries like
Egypt and the UK
… Muslim Arab
Sudanese resist
being designated
as “black”…
Anita Fabos is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences, Media and
Cultural Studies, University of East London, where she runs the Masters programme
in refugee studies.
Email: [email protected]

http://www.isim.nl/files/review_21/review_21.pdf

من ضمن ما استشهدت به الكاتبة, موضوع نشر هنا ب sudaneseonline :

Quote: Light skin also symbolizes wealth, as illustrated by a woman quoted in a newspaper article posted on SudaneseOnline: “People judge you here by your colour...If they see me and someone else with lighter skin wearing the same clothes, they would say she is living a comfortable life and I’m a poor woman.”5 The same article excited the following comment from a Sudanese man: “Thanks for this interesting issue. It’s so important to discuss such realities of Sudanese life. Such phenomenon can be interpreted in terms of the influence of Arabic culture in the country. In school curriculum, white colour, and particularly a white woman, is associated with perfection in all aspects of life. A woman is praised if she’s white, sometimes regardless of whether or not she’s beautiful. Even in Holy Quran white color is always postive with black color being negative. Sudanese people were, and still, brought up with the understanding that they are arabs, and part of this identity is to acquire an aran [Arab] feature: color.”

Quote: 6 5. Abbas, “In Sudan, Pale Is Beautiful but Price Is High.” 6. Posted by Al-Sadig Yahya Abdalla, 1 May 2006, www.sudaneseonline.com. Spelling as in original.

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