“…It had a flourishing court culture, where enslaved courtesans well‐trained in music, dance, and fine manners would attend soirees with litterateurs and poets (Al‐Heitty, 1990; Bray, 2004; Caswell, 2011; Gordon, 1994; Gordon & Hain, 2017; Kilpatrick, 1991). It also witnessed the Zanj Rebellion (869–83 CE), which was a large uprising of agricultural slaves and other disenfranchised groups (Campbell, 2016; Popovic, 1976; Talhami, 1977). In terms of race‐thinking, this period saw the writing of several famous works pertaining to race and ethnicity, notably al‐Jahiz's (d. 869 CE) semi‐satirical essay “The Boasting of the Blacks over the Whites” (Jahiz and Coleville, 2002); al‐Mutanabbi's (d. 965 CE) invective poetry against the Black eunuch Kafur (Larkin, 2012; Schine, 2021); and Ibn Butlan's (d. 1064) slave‐buying manual in which he describes the stereotypical attributes of many different ethnicities of enslaved women (Rodriguez, 2015).…”