For centuries, North African and Middle Eastern/Asian Muslims were very racist against black Africans, and there continues to be a Muslim slave trade in Africa. But that’s a history of racism you will never hear woke Americans discuss, even though it helps explain such comments as came from Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign surrogate Hasan Piker.
Senate Republicans published a compilation video showing Piker — who partially grew up in and has family from Turkey — issuing a series of extremely racist comments, including calling the era of lynchings a “better time.” He raved, “I don’t give a f**k what black people care about… shut the f**k up,” and called himself “racist, dude,” in addition to even more vile comments. The clips are going viral again because Piker’s chum El-Sayed has been making headlines every day after new exposés on his terrorist ties.
How does Abdul El-Sayed's campaign surrogate Hasan Piker feel about Black Americans? Watch for yourself. https://t.co/icGiXek7Ok
— Senate Republicans (@NRSC) August 6, 2026
Should we be shocked that a Turkish Muslim would be so racist? No. Both Arabs and Turks (and Egyptians) have a history of discrimination against black Africans, even though so many black African nations are majority Muslim now. Even George Mason University’s Maydan publication, at the AbuSulayman Center for Global Islamic Studies, admitted back in 2020 that there is still a serious problem of anti-black racism among Muslims in northern Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, and Australia. “Anti-blackness, in the sense of racial discrimination based on one’s dark or black skin color, is something that precedes European colonial expansion in the Muslim world.” And that’s coming from an Islamic entity with a writer who considers himself “Palestinian.”
Related: This Is Islamic Conquest: Hundreds of Child Marriages in Europe
Stephen J. King of Georgetown University wrote that North African enslavement of black Africans in the Sahara desert fueled the harshness of racism in that region, a racism that continues up to the present day, just as there is still some slavery in the area today.
The website Modern Ghana in 2009 referred to the early Arab Muslim practice of taxing ethnic and religious groups considered inferior, which helped drive Africans’ conversion to Islam. Despite the many conversions in Africa, the Arab Muslims continued to see black Africans as inferior. Muslims believe hadith are sacred like the Quran, and multiple hadith verses describe Mohammed's racism. For instance, Mohammed allegedly warned, "Do not bring black into your pedigree." In another verse, according to Modern Ghana, Mohammed consoled an Ethiopian by telling her that she would be white-skinned in Paradise. That verse has proven so controversial that some modern scholars claim it was faked, though it matches the long history of Muslim racism.
There were restrictions on lighter-skinned Muslims intermarrying with darker-skinned Africans. Muslims often considered the Arabic word for slave, "abd," as interchangeable with the words for African or black. Osama Bin Laden referred in a 1996 conversation to the fact that many Arabs still see only a slave when they look at a black African, according to Modern Ghana. A similar problem exists in Turkey, where Piker's family originates, and where anti-black racism continues to be a modern-day issue.
Interestingly, when I tried to read the very famous fairy tale collection Arabian Nights, I found myself quickly abandoning the book because the anti-black racism was so egregious and constant. I have had the same experience with other Muslim fairy tales, and my Muslim classmate in college was very racist against black people. Hasan Piker bashes black Americans because he is a product of more than a millennium of Muslim racism.
