Tariq Nelson

There was an interesting article in the Economist that explores the question of race in medicine and slightly dips into the question of whether or not race is a biological reality or a social construct. People have been going back and forth on this ever since the advent of the new DNA tests. Before commenting on some of the quotes from the article, I want to clarify my position 

Is race a biological reality? 

From what I see the answer is an unequivocal … Yes and No. 

Yes groups of people are different and can be categorized into groups that I suppose could be called “races”, but No, the broad groups that have traditionally defined “race” as being everyone with a certain skin color being from a mutually exclusive category, never over-lapping is not accurate. 

What do I mean? 

Let’s start with the ayah in which Allah says:

يَا أَيُّهَا النَّاسُ إِنَّا خَلَقْنَاكُم مِّن ذَكَرٍ وَأُنثَى وَجَعَلْنَاكُمْ شُعُوبًا وَقَبَائِلَ لِتَعَارَفُوا إِنَّ أَكْرَمَكُمْ عِندَ اللَّهِ أَتْقَاكُمْ إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَلِيمٌ خَبِيرٌ

O Humankind! We have created you from male and female and have made you into peoples (shu‘ub) and tribes (qaba’il) that you may know one another; truly, the noblest (akram) among you before God are the most pious (atqa) among yourselves; indeed, is God the All-knowing, the All-seeing.” (49:13).  

The above verse in the Qur’an shows that Islam is a religion that is for all of mankind regardless of color, background or “race”. 

However, note that the word “race” is not even mentioned in the verse above. Allah Himself has mentioned that he created us in nations and tribes, but did not mention “race”.  

This is one of the beautiful things of Islam as attested to by many converts; the equality of human beings. The only thing that makes one better than another is piety, which only Allah knows is truly there or not. 

Tribes are extended families and this is how Allah created us and this is where one can indeed biologically group people into a “race” if one wants to call it that. 

In other words, one can find distinct similarities in a tribe of Dinkas, but cannot find anything that links these Dinkas to another group of blacks such as Housas in Nigeria besides a similarity in skin color. And, scientifically, one may find MORE differences between these two groups, than between say the Dinkas and an Asian tribe. So humanity is more a group of thousands (perhaps millions) of different tribes (extended families) or “clines” than the overbroad “races” where large swaths of differing people are crudely all lumped into a single category. 

Dr. C. Loring Brace puts it this way: 

Pictures and the television camera tell us that the people of Oslo in Norway, Cairo in Egypt, and Nairobi in
Kenya look very different. And when we actually meet natives of those separate places, which can indeed happen, we can see representations of those differences at first hand. But if one were to walk up beside the Nile from Cairo, across the Tropic of Cancer to Khartoum in the Sudan and on to Nairobi, there would be no visible boundary between one people and another. The same thing would be true if one were to walk north from Cairo, through the Caucasus, and on up into Russia, eventually swinging west across the northern end of the Baltic Sea to Scandinavia. The people at any adjacent stops along the way look like one another more than they look like anyone else since, after all, they are related to one another. As a rule, the boy marries the girl next door throughout the whole world, but next door goes on without stop from one region to another.

We realize that in the extremes of our transit—Moscow to Nairobi, perhaps—there is a major but gradual change in skin color from what we euphemistically call white to black, and that this is related to the latitudinal difference in the intensity of the ultraviolet component of sunlight. What we do not see, however, is the myriad other traits that are distributed in a fashion quite unrelated to the intensity of ultraviolet radiation. Where skin color is concerned, all the northern populations of the Old World are lighter than the long-term inhabitants near the equator. Although Europeans and Chinese are obviously different, in skin color they are closer to each other than either is to equatorial Africans. But if we test the distribution of the widely known ABO blood-group system, then Europeans and Africans are closer to each other than either is to Chinese.

Every time we plot the distribution of a trait possessing a survival value that is greater under some circumstances than under others, it will have a different pattern of geographical variation, and no two such patterns will coincide. Nose form, tooth size, relative arm and leg length, and a whole series of other traits are distributed each in accordance with its particular controlling selective force. The gradient of the distribution of each is called a “cline” and those clines are completely independent of one another. This is what lies behind the aphorism, “There are no races, there are only clines.”  

And here is the main point I want to make from what Dr. Brace said: 

Yes, we can recognize people from a given area. What we are seeing, however, is a pattern of features derived from common ancestry in the area in question, and these are largely without different survival value. To the extent that the people in a given region look more like one another than they look like people from other regions, this can be regarded as “family resemblance writ large.” And as we have seen, each region grades without break into the one next door.
 

In other words: We are just a bunch of extended families or TRIBES. So, just as Allah revealed in the Qur’an over 1,400 years ago, scientists are finding that human beings are indeed a myriad of tribes. 

So if one compared me to my Father’s brother’s son (From the “Nelson” tribe), one would find a lot of biological similarities between us, including the same tendencies to certain diseases etc. However, if one was to select a random African-American, they may not find any similarities at all other than similar skin color and perhaps phenotype.  

That said, let’s move to the article where they are confused on “race”. Here are some quotes: 

Yet decades ago, Luca Luigi Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford University showed that the frequencies of different alleles of genes for several blood and immune-system proteins vary geographically. It is now starting to be accepted that these sorts of variation can matter for health. If so, searching for genetic variations in different racial groups is not only acceptable, but also obligatory. 

They are confused about the seeming contradiction because they are looking at things in total black and white (no pun intended) terms. Either race is a social construct that should be totally thrown out, or they are mutually exclusive categories that never overlap. Nothing in-between.

 That is even truer for less populous racial groups; indeed, the smaller the group, the less likely researchers are to find important but rare alleles unless they can break the population down. Ignoring race altogether would be to the detriment of medical knowledge about the very people who might benefit 

See my comments above about tribes. Allah’s description would solve the entire dilemma. Simply replace the word “race” with “tribe” or think of a tribe as a “race” or call it extended family.  It would also solve the following dilemma. 

For example, according to Richard Cooper, a professor of medicine at Loyola University in Chicago, talking about black people having a gene that predisposes them to some disorder or another “feeds a social process” that is deeply negative. As he observes, black Americans suffer more from high blood pressure than white Americans. “We don’t know why, but everyone says it is genetic. But if you look around the world, by far the highest hypertension rates are in Poland, Finland and Russia. Much higher than black Americans. The average difference in blood pressure between blacks and whites is about 4mm of mercury, the difference between whites in the US and Russia is about 20mm. No one has ever said that these white people are genetically predisposed to hypertension: it must be their diet. But when they talk about blacks, it has to be genetics. That, in a nutshell, is the whole problem with this whole way of thinking.”

That is a good point, but in reality, all of them could be genetic or none of them. They are looking at this from this prism: All the blacks must have tendency to high blood pressure, while the whites do not. When looking at this from a less general point of view, populations from amongst the Polish, Fins and Russians may indeed have this tendency. The same applies to certain groups of blacks. The problem comes in when they try to apply a rule to all “the blacks” and another to all “the whites” and so on. There are a multitude of differences between the groups within those two crude larger groups. 

This sort of work raises another question, with its own set of sensitivities: how, scientifically, do you define someone’s race? In studies such as Dr Cohen’s this question is fudged, because people defined themselves. That is a reasonable starting point. But America’s population is descended mainly from immigrants and those ancestors have been meeting and mating for centuries. Few native-born Americans trace all of their ancestors back to the same part of the world, so how closely are genes affecting disease linked to genes affecting racial self-identification?

This is what makes America different from the rest of the world. So many different people mixing and having more diverse backgrounds. However, this does not mean that they do not have a tribe (extended family). Even a mixed person (essentially a person from two different tribes) will have much in common genetically with his “mono-racial” tribal members.  

So, instead of just testing and grouping a bunch of “blacks” and “whites” etc, they could look at this from the tribal level, and get more accurate measurements and get even higher correlations. 

Eventually, the technology developed to carry out the Human Genome Project, and the science it has made possible, will make the whole question redundant. It will be possible to look at the genes of each person as an individual. But until that time race, used sceptically, does have value. And unlike previous attempts at racial science, this one could actually do people some good.

So, yes grouping into “races” (I am calling tribes) can have value, but not when viewed through a political prism. So between these two extremes of total race exclusivity and race should be dismissed as totally being a social construct, is the Islamic position on this.