Despite the many strands of Arab scholarship flourishing by the beginning of the ninth century, knowledge about the black population remained extremely scant. When it came to social conformity, it suffices to look at the work of geographer Ibn al-Faqīh al-Hamadhānī. In Mukbtasar Kitāb al-Buldān, he compared the shape of the planet to that of a bird. In this system, Africa was stripped of all material reality. The parts that he sketched of the northern part of the continent, from the western fringes of Egypt to the extreme edges of the Maghreb, are insubstantial. In this highly evocative allegory of the thinking of the time, Ibn al-Faqī (op. cit., pp. 3-4) recalls that:  
According to 'Abd Allah Ibn Wā̄il al-Saḥmī, the shape of the world is split into five areas. The world looks like a bird's head with two wings, a chest and a tail. The head of the world is China and beyond China is where people called the Wāq-Wāq live; and beyond the Wāq-Wāq are a people whose numbers are only known to Allah. The right wing is India and beyond India there is an ocean beyond which there is no-one; the left wing is al-Khazar [...]; the chest of the world is Mecca, Hedjaz,  
Syria, Iraq and Egypt; the tail stretches from Dhāt al-Humān to the Maghreb, and the worst part of the bird is the tail.  
Documentary sources provide much of our information regarding the development of mindsets, the introduction of colour prejudice and the establishment of an imaginary hierarchy. Understanding the processes involved in producing stereotypes and the markers of biological and sociocultural identities proves an inexhaustible subject. To which precise moment in the history of the Arab and Muslim world can we trace back the premises of the naturalization and essentialisation of blacks? How did the transition from simple stereotype to systematic stigmatization come about? Did the latter precede or coincide with the spread of enslavement?