In a different passage, the Senegal River separated the Berber race and the black race. French Algeria continued to expand, although the conquest of the Sahara took until Together with their military takeover, the generals oversaw a transfer of property on an epic scale.
From urban real estate to agricultural land and natural resources, the wave of expropriations redistributed an entire system of wealth and set the foundations for a new colonial society. It would have a clearer vision and be better organised. The correct approach was hotly debated by the French, but in the end settler colonialism won the day. The division reduced the threat of their partnership against the settlers.
Although they might not have understood the fine points of Islamic theology or jurisprudence, the colonists knew that the new racialised Islam benefited them. They also enjoyed a legalised system of protections from the natives. Eventually, French colonisation led not only to the pauperisation of the natives, but also to the emergence of a few very large estates and a large number of poor farmers who depended on the colonial state for their economic survival.
The gradual industrialisation of Algeria made many of these poor European farmers into an urban working class with better jobs and pay than the Muslim masses. As the mass poverty of the natives became a conspicuous social fact, it served as evidence of all sorts of ideas about their own responsibility for their condition. To the French, the landless and poor Berbers were responsible for their own hardships because they stubbornly clung to the Islam of the Arabs who victimised them more than 1, years ago.
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While historians often disagree about the chronology, character, and extent of these processes, they all agree that they are essential to understanding the medieval period. So, who were the Barbar of the Arabs? Whether the sources call them Moors or Barbar, some scholars believe the people were the same. For these scholars, the Berbers were the same indigenous people of northwest Africa conquered by the Arabs, Byzantines, Vandals, Romans, and Phoenicians.
In this essay, I will reassess the validity of the equation of Berbers with Moors, which underlies scholarly research, by focusing on the representation of the Barbar in early medieval Arabic sources. In particular, I will concentrate on the extent to which these sources conceived of the Barbar as the indigenous inhabitants of the region. In this way, I hope to outline research possibilities about the Arab conquests, conversion to Islam, and Arabization.
The latter led to the city of Rhapta, which he described as the metropolis of Barbaria. Excerpts from early authors, known through later recensions, contain references to them.
Zayd d. It does not refer to a particular people like the Arabs or the Abyssinians but rather to the inhabitants of a region or city on the east coast of Africa called Barbar. Thus, one may safely conclude that the name predated the Arab conquest of northwest Africa. Since these Barbar were not also Moors, it is necessary to find out whether the Arabs gave up this older conception and took on a new one once they invaded northwest Africa. The earliest Arabic sources describing the Muslim conquest of northwest Africa and al-Andalus were composed in the ninth century, more than a century after the first raids.
As they tend to take the category for granted, these texts need to be critically reassessed in light of the political events they recount.
A synoptic narrative of the Arab conquest of northwest Africa and the politics that ensued will set the stage for a discussion of early Arabic sources and their portrayal of the Barbar, and how the term, originally applied to east Africans, came to be applied to northwest Africans.
The Arab conquest occurred in stages. Over time, the incursions, raiding, and settlements led to a slow and progressive reorientation of politics in northwest Africa, closely related to the new important centers of power in the Mashriq. Political struggles taking place in the east had a great impact on the formulation of a course of action, the leadership of the military campaigns, as well as shaping the terms of the opposition. The articulation, and thus terminology, of political struggle between Muslims in the Maghrib owed a great deal to developments in the Mashriq.
In this regard, it may seem as if eastern politics were transplanted in the west, or that the west reproduced the politics of the east. Yet, and this is crucial, the parties that won battles in the east did not necessarily or automatically win in the west as well.
As they raided, imposed tributes and taxes, and accumulated captives, the Arabs came up against a number of political formations, which had emerged from the reordering of power subsequent to the defeat of the Byzantines. The ability of these groups to raise armies made them formidable opponents and useful allies. These clients fought alongside the Arabs and came to espouse similar eastern ideologies.
In the first decade of the eighth century, an Arab force reached the shores of the Atlantic. Arab forays into the pre-Saharan and Saharan regions were limited and, in any case, not as spectacular as their capture of the Mediterranean city of Tangier.
For the first time, the entirety of northwest Africa became an administrative unit. In subsequent years, they accumulated further victories and pushed their raids far into the northern regions.
Al-Andalus was born. In the west, the Arab elite put in place a system of precedence that guaranteed them preferential treatment. The Arab elite fought hard to establish and maintain the mechanisms that distinguished between Muslims, and which alienated their relatively recent northwest African allies. By the s, many groups challenged Umayyad rule in the east and the west. The grievances of opponents included the nepotism, rapaciousness, and arbitrary brutality of Umayyad officials.
Unsurprisingly, anti-Umayyad Arabs, some of whom had fled Umayyad police in the east, formed alliances with various groups of northwest Africans. In the early s, anti-Umayyad movements seriously confronted the Arabs of al-Andalus.
However, unlike the Maghrib, al-Andalus was a more recently conquered territory. Because the leaders of the conquest were Umayyad generals, Arab elites of al-Andalus were predominantly pro-Umayyad.
This did not prevent the articulation of anti-Umayyad sentiment in ways that echoed eastern politics. It did mean, however, that the most serious threat to their predominance came from an alliance of anti-Umayyad Arabs and northwest Africans.
For the most part, and given the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Africans among the discontented, the latter led the uprisings in al-Andalus. In al-Andalus, a similar rebellion in showed that disunity among Arabs could seriously challenge the status quo. In this respect, al-Andalus was different from the rest of the Maghrib where Islam, rather than Arab predominance, was the more dominant ideology.
Al-Andalus took another route. The pro-Umayyad camp welcomed the arrival of the sole surviving member of the Umayyad dynasty and in , after routing a vigorous opposition, declared an independent Umayyad emirate in al-Andalus. The Arab-Byzantine Chronicle of 22 is the earliest extant historical source written after the Muslim conquest of the Maghrib and al-Andalus. Its author was Iberian, and its language was Latin.
Unfortunately for historians of the Maghrib, the anonymous author was more interested in Byzantine imperial politics and barely mentioned events in al-Andalus. One of his contemporaries living in al-Andalus possibly used the same sources to pen a richer chronicle.
Although neither of these authors refers to the Barbar, the author of the Arab-Byzantine Chronicle refers to the Moors Mauri once to describe the battle that ended Byzantine rule in Africa Therefore the confrontation was prepared, whereupon, the battle line of the Moors turned in flight and all the nobility of Africa, along with count Gregory, was destroyed to the point of extinction.
The description of the Moors is rather vague and does little to identify them. In contrast to the imprecisely defined Moors, the authors refer to the inhabitants of the old Roman province of Africa as Africans Africani.
While it is not clear if the author of the Arab-Byzantine Chronicle collected any information in Iberia, his contemporary, the author of The Chronicle of , did. In fact, he seems to have used even Arabic sources. A passage about the rebellion against Arab rule in both the Maghrib and al-Andalus in suggests that the author may have gleaned more than dates and names from Arabic sources. This story offers a very dramatic prelude to the landing of the Syrians in al-Andalus and explains their zeal and expertise in crushing the rebellion there.
The description of the events in al-Andalus possesses concreteness and specificity missing from the narration of African affairs. This suggests that the Arabic sources in question were either Andalusi or had an Andalusi connection. Distinguishing himself from the author of the Arab-Byzantine Chronicle , this author provides much more information about politics in Iberia. The Moors and Saracens of Spain refer to groups who had privileges as Muslims that set them apart from Christians:.
He was a cruel and terrible despot who raged for almost three years. With bitter deceit, he stirred up the Saracens and Moors of Spain by confiscating property that they were holding for the sake of peace and restoring many things to the Christians. Although he was preeminent in courage and fame, a Moor named Munnuza, hearing that his people were being oppressed by the harsh temerity of the judges in the territory of Libya, quickly made peace with the Franks and organized a revolt against the Saracens of Spain.
The anonymous author cast the revolts of the s and early s in terms that mark them as a traumatic experience.
Inter-Arab strife had prevented Umayyad troops from coming to the rescue and encouraged the Moors of Spain to rebel endangering the status quo. Clearly, the rebellions of the Moors against the Arabs in al-Andalus produced conditions requiring a distinction between the Moors of Iberia and those of northwest Africa.
While Arabs may have had the sense that their rule throughout the region was unstable, northwest Africans do not seem to have formulated a collective political program against them.
Its titular character is a Moor who serves as a general in the Venetian army. More recently, the term has been coopted by the sovereign citizen movement in the United States. Members of Moorish sovereign citizen groups claim they are descended from Moors who predated white settlers in North America, and that they are part of a sovereign nation and not subject to U.
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