Arabs And Berbers

Download or read book Arabs and Berbers written by Ernest Gellner and published by Lexington, Mass. : Lexington Books. This book was released on 1972 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Inventing the Berbers written by Ramzi Rouighi and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-08-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Before the Arabs conquered northwest Africa in the seventh century, Ramzi Rouighi asserts, there were no Berbers. There were Moors (Mauri), Mauretanians, Africans, and many tribes and tribal federations such as the Leuathae or Musulami; and before the Arabs, no one thought that these groups shared a common ancestry, culture, or language. Certainly, there were groups considered barbarians by the Romans, but "Barbarian," or its cognate, "Berber" was not an ethnonym, nor was it exclusive to North Africa. Yet today, it is common to see studies of the Christianization or Romanization of the Berbers, or of their resistance to foreign conquerors like the Carthaginians, Vandals, or Arabs. Archaeologists and linguists routinely describe proto-Berber groups and languages in even more ancient times, while biologists look for Berber DNA markers that go back thousands of years. Taking the pervasiveness of such anachronisms as a point of departure, Inventing the Berbers examines the emergence of the Berbers as a distinct category in early Arabic texts and probes the ways in which later Arabic sources, shaped by contemporary events, imagined the Berbers as a people and the Maghrib as their home. Key both to Rouighi's understanding of the medieval phenomenon of the "berberization" of North Africa and its reverberations in the modern world is the Kitāb al-'ibar of Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), the third book of which purports to provide the history of the Berbers and the dynasties that ruled in the Maghrib. As translated into French in 1858, Rouighi argues, the book served to establish a racialized conception of Berber indigenousness for the French colonial powers who erected a fundamental opposition between the two groups thought to constitute the native populations of North Africa, Arabs and Berbers. Inventing the Berbers thus demonstrates the ways in which the nineteenth-century interpretation of a medieval text has not only served as the basis for modern historical scholarship but also has had an effect on colonial and postcolonial policies and communal identities throughout Europe and North Africa.

Download or read book Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew written by Lawrence Rosen and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Drawn from Memory" is an important contribution to Moroccan studies, to the field of anthropology, and to academic approaches to biography. Rosen weaves the threads of his narrative together into a tapestry focused on the lives of four men: a raconteur, a teacher, an entrepreneur, and a cloth dealer, a Jew. Ordinary people have intellectual lives, Rosen tells us. They may never have written a book; they may never even have read one. But their lives are rich in ideas, constantly fashioned and revised, elaborated and rearranged. Rosen first encountered the four men he profiles in his book in the course of his academic research, and he then visited and revisited these men, and the towns in which they live, over several decades. He engaged them ina kind of continuous conversation. He spoke to members of their family, their neighbors, and the town people. Out of this wealth of material, he has constructed a narrative that takes the reader not only into four intensely observed individual lives but also, as it were, the history of Morocco s evolution across the span of many decades; he takes the reader not only into the outwardly lived lives of his subjects, but their innermost thoughts, their own perceptions of themselves and the evolving Moroccan world around them. At the same time, he manages to evoke the physical landscape, the towns in which these men live, marvelously well, so that the towns and their inhabitants come alive for the reader. Beautifully illustrated with archival and ethnographic photos, "Drawn from Memory" teaches us that that for Moroccans, and by extension Muslims in general, nothing in everyday social life is hard and fast, and the meaning and outcome of all interactions is the product of negotiation and relatedness."

Download or read book Berbers and Others written by Katherine E. Hoffman and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Berbers and Others offers fresh perspectives on new forms of social and political activism in today's Maghrib. In recent years, the Amazigh (Berber) movement has become a focus of widespread political, social, and cultural attention in North Africa, Europe, and the United States. Berber groups have peacefully yet persistently laid claim to ownership over broad areas of creativity in the arts, politics, literature, education, and national memory. The contributors to this volume present some of the best new thinking in the emerging field of Berber studies, offering insight into historical antecedents, language usage, land rights, household economies, artistic production, and human rights. The scope, depth, and multidisciplinary approach will engage specialists on the Maghrib as well as students of ethnicity, social and political change, and cultural innovation.

Download or read book The Arabic Influence on Northern Berber written by Maarten Kossmann and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Arabic Influence on Northern Berber provides an overview of the effects of language contact on a wide array of Berber languages spoken in the Maghrib. These languages have undergone important changes in their lexicon, phonology, morphology, and syntax as a result of over a thousand years of Arabic influence. The social situation of Berber-Arabic language contact is similar all over the region: Berber speakers introducing Arabic features into their language, with only little language shift going on. Moreover, the typological profile of the different Berber varieties is relatively homogenous. The comparison of contact-induced change in Berber therefore adds up to a study in typological variation of contact influence under very similar linguistic and social conditions.

Download or read book The Berbers written by Michael Brett and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1997-12-08 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Berbers provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the Berber-speaking peoples.

Download or read book The Most Noble of People written by Jessica Coope and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-04-10 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Negotiates ethnic, religious, and gender identity amid turbulent social change in medieval Islamic Spain