quote:Originally posted by T. Rex: To be honest, I have to express some doubt that the Moors were all black. If that was true, why'd they depict themselves like this?
It's from "Qissat Bayad wa Riyad".
I don't recall anyone ever stating that "all" Moors were Black. However the evidence of eye witness accounts from White Europeans, iconography, and literature suggest the vast MAJORITY were Black. You should focus your attention on why Blacks have been completely whitewashed out of Moorish history, unless you're under the false assumption that Blacks during the Moorish era were simply "servants" or "Mercenaries".
Posts: 148 | From: Sirius | Registered: Sep 2006
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Another thing is most of the focus is on Islamic era Moors... when Euros have been calling them that name since Greek times...Now like others have said they the Moors rerly refer to themselves as Moors that they had proper names for themselves...if for eg you want to know what a Sanhadja looked like they are still very much around...a quick goole search will put you in contact with them.
Posts: 6546 | From: japan | Registered: Feb 2009
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Nobody is confused about what Moor refers to. Even American high school text books make it clear that the Moors were African muslims.
Quote from a text on Moorish literature:
quote: WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY RENŽE BASSET, PH.D. OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FRANCE, AND DIRECTOR OF THE ACADŽEMIE DALGER SPECIAL INTRODUCTION. The region which extends from the frontiers of Egypt to the Atlantic Ocean, and from the Mediterranean to the Niger, was in ancient times inhabited by a people to whom we give the general name of Berbers, but whom the ancients, particularly those of the Eastern portion, knew under the name of Moors. They were called Maurisi by the Greeks, said Strabo, in the first century A.D., and Mauri by the Romans. They are of Lybian origin, and form a powerful and rich nation.[1] This name of Moors is applied not only to the descendants of the ancient Lybians and Numidians, who live in the nomad state or in settled abodes, but also to the descendants of the Arabs who, in the eighth century A.D., brought with them Islamism, imposed by the sabre of Ogbah and his successors. Even further was it carried, into Spain, when Berbers and Arabs, reunited under the standard of Moussa and Tarik, added this country to the empire of the Khalifa. In the fifteenth century the Portuguese, in their turn, took the name to the Orient, and gave the name of Moors to the Mussulmans whom they found on the Oriental coast of Africa and in India. The appellation particularizes, as one may see, three peoples entirely different in origin the Berbers, the Arabs of the west, and the Spanish Mussulmans, widely divided, indeed, by political struggles, but united since the seventh and eighth centuries in their religious law. This distinction must be kept in mind, as it furnishes the necessary divisions for a study of the Moorish literature. The term Moorish Literature may appear ambitious applied to the monuments of the Berber language which have come down to us, or are gathered daily either from the lips of singers on the mountains of the Jurgura, of the Aures, or of the Atlas of Morocco; under the tents of the Touaregs of the desert or the Moors of Senegal; in the oases of the south of Algeria or in Tunis.
Moor was a term that derived from the Roman name for the provinces in Africa and their dark skinned inhabitants. It then became used as a reference to the dark skinned people who invaded Spain in the 8th century, which included both Africans and non African blacks. And it then expanded to mean any dark skinned Muslim from Africa, Arabia, the Middle East, Persia, Afghanistan, India and South Asia. Marco Polo even writes of Moors in the Indian Ocean in his travels. Only later did it become expanded to the point to describe any Muslim in Medieval Spain.
Posts: 8898 | Registered: May 2005
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Note the Eurasian ladies/Berbers at 13:00. But obviously the mixing of black African males and Eurasian females and vice versa across the Mediterranean is quite ancient.
Posts: 8898 | Registered: May 2005
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