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Arab sources on Africa older translations better translations?
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Doug M: [QB] [QUOTE]Originally posted by markellion: [qb] Will the important thing in this thread is Arabic texts so I got off topic. Are there any medieval writers that referred to Berbers as a different color than most Arabs. Both are generally referred to as white meaning dark skinned. I'm actually more interested in how they viewed different people in the world than genetics. Also the way people talk about the Moors being black but act like Arabs weren't black. By United States views both were black. I'm not saying we should look at this the way people in the United States think but if/when people say the Moors were black they should say the Arabs of that time were black When this says Negroland I'm guessing Ibn Battuta (a Berber) is using the term bilad al-sudan.: [QUOTE] This is from the end of page 75 Ibn Battuta is talking http://books.google.com/books?id=380NAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA75#PPA75,M1 [QUOTE]We marched from Karsekho and came to the river Sansarah, which is ten miles from Mali, and it being the custom of the country that no one enters there without asking leave, I wrote to the company of Whites, and to its chief, Mohammed ben Alfakih Algezuli, and also to Shemso-d-din, to engage me a lodging; and so, when I came to the river (Sansarah), I embarked in a canoe, and without further trouble, arrived at the city of Mali, the residence of the Sultan of Negroland; and, landing near the burial ground, I walked directly to the quarter of the Whites, and found Mohammed ben Alfakih, who had procured me a lodging opposite to his own house." [/QUOTE][/qb][/QUOTE][/QB][/QUOTE]Actually I haven't seen anywhere where you have provided sources from Arabic where the Berbers were identified as a monolithic entity and not black. I also have not seen anything where you have referenced anything in Arabic claiming Arabs to be monolithic and not black. That is the point. You have latched onto a handful of European translations of a few Arabic medieval texts, yet you pretend that this presents the full scope of the Arabic views of the world, when it does not. I also have not seen anything that shows how white in the Arabic texts meant black, as opposed to meaning honorable. So I think you are confused because you are taking texts that have been either purposely or accidentally mistranslated at face value. In medieval Islam, it was the clan or family connection that was the most important. Berber was not the perjorative, Lamtuna, Zenata, Masmuda, Zenaga, Sanhaja and other terms were, as those terms were the identifiers for the clans within "Berber" society that played a role in the encounters between Africans and Arabs as they swept across North Africa. If you look for Arabic medieval works on those peoples you will find much more than what you have provided thus far. Likewise, when reading about Arabs, again it is the clan names and family names that are most important, with family genealogy and history being an important branch if Islamic scholarship, especially that showing relationship to the prophet. All of which shows that Medieval Arabs did not see the world in a monolithic way as these texts suggests as opposed to a complex hierarchy of castes, professions, clans and families based on various systems of identity, especially for groups within the Islamic world. Once you get to groups on the periphery of the Islamic world or unfamiliar at the time, then you get more generic descriptions and attributes used, often degradingly as to be a non Muslim was to be a heathen to begin with in many senses. There are tons of texts across North Africa and the Islamic world that are in Arabic from the period and all you have are the selected few chosen by Europeans for translation. They do not present the depth and breadth of Arabic texts on the people of the Medieval Islamic world as most Arabic documents from the Medieval period have not been translated into English and that includes work on all subjects known to man. [QUOTE] By the 10th century, Cordoba had 700 mosques, 60,000 palaces, and 70 libraries, the largest of which had 600,000 books. In the whole al-Andalus, 60,000 treatises, poems, polemics and compilations were published each year.[21] The library of Cairo had two million books,[22] while the library of Tripoli is said to have had as many as three million books before it was destroyed by Crusaders. The number of important and original medieval Arabic works on the mathematical sciences far exceeds the combined total of medieval Latin and Greek works of comparable significance, although only a small fraction of the surviving Arabic scientific works have been studied in modern times.[23] [/QUOTE]From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age [/QB][/QUOTE]
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