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 Inventing the Berbers written by Ramzi Rouighi and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-07-05 with total page 268 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 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 Invention of the Jewish People written by Shlomo Sand and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2010-06-14 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of the Berbers Imazighen written by Hsain Ilahiane and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-03-27 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Berbers, also known as Imazighen, are the ancient inhabitants of North Africa, but rarely have they formed an actual kingdom or separate nation state. Ranging anywhere between 15-50 million, depending on how they are classified, the Berbers have influenced the culture and religion of Roman North Africa and played key roles in the spread of Islam and its culture in North Africa, Spain, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Taken together, these dynamics have over time converted to redefine the field of Berber identity and its socio-political representations and symbols, making it an even more important issue in the 21st century. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Berbers contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 200 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, places, events, institutions, and aspects of culture, society, economy, and politics. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Berbers.

Download or read book The Invention of the Maghreb written by Abdelmajid Hannoum and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-10 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines how French colonial modernity invented the concept of the Maghreb, making it distinct from Africa and the Middle East.

Download or read book The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber written by Mel Gordon and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber chronicles a remarkable career, including dozens of photographs and drawings that recreate Anita's "Repertoire of the Damned." Book jacket.

Download or read book The Adventures of Ibn Battuta written by Ross E. Dunn and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ross Dunn's classic retelling of the travels of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim of the 14th century.

Download or read book Land Power and the Sacred written by Janet R. Goodwin and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Landed estates (shōen) produced much of the material wealth supporting all levels of late classical and medieval Japanese society. During the tenth through sixteenth centuries, estates served as sites of de facto government, trade network nodes, developing agricultural technology, and centers of religious practice and ritual. Although mostly farmland, many yielded nonagricultural products, including lumber, salt, fish, and silk, and provided livelihoods for craftsmen, seafarers, peddlers, and performers, as well as for cultivators. By the twelfth century, an estate “system” permeated much of the Japanese archipelago. This volume examines the system from three perspectives: the land itself; the power derived from and exerted over the land; and the religion institutions and individuals that were involved in landholding practices. Chapters by Japanese and Western scholars explore how the estate system arose, developed, and eventually collapsed. Several investigate a single estate or focus on agricultural techniques, while others survey estates in broad contexts such as economic change and maritime trade. Other chapters look at how we learn about estates by inspecting documents, landscape features, archaeological remains, and extant buildings and images; how representatives of every social stratum worked together to make the land productive and, conversely, how cooperative arrangements failed and rivals battled one another, making conflict as well as collaboration a hallmark of the system. On a more personal level, we follow the monk Chōgen’s restoration of Ōbe Estate and his installation of a famous Amida triad in a temple he built on the premises; the strategies of royal ladies Jōsaimon’in, Hachijōin, and Kōkamon’in as they strove to keep their landholdings viable; and the murder of estate official Gorōzaemon, whose own neighbors killed him as a result of a much larger dispute between two powerful warrior families. Land, Power, and the Sacred represents a significant expansion and revision of our knowledge of medieval Japanese estates. A range of readers will welcome the primary source research and comparative perspectives it offers; those who do not specialize in Japanese medieval history but recognize the value of teaching the history of estates will find a chapter devoted to the topic invaluable. Contributors and translators: Kristina Buhrma Michelle Damian David Eason Sakurai Eiji (translated by Ethan Segal) Philip Garrett Janet R. Goodwin Yoshiko Kainuma Rieko Kamei-Dyche Sachiko Kawai Hirota Kōji (translated by Janet R. Goodwin) Ōyama Kyōhei (translated by Janet R. Goodwin) Nagamura Makoto (translated by Janet R. Goodwin) Endō Motoo (translated by Janet R. Goodwin) Joan R. Piggott Ethan Segal Dan Sherer Kimura Shigemitsu (translated by Kristina Buhrman) Noda Taizō (translated by David Eason) Nishida Takeshi (translated by Michelle Damian)

Download or read book Berber Memories written by Michel Draguet and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Berbers are considered to be the earliest occupants of the regions stretching north of the Sahara. Their ancient cultural tradition has been enhanced by absorbing diverse outside influences, the result of successive invasions punctuating the history of the southern Mediterranean ever since the arrival of the Phoenicians - followed by the Greeks, the Romans, the Vandals, the Byzantines and finally the Arabs. Through appropriation and assimilation, the Berbers gave birth to an exceptionally rich culture, while retaining the very foundations of an age-old civilisation born when the Sahara was still green. The remarkable collection of finery assembled by Anne-Marie Gillion Crowet relates this fascinating history brilliantly. Besides the virtuosity of the Muslim and Jewish artisans, this jewellery also testifies to the complex situation of women within the Berber world. The fruit of a partnership with the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, Berber Memories pays tribute to Berber women, as guardians and conveyors of civilisation in Morocco.

Download or read book Black Metaphors written by Cord J. Whitaker and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-10-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late Middle Ages, Christian conversion could wash a black person's skin white—or at least that is what happens when a black sultan converts to Christianity in the English romance King of Tars. In Black Metaphors, Cord J. Whitaker examines the rhetorical and theological moves through which blackness and whiteness became metaphors for sin and purity in the English and European Middle Ages—metaphors that guided the development of notions of race in the centuries that followed. From a modern perspective, moments like the sultan's transformation present blackness and whiteness as opposites in which each condition is forever marked as a negative or positive attribute; medieval readers were instead encouraged to remember that things that are ostensibly and strikingly different are not so separate after all, but mutually construct one another. Indeed, Whitaker observes, for medieval scholars and writers, blackness and whiteness, and the sin and salvation they represent, were held in tension, forming a unified whole. Whitaker asks not so much whether race mattered to the Middle Ages as how the Middle Ages matters to the study of race in our fraught times. Looking to the treatment of color and difference in works of rhetoric such as John of Garland's Synonyma, as well as in a range of vernacular theological and imaginative texts, including Robert Manning's Handlyng Synne, and such lesser known romances as The Turke and Sir Gawain, he illuminates the process by which one interpretation among many became established as the truth, and demonstrates how modern movements—from Black Lives Matter to the alt-right—are animated by the medieval origins of the black-white divide.

Download or read book The Making of the Medieval Middle East written by Jack Tannous and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-04 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold new religious history of the late antique and medieval Middle East that places ordinary Christians at the center of the story In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. Jack Tannous argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East’s history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, Tannous provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. This provocative book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

Download or read book The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan the Life of Mexico City written by Barbara E. Mundy and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2015-07-15 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In 1325, the Aztecs founded their capital city Tenochtitlan, which grew to be one of the world's largest cities before it was violently destroyed in 1521 by conquistadors from Spain and their indigenous allies. Re-christened and reoccupied by the Spanish conquerors as Mexico City, it became the pivot of global trade linking Europe and Asia in the 17th century, and one of the modern world's most populous metropolitan areas. However, the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan and its people did not entirely disappear when the Spanish conquistadors destroyed it. By reorienting Mexico City-Tenochtitlan as a colonial capital and indigenous city, Mundy demonstrates its continuity across time. Using maps, manuscripts, and artworks, she draws out two themes: the struggle for power by indigenous city rulers and the management and manipulation of local ecology, especially water, that was necessary to maintain the city's sacred character. What emerges is the story of a city-within-a city that continues to this day"--

Download or read book Sea of the Caliphs written by Christophe Picard and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-21 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christophe Picard recounts the adventures of Muslim sailors who competed with Greek and Latin seamen for control of the 7th-century Mediterranean. By the time Christian powers took over trade routes in the 13th century, a Muslim identity that operated within, and in opposition to, Europe had been shaped by encounters across the sea of the caliphs.

Download or read book The Ethnographic State written by Edmund Burke III and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-09-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alone among Muslim countries, Morocco is known for its own national form of Islam, "Moroccan Islam." However, this pathbreaking study reveals that Moroccan Islam was actually invented in the early twentieth century by French ethnographers and colonial officers who were influenced by British colonial practices in India. Between 1900 and 1920, these researchers compiled a social inventory of Morocco that in turn led to the emergence of a new object of study, Moroccan Islam, and a new field, Moroccan studies. In the process, they resurrected the monarchy and reinvented Morocco as a modern polity. This is an important contribution for scholars and readers interested in questions of orientalism and empire, colonialism and modernity, and the invention of traditions.

Download or read book The Ornament of the World written by Maria Rosa Menocal and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2009-11-29 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic bestseller — the inspiration for the PBS series — is an "illuminating and even inspiring" portrait of medieval Spain that explores the golden age when Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance (Los Angeles Times). This enthralling history, widely hailed as a revelation of a "lost" golden age, brings to vivid life the rich and thriving culture of medieval Spain, where for more than seven centuries Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together in an atmosphere of tolerance, and where literature, science, and the arts flourished. "It is no exaggeration to say that what we presumptuously call 'Western' culture is owed in large measure to the Andalusian enlightenment...This book partly restores a world we have lost." —Christopher Hitchens, The Nation

Download or read book Reading in the Byzantine Empire and Beyond written by Teresa Shawcross and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-12 with total page 744 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a comprehensive introduction to the history of books, readers and reading in the Byzantine Empire and its sphere of influence, this volume addresses a paradox. Advanced literacy was rare among imperial citizens, being restricted by gender and class. Yet the state's economic, religious and political institutions insisted on the fundamental importance of the written record. Starting from the materiality of codices, documents and inscriptions, the volume's contributors draw attention to the evidence for a range of interactions with texts. They examine the role of authors, compilers and scribes. They look at practices such as the close perusal of texts in order to produce excerpts, notes, commentaries and editions. But they also analyse the social implications of the constant intersection of writing with both image and speech. Showcasing current methodological approaches, this collection of essays aims to place a discussion of Byzantium within the mainstream of medieval textual studies.