Book The Berbers In Arabic Literature

Book Description

This book is not intended to be an historical eurvey, nor is it an anthropological study supported by documentary evidence. It is a presentation of a people as recealed in written and oral literature. In a limited panorama it would be wholly unrealistic to try present the Berbers from every part of North Africa. I have chosen representative groups and peoples. They are: the Ibadi Berbers of Eastern Algeria, Tunisia, and the Libyan Jabal Nafusa; the Berbers of Northern Morocco; the Berber peoples of the Moroccan Sus and Mauritania; and the Tuareg of the Sahara. Each region has been important for the diffusion of Arabic culture and literature in Europe and Africa or for the evolution of Islam in the Maghreb and West Africa.

Other volumes in this series have attempted to face, if not to answer, the thorny question as to why Islam and the Islamic peoples have aroused continous hostility, aversion and incomprehension in the West. The central difference in creed between Christianity and Islam is probably too fundamental ever to be bridged, although the mystics are often remarkably close in their vision. Rarely have Christen-dom and Islam agreed to differ with anything like a respect devoid of animosity. Islam among the Berbers has fared no better in the West that Islam anywhere else. If anything the antipathy in the remote past has been worse, although Norman Daniel has shown that in the case of the Berber Almoravids at least there is the occasional exception.

Yet the Berber dissenter and puritan and the Berber "holy man " or marabout often appear in Arabic literature in a guise and with a temperament not dissimilar to the Celtic saint in Ireland, Wales or Britanny in the Dark Ages, to the seventeenth-century Roundhead, or to the nineteenth-century finnish Layman and reformer Paavo Ruotsalainen.Those who find themselves in sympathy with any or with all of these very different religious outlook of the Berbers. Islamic legalism has been effectively leavened by a child-like, dare one say animistic, nature mysticism which runs deep in the hearts of the people. Pre-Islamic religion has indelibly influenced the Islam of the Berbers.

This book, then, is intentended to furnish a background to one of the peoples who, although intensely proud of their past and their culture, form an important part of the Arab World. At the same time I hope it will introduce new source material inaccessible up to now to the student of Islamic and African societies.

Who are the Berbers? The name is derived from the Latin barbarus, meaning a savage of diverse origin who lived beyond the bounds of the Roman world. As time passed this name was extended to the original inhabitants of Barbary, that land lying between Eygpt and the Atlantic, the Sahara and the Mediterranean. Today, the Berber world still forms a bridge between the Middle East, Western Europe and Muslim Africa to the south of the Sahara.

Berber has a linguistic, if not an ethnic, reality, being a Hamito-Semitic language consisting of clearly distinguised, and sometimes mutually unintelligible dialects. Some Berbers speak only this tongue; others speak or write Arabic as well.

When the Arab Conquests began most of North Africa was Berber. Today, due to Arabisation, the Berbers are not evenly spread: the majority are to be found in Mororco and Algeria, but there are also pockets of Berbers in Southern Mauritania, Gourara and the Central Sharan ranges, in Mali and Niger, and in Western Libya. It is often diffiuclt now to make a meaningful distinction between "Arab" and "Berber".

the Arabic sources quoted here are of varied date and provenance; several were hitherto unaccessible. Special prominence has been given to works in Arabic, written by the Berbers themselves, which have not been published before in English translation. Together, they present a colourful pageant of a people, their history, and the influence they have had on the development of the Muslim world.

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