Who were the Moors ?

[Short thread]

Derived from the latin word "Maurus", the term Moor was originally used to describe BERBERS from the ancient roman province of Mauretania (actual Morocco).

Over time, this word was progressively applied to Muslims Berbers and Arabs living in Europe.

711 A.D, a group of 12 000 soldiers mostly berbers led by the berber general Tarik Ibn Ziyad, landed in Gibraltar and began the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula known as Al-Andalus, in the name of the Umayyad Caliphate of Damascus.

The moors created a highly advanced civilization and culture famous for it's architecture.This territory became a prosperous cultural and economic center where education, arts and sciences flourished.

By then, the idea of Moors spread across western europe and the word "Moor" came to mean anyone who was muslim and white skined.

But they're also the black moors, also known as Haratin, descendants of black West Africans slaves.

Today we are witnessing a cultural appropriation from the afrocentrists.

So why they countinue to depict the Moors as being black skinned, even though they were mostly Berbers and Arabs ?

The reason why afrocentrists thought all moors were black was simply because they are IGNORANT.

During the 12th and 13th centuries, when the northern European crusaders began to travel to Spain and Portugal, they only saw moorish soldiers who were

mostly black slaves.

Furthermore, if a Muslim monarch had a black African slave mother or a black slave grandmother he would look a lot like a subsaharan African.
For example, the Moroccan sultan Ismaïl ben Chérif, known as Moulay Ismaïl, who had a black slave mother.

From a historical point of view, what is the reason for the disappearance of the Berbers and Arabs rulers from European imagination and their replacement with subsaharan African slaves ?

Because the subsaharan African Muslim warriors were the most exotic looking Muslim warriors they probably became stereotyped as the typical Muslim enemies.

Some Muslim warriors in Spain looked just like Christian Spaniards.

And some looked more foreign, but the black African Muslim Warriors in Spain looked the most exotic and foreign, and so would have become the model for artists wanting to stereotype Muslim enemies as foreign and exotic.

Conclusion :

Moors are Arabs and Berbers. Were some blacks amongst them ? Certainly.

But the Moorish civilization has nothing to do with black Africa.

The Moors look exactly how Moroccans and western Algerians of today look.

I hope this helps eliminate this distorted view that Moors were black and thanks for reading.

[End of the thread]