Re: Sailing Down Africa's East Coast

[David KUIJT <kuijt@umiacs.umd.edu>]

Poster: David KUIJT <kuijt@umiacs.umd.edu>



On Wed, 9 Dec 1998, Michael Jeffrey Looney wrote:

> And I had 2 questions arise:
> 
> 1.  Is that who we get the style of "berber carpets" from?

Never heard of them.

> 2.  What's a "Berber"??

The Berbers are a race of North-African desert nomads.

The Arabs are Middle-Eastern desert nomads in origin; the expansion of
Islam from Arabia in the 600s spread the Arabs out across the
Mediterranean coast of Africa and into Spain.  In most cases outside
Arabia they were only thinly spread as a ruling class over the native
population.

Even though the Berbers converted to Islam in the initial explosive wave
of the 7th century, conflicts between them and the Arabs were common; the
civil wars that split Andalusian Spain into warring Berber and Arab
principalities were a major cause of the fall of Andalusia in the 12th
century.

Dafydd

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