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Why would someone want to write a website on the pre-Arabic history of North Africa? What is the impact of all this for North African societies today?
Already during the colonial era, and even more since independence, North African national identity is a hotly debated question, between Arab nationalists and Amazigh movements.
Are North Africans Arabs ? The number of colonists who came from Arabia to North Africa is estimated around 100.000, against the several million Amazigh who were there before them. Consequently, it is clear, genetically speaking, that quite few North Africans today have Arab origins. However, those Arabs became mixed with the local populations, taught them their language and customs, while also adopting certain customs of the people among whom they had come to live. Through this process, the Amazigh did not become Arabs, nor did the Arabs become Amazigh, but both groups intermingled. We know this intermingling did not always happen peacefully, but its result is undeniable! Today, most North Africans speak an Arabic dialect, even though their Darija also borrowed words from Amazigh languages, as well as from Turkish and from the languages of their former colonisers. The best answer to this question is: North Africans are culturally arabised, and live in an ´Arab world´ that makes more sense culturally than ethnically. This website does not aim to deny the last 1.300 years of history, but to complete them by what came before.
Some Amazigh tribes fled to mountain regions, where the invaders could hardly reach them, and thus managed to better preserve their culture. Today, their descendants are demanding that the North African States give better recognition to this culture. However, these legitimate aspirations should not bring them to consider themselves as the only ´true´ North Africans, thus rejecting their countrymen with more mixed origins: this would be the opposite mistake than those who too long marginalised them.
We are not pure Arabs, or pure Amazigh, any more than the French are pure Gauls or pure Romans: we are a bit of both, and much more. North Africa today is a tree with Amazigh roots, and Phoenician, Punic, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Vandal, Byzantine, and Arabic branches – and even some Subsaharan, Turkish, French and Spanish sprouts! Our language is an Arabic darija – but mixed with other languages. Our societies are Muslim, but our ancestors were also Jewish and Christian – including long after the advent of Islam. Even our Islam was always characterised by local influences, that can be found nowhere else in the Muslim world. All this diversity enriches us, like a fresco is made more beautiful by the multiplicity of the colors and shapes it contains.
This website aims to celebrate the diversity that characterises our nations for so many centuries, in order to open the eyes of our North African brothers and sisters on the richness of their heritage. By this, we hope to contribute to a spirit of tolerance and brotherhood in our beloved nations, because those who are different from me are not a threat for me – on the contrary, they enrich me.