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Tamazgha

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by AethyrX (talk | contribs) at 02:48, 14 March 2024 (Added Tifinaɣ spelling of Tamazɣa, replaced unreliable sources (including an article by an non-scientific think-tank) with sources from peer-reviewed journals, clarified the use of the term, and expanded the explanation of its' origin. Tamazɣa is not a fictitious entity, all reliable sources describe it as "imagined" and all nations are imagined. Nowhere else on this encyclopedia is a nation described as a 'fictitious entity'.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Not to be confused with Tamazight.

Tamazgha (Latin Tamazight: Tamazɣa; Neo-Tifinagh Tamazight: ⵜⴰⵎⴰⵣⵖⴰ; Arabic: تامازغا) is a neologism in the Tamazight languages denoting the lands traditionally inhabited by the Amazigh people.[1] The term was coined in the 1970s by the Agraw Imazighen in France[2] and, since the late 1990s, has gained particular significance among speakers of the Tamazight languages.[3] While the region was once unified by its' culture and language[4][5], it has never been a single political entity.[6] Despite this, certain (but not all[7]) Amazigh nationalists such as members of the the Movement for the Autonomy of Kabylia use the term to imagine and describe a hypothetical federation spanning between the Canary Islands and the Siwa Oasis, a large swathe of territory including Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Egypt, the Western Sahara, Burkina Faso and Senegal.[8][9][10]

Overview

Historically, there was no singular endonym for the speakers of the languages descended from what is now called Proto-Libyan nor was there a term for their land. Instead, more specific terms for each subgroup were employed such as the Kabyle term Leqbayel or the Shawia term Ishawiyen.[11] The earliest known reference to the Amazigh people as one group comes in the form of Arabic بربر (barbar), as borrowed from Ancient Greek βᾰ́ρβᾰρος (bárbaros, 'barbarian'). Originally, this term had been used in reference to all indigenous North Africans and East Africans but the term eventually narrowed in most situations to Northwest Africans through its' usage during the Muslim conquests.[12] This was then solidified during French colonization when the Kabyle myth developed and 'Berbère' became a relatively common term of self-identification.[13]

In an attempt to reclaim the identity from the history of colonization, the Agraw Imazighen (a Paris-based Kabyle activist association that dissolved in 1978 and was known as the Berber Academy before 1969) coined the term Tamazɣa using the pre-existing triconsonantal root M-Z-Ɣ[14] in the 1970s to refer to the land of the Amazigh people as a whole.[15]

The most densely populated areas of the Tamazgha are the coastal fertile regions of northern Libya, northern and eastern Tunisia, northern Algeria, northern Morocco, and the Atlantic coast of Morocco. "Tamazgha" corresponds roughly to the geographical territory inhabited by the Mazices, Herodotus' Ancient Libya and to the medieval Barbary Coast.[citation needed] While no state has spanned the entire region of Tamazgha, the Barghawata Confederacy, the Almoravid Dynasty and the Almohad Caliphate are all believed to have been major political entities in Northwest Africa that had a significant Amazigh population and had made a Tamazight language official.[16]

The term has been translated into Spanish as Mazigia, abbreviated as MZG and used as an alternative international license plate code for some people.[17]

Notes

  1. ^ Brahim El Guabli (2023). "The Idea of Tamazgha: Current Articulations and Scholarly Potential". Tamazgha Studies Journal. Retrieved 2024-03-13. Often described as a neologism, Tamazgha can be simply defined as the Amazigh homeland.
  2. ^ Brahim El Guabli (2023). "The Idea of Tamazgha: Current Articulations and Scholarly Potential". Tamazgha Studies Journal. Retrieved 2024-03-13. The Académie Berbère may have invented the word Tamazgha, but the existence of a land where different varieties of Amazigh languages were spoken preceded the creation of the Académie itself.
  3. ^ Brahim El Guabli (2023). "The Idea of Tamazgha: Current Articulations and Scholarly Potential". Tamazgha Studies Journal. Retrieved 2024-03-13. Tamazgha is a concept that has acquired a transnational cultural and political significance among Amazigh speakers since the late 1990s.
  4. ^ Brahim El Guabli (2023). "The Idea of Tamazgha: Current Articulations and Scholarly Potential". Tamazgha Studies Journal. Retrieved 2024-03-13. Tamazgha is both the discursive and geographic embodiment of an Amazigh imaginary of a language and culture that were once unified and had their own territory.
  5. ^ "L'État marocain et la question amazighe: Rapport alternatif de Tamazgha au Comité pour l'élimination de la discrimination raciale (CERD)" (PDF). Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. 2010. Retrieved 2024-03-13. Tous les historiens de l'Afrique du Nord attestent que le pays est peuplé de Berbères depuis les temps les plus anciens. Ainsi, Ibn Khaldoun dans son Histoire des Berbères, peut écrire à propos du pays que l'on appelle le Maghreb et que nous appelons Tamazgha ou pays des Imazighen : "Depuis les temps les plus anciens, cette race d'hommes habite le Maghreb dont elle a peuplé les plaines, les montagnes, les plateaux, les régions maritimes, les campagnes et les villes.
  6. ^ Eman A. A. AlKroud (2018). "Renarrating the Berbers in Three Amazigh Translations of the Holy Quran: Paratextual and Framing Strategies" (PDF). www.research.manchester.ac.uk. p. 93. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2023-04-17. Retrieved 2023-04-17.
  7. ^ Brahim El Guabli (2023). "The Idea of Tamazgha: Current Articulations and Scholarly Potential". Tamazgha Studies Journal. Retrieved 2024-03-13. In this context, Tamazgha is more an aspiration toward the recognition of Imazighen's civic rights than an endeavor to construct a political entity.
  8. ^ Stéphanie Pouessel (2010). "Les identités amazighes au Maroc". Le Matin d'Algérie. Retrieved 2024-03-13. Le Mouvement d'autonomie de la Kabylie (MAK) de Ferhat Mehenni qui se dit kabyle avant d'être amazigh s'inscrit complètement dans ce mouvement fédéraliste qui englobe l'ensemble des composantes berbères nationales et des différentes diasporas dans un projet transnational porté par le Congrès mondial amazigh (CMA). Fondé à Saint Rome de Dolan dans le Sud de la France en 1995, le CMA a été dirigé par Mabrouk Ferkal, par Rachid Raha au IIe congrès de Lyon puis par Lounès Belkacem au Ille congrès tenu dans la banlieue lilloise en 2002. Au IVe congrès de 2005, tenu à Nador, il devait déclarer : "Nous revendiquons simplement le droit d'exister avec tous nos droits individuels et collectifs en tant que peuple. Notre pays est Tamazgha ; notre histoire millénaire ; notre culture a valeur universelle ; notre projet est démocratique et laïque, pacifique pour notre peuple. Notre espace régional n'est pas le Moyen-Orient, mais la Méditerranée occidentale.
  9. ^ Slyomovics, Susan (2006). "Self-Determination as Self-Definition: The Case of Morocco". In Hannum, Hurst; Babbitt, Eileen F. (eds.). Negotiating Self-determination. Lexington Books. p. 135. ISBN 0739114336. Retrieved 3 April 2017.
  10. ^ Brahim El Guabli (2023). "The Idea of Tamazgha: Current Articulations and Scholarly Potential". Tamazgha Studies Journal. Retrieved 2024-03-13. Located between the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean and the oasis of Siwa in west Egypt, Tamazgha is both the discursive and geographic embodiment of an Amazigh imaginary of a language and culture that were once unified and had their own territory.
  11. ^ Jane E. Goodman (2005-11-03). Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video. Indiana University Press. p. 7. ISBN 9780253217844. Historically, these groups did not call themselves 'Berbers' but had their own terms of self-referral.
  12. ^ Ramzi Rouighi (2019-07-05). Inventing the Berbers: History and Ideology in the Maghrib. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 19. ISBN 9780812251302. At the same time, the military conquests gave the word Berber meanings that distinguished it from both 'barbarian' and 'ajam. Most notably, in conquest narratives (futūb), Berber refers mostly to groups in northwest Africa. With time, this specialization in the usage became the most dominant one, though the memory of the Berbers of eastern Africa did not disappear.
  13. ^ Jane E. Goodman (2005-11-03). Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video. Indiana University Press. p. 7. ISBN 9780253217844. Usage of the term 'Berber' by the populations themselves began to become more generalized under French rule. From early on, the French viewed North Africa through a Manichean lens. Arab and Berber became the primary ethnic categories through which the French classified the population. This occurred despite the fact that a diverse and fragmented populace comprised not only various Arab and Berber tribal groups but also Turks, Andalusians (descended from Moors exiled from Spain during the Crusades), Kouloughlis (offspring of Turkish men and North African women), blacks (mostly slaves or former slaves), and Jews. Of the various Berber groups, Kabyles were singled out for special attention—probably because of their geographic proximity to Algiers and France. In what came to be called the Kabyle Myth, a number of the French military men charged with governing the new colony contended that Kabyles were closer to the French than were Algerian Arabs and demonstrated greater promise of being able to assimilate into the French polity.
  14. ^ Vermondo Brugnatelli (2012-07-18). "À propos de la valeur sémantique d' amaziɣ et tamaziɣt dans l'histoire du berbère". Academia EDU. Retrieved 2024-03-13.
  15. ^ Brahim El Guabli (2023). "The Idea of Tamazgha: Current Articulations and Scholarly Potential". Tamazgha Studies Journal. Retrieved 2024-03-13. The Académie Berbère may have invented the word Tamazgha, but the existence of a land where different varieties of Amazigh languages were spoken preceded the creation of the Académie itself.
  16. ^ Brahim El Guabli (2022-08-29). "Where is Amazigh Studies?". The Journal of North African Studies. 27 (6): 1093–1100. doi:10.1080/13629387.2022.2114234. Retrieved 2024-03-13.
  17. ^ Canarian Nationalist Flags (Spain). (2006, May 27). In Flags of the World. https://web.archive.org/web/20100818221014/http://www.atlasgeo.net/fotw/flags/es}ic.html
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