This article is the translation of a comment in a discussion about kabyles in the Wikipedia website
The subject of the discussion was the origin of the Kabyle word that Arab militants claim comes from the Arabic word and means tribe
The Wikipedia site is becoming more and more a site of pro-Arab propaganda. As soon as a subject deals with Amazigh people in general and especially the Kabyle people; they attribute it to the Orientals.
Before wanting to attribute everything to the Arabs, one should already know who they really are. We need to restore the credibility of Wikipedia !!
Far from the Western and Orientalist propaganda that is trying to produce an Arab people on the ashes of peoples that the West has conquered several times in post-medieval history.
The Kabyle name was established long before the invention of the so-called Arab people. The name Kabylie is mentioned for the first time by the historian Herodotus to designate the Cabales a Libyan people of Cyrenaica. For a reason that is totally unknown to us and long before the gestation of Islam, this name has disappeared from the history of North Africa. In the Middle Ages no one mentions the Kabyle name, neither Leon the African nor Ibn Khaldun make use of this denomination. We must wait for the Europeans of the 18th century to see it resurrect in Cabalis, Cabile Cabyle and Kabyle.
The Kabyle name can not in any case come from the Arabic word which according to them means “a tribal people”, because the tribal system does not exist in Kabylie. Political and social unity is the village. The federation of several villages on a territory does not constitute a tribe in the sense understood by ethnologists. Instead these federations refer to a territory.
The falsification and denaturing of the Kabyle political organization is the result of the Europeans who wanted to harmonize their terminology by applying to all the peoples they have conquered the same social organization, in spite of themselves. For them whether in Australia, Amazonia, Arabia, Africa or America, all that is not “white” is tribal because some ethnic groups claim this form of social organization. These ethnic groups are often non-sedentary and therefore can not refer to a territory to identify themselves. The nomad has no other references than the lineage, somehow a right of blood to belong to the group.
Since the Arabs are a tribal people, it is illogical for them to call out other people as tribes.
I have no prejudices about this or that form of political and social organization. But as far as Kabylia is concerned, I do not find any terms of this tribal organization. I speak of visible, concrete traces.
But if we want to pull everything by the hair, today we can call anything “tribe”.
We must mention this mania of this Wikipedia media that gives an Arabic version to everything related to North Africa. This version is often made by Islamist embudlers acting as veritable jihadists of the pen. Arab-Islamic militants denature while weakening the North African languages and thus emerging the so-called Arabic language like mother of all the languages.While in truth the language of the bedouins can not be of any use by itself because in fact every word that these islamic militants appropriate comes from other languages such as Persian, Hindu, Arameen, Berber. The desert of Arabia is not fertile ground for a wealth of a language. The so-called Arabic language exists only for the needs of a Koran. There is no written record of this language before the gestation of Islam.
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According to the official history of Islam written by Catholic and Muslim fanatics, the Sarazens were those who were cited as the conquerors who spread the Islamic faith in the 700 hundreds. A faith whose sacred book would only exist a century later.
It seems that the Europeans took ingredients they had at home and made a great story for Islam. Let’s see whom the sarazins were in the middle ages.
In his book “The Sarazins were from the area” (Les Sarazins étaient du coin), the French historian Joseph Henriet demonstrates that those whom history has named Sarazens were not Arabs. They would be, more generally, pagans, peoples who had not converted to Christianity, and assimilated to Muslims by a confusion due to the idea, formerly believed, that Islam adapted certain traits estimated prior to Christianity. Heresy was generally regarded as a superficial garment given to old beliefs; this was also the case of Arianism, which had been adopted by the Burgundians. In the heart of the Alps, according to Henriet, different heretics and pagans could live side by side, but at the end of the day, they were no stranger to the area: it was a native people, settled in places since the beginning. They are those whom we today call Ligures, whose language was no doubt close to Basque. In opposite from the Allobroges, they remained at the top of the mountains or in the depths of the valleys.
According to Henriet, the description of “Sarazins” by medieval authors refers to indigenous peoples, not Eastern invaders.
These natives would have preserved for a long time, in the Middle Ages, their pagan cults, their way of mountainlife, and also their habits of plundering the convoys of travelers when their productions were insufficient. Christian writers, living in the cities, would therefore have claimed them to be “Sarazins”, referring both to the terror they inspired, and to their ignorance of the Christian religion.
One day, perhaps soon, thanks to the rapid progress of genetic sience, honorable scientists should be able to determine with certainty whom the Sarazins of the Alps were. In the meantime, Joseph Henriet’s hypothesis seems to be particularly convincing …
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