Word: berbers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...natural decay, the seasons of human life, for example. Animals, people, have birth, growth, periods of vigor, then decline and death. Do societies obey that pattern? The idea of decadence, of course, implies exactly that. But it seems a risky metaphor. Historians like Arnold Toynbee, like the 14th century Berber Ibn-Khaldun and the 18th century Italian Giovanni Battista Vico, have constructed cyclical theories of civilizations that rise up in vigor, flourish, mature and then fall into decadence. Such theories may sometimes be too deterministic; they might well have failed, for example, to predict such a leap of civilization...
Those are only a few of the voices of Islam, as powerful and compelling today as the muezzin's ancient call of the faithful to prayer. The voices speak Russian and Chinese, Persian and French, Berber and Malay, Turkish and Urdu?and Arabic, of course, the mother tongue of the Prophet Muhammad and language of Islam's holy book, the Koran. Islam is the world's youngest universal faith, and the second largest, with 750 million adherents, to about 985 million for Christianity. Across the eastern hemisphere, but primarily in that strategic crescent that straddles the crossroads of three continents...
...Berber, a language known from the Atlantic Ocean to the Siwa oasis in Egypt, important for Africo-Semitic (I am using this expression to avoid the controversial expression Hamito-Semitic or the meaningless term Afro-Asiatic.) studies...
...specific area but who are able to handle several related languages can be recruited to develop a coherent curriculum along these lines: a professor of Egyptian languages and literature who takes an interest in the problem of the stu-of Meroitic and who possesses some knowledge of Berber or a Cushitic language; a specialist in Ge'ez who can also handle some of the Cushitic or Semitic languages of the Horn; a specialist in Swahili who can handle some other important eastern-central languages of Africa (e.g. Kikuyu); a specialist in Hausa who can handle some of the important languages...
Stones of Eden, Oasis in the Sahara, Berber Villages, Thursday, 7:30 p.m., free...