Word: berbers
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...asked him if she spoke English because I didn't speak their Berber dialect, but he said that didn't matter," laughs Herzberg...
John W. Thomas is only slightly moved by the display. He names his price, saying he can pay no more. After already unrolling several of his most choice products ("this is Berber wool, made by Berber women in the mountains, it is not manufactured") the salesman knows this customer means business. "You kill me," he says giving in, and takes Thomas' money, thanking him profusely...
...that is the captial of Algeria. The singular TANGIER (no "s") is where Burroughs lived and wrote for many years. In French, the city is "Tanger" (tawn-JAY); the city was named by ancient Phoenicians, as something like "Tahn-ja," which is how many contemporary Arabic-or better Berber-speaking Moroccans refer...
...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...