Историк Ламин Суаг проанализировал эволюцию термина «берберы» в книге Рамзи Руайхи

Our old pal Lameen Souag is back to posting at Jabal al-Lughat; his review of Ramzi Rouighi’s Inventing the Berbers is typically interesting and sensible: The book is primarily the history of a name: how did certain people in North Africa come to be called “Berbers”, and how did the reference and connotations of this label change over time? Viewed as such, it has a good deal of useful material. He argues that, rather than being derived directly from Latin or Greek “barbari”, the label was transferred from East Africa to Northwest Africa as the Arabs moved west; its original associations would be with slavery rather than with barbarism as such. (Traces of the original usage persist: in Nubia, as I first learned on a trip to Aswan, “Berber” is still understood to mean “Nubian”!) In the early medieval period, it was used primarily for rebels and enemies on the fringes; groups with a closer involvement tended to be referred to by more specific terms. Ibn Khaldun’s usage is more complex, reflecting Andalusi practice as it emerged in the context of elite competition between Berber and Arab noble families, but shows clear traces of the older tendency to reserve it for “outsiders” to the ruling elite. The modern European usage of the term comes essentially from Ibn Khaldun as filtered through De Slane’s essentialism (which turned Berbers into a “race”) and subsequent academic and ideological debates, largely in the context of the French colonization of Algeria. He talks about Rouighi’s “unacceptably simplistic” discussion of the term “Amazigh,” concluding: Reading as a linguist, I can appreciate the attention given to semantic shifts and to the arbitrariness not only of the sign but of the signified. But as a historical linguist, it feels rather at cross-purposes to the questions of interest to me. Fundamentally, I don’t much care which ethnic label people identify or are identified with: for me, “Berber”, like “Arabic”, is primarily useful as a linguistic category. And its referent has a history starting far earlier than the earliest attestation of “Berber”, “Tamazight”, or any other label one might choose to apply to it. It is necessary and appropriate to historicize such labels – to be aware that Masinissa or Dihya or Fatma n’Soumer were not acting in the name of some kind of Amazigh nationalism, and may not even have been familiar with “Amazigh” as a name, let alone as an identity. But how this relatively close-knit language family spread, and retreated, remains a historical question, of interest to archeologists and population geneticists as well as linguists, which an exclusive focus on ethnic labels erases. It should, however, help to provoke reflection on the appropriate choice of label for this language family. “Berber”, neutral though it undoubtedly is in English or French, does have a problematic history; the derivation from “barbarian” may be inaccurate, but this book really underscores the extent to which its usage in Arabic has been overwhelmingly negative and “othering” for most of the region’s history. “Amazigh” does not have this problem, but is strongly associated with a projection of shared ethnicity into the past which risks distorting our picture of language spread. In an ideal world, one might prefer a purely geographical label (“Northwest African”?), or, better yet, a purely linguistic one ( iles -languages, after the usual word for “tongue”?) In practice, however – here as elsewhere – it seems preferable to live with the occasional misunderstandings caused by the use of a well-known “ethnic” term than to confuse the public with a completely novel one. Sounds about right.