The Persian Compound in the Maghreb between the 1st and 6th centuries AH (7th and 12th centuries CE): A Study in the Origins of Human Names and Geographical Settlement Areas

Abstract

The subject of this study is concerned with researching the origins of the naming of non-Arabs and their ethnic meanings in the Maghreb during a period that extends over six full centuries of the Middle Ages, by tracing their historical roots from ancient periods up to the period under study. The research highlights the extent of the influence of political, social, cultural, and linguistic factors in the formulation of non-Arab names, while monitoring the transformations that have occurred to them, especially since most contemporary historical studies have transmitted the list of names of Maghrebi human groups without investigating their historical origins and ethnonymic connotations, or considering the temporal contexts that contributed to their crystallization, taking Islamic source fields as a fixed reference from which to derive the names of the inhabitants of the Maghreb, despite the changes that the narrative, geographical, jurisprudential knowledge and the texts of Arabic genealogical literature have brought about to the original nominal forms of the Maghrebi population, and overlooking the usefulness of identifying the situation of human structures and the names of their components during the ancient period, and excluding the role of the Islamization and Arabization movement in the nominal transformation of the ethnonymy of human groups during the period that followed the Islamic conquest campaigns of the Maghreb regions.