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Berbers are not an entirely homogeneous ethnicity, and they include a range of societies, ancestries, and lifestyles. The unifying forces for the Berber people may be their shared language or a collective identification with Berber heritage and history. As a legacy of the spread of Islam, the Berbers are now mostly Sunni Muslim.
The English term "Berber" is derived from the Arabic word barbar, which means both "Berber" and "barbarian." [7] [21] [22] Due to this shared meaning, as well as its historical background as an exonym, the term "Berber" is commonly viewed as a pejorative by indigenous North Africans today. [8] [9] [10]
It is possible that the Barghawata confederacy had a Judeo-Berber background, though accounts of entire Berber tribes practicing Judaism appear later and are unreliable. [ 7 ] : 167 While most Jewish communities from Ifriqiya westward through the Maghreb, the Sahara, and al-Andalus were primarily urban, the indigenous Judeo-Berbers of the ...
Thereafter Berbers lived as an independent people in North Africa, including the Tunisian region. On the most distant prehistoric epochs, the scattered evidence sheds a rather dim light. Also obscure is the subsequent "pre-Berber" situation, which later evolved into the incidents of Berber origins and early development.
Most Riffian tribes are of Zenata origin. [14] Although the Masmuda formed the core of the Almohad army and hierarchy, Abd al-Mumin, who founded the dynasty, belonged to an Arabized section of the Zenata known as the Kumiya. He claimed an illustrious Arab and Berber ancestry linking him to the Berber Queen Kahina. [15]
The traditional Berber religion is the sum of ancient and native set of beliefs and deities adhered to by the Berbers.Originally, the Berbers seem to have believed in worship of the sun and moon, animism and in the afterlife, but interactions with the Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans influenced religious practice and merged traditional faiths with new ones.
The Kabyle people (/ k ə ˈ b aɪ l /, Kabyle: Izwawen or Leqbayel or Iqbayliyen, pronounced [iqβæjlijən], Arabic: القبائل, romanized: al-qabā'il) [12] [13] are a Berber ethnic group indigenous to Kabylia in the north of Algeria, spread across the Atlas Mountains, 160 kilometres (100 mi) east of Algiers.
The term initially denoted a specific Berber people in western Libya, but the name acquired more general meaning during the medieval period, associated with "Muslim", similar to associations with "Saracens". During the context of the Crusades and the Reconquista, the term Moors included the derogatory suggestion of "infidels".