In an article about the upcoming Arabian Night written for The Post on May 9, titled “Student association hopes to open eyes to Arabic culture,” Anjelica Oswald wrote that “Each performance will be incorporated in a narrative about Ibn Battuta, a famous Arab explorer.” This sentence contains a basic factual mistake and contributes to the erasure of an often marginalized indigenous group.
Ibn Battuta was not Arab, and even the most basic research (even checking the oft-maligned Wikipedia, which is more accurate on this point than The Post) would have informed the author that Ibn Battuta was an Amazigh (singular) Muslim. This indigenous group is often identified with the word “Berber,” a racist term imposed by colonizing forces on Imazighen (plural) that means barbarian.
Imazighen are the indigenous people of North Africa who historically and presently inhabit the present day countries of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Niger, Mauritania, Azawad, Burkina Faso, the Canary Islands and the Western Sahara. Following the Arab-Islamic conquest and colonization of North Africa, the region has undergone a process of Arabization that continues to this day. In other words, Amazigh culture and history has and is being appropriated and redefined by colonial powers as “Arab,” a kind of process that often takes place in settler colonial states and is intended to destroy the indigenous group it victimizes. Arabization can also be viewed as a form of genocide if one follows the definition of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish jurist who first defined the term and drafted the United Nations Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Identifying Ibn Battuta as Arab and not Amazigh, erasing his ethnicity and indigeneity, is not just a factual error. It makes one complicit in the Arabization — the destruction of the culture, past, present, and existence—of the Amazigh people. (I am sure that the author did not intend this, but that is the result of reproducing this untruth.) I hope that The Post will issue a correction and that this error will not be repeated.
Stephen Pearson is a graduate student studying teacher education.
