Were the Moors Who Invaded Spain Black?

Hello everyone, it's Jabari here. About two years ago, I made a video about the Moors. Prior to uploading, I predicted in advance and in the video that it would make lots of people very angry and unfortunately, I guessed correctly. However, there are a few details at this reception that I'd like to talk about in this video, as well as some details that I failed to include before. This video is going to be episode 3 of my series that I, as of yet, renamed twice in two episodes and I guess I'm going to continue that trend because I want to rename it again to simply Looking Back. Again, not a very original title, but a bit more clean and fitting for the series. So firstly, here's an easy one. A name which would later become corrupted to Andalusia by the Spanish. These Islamic strangers had a strong impact on European art, architecture, and science, bringing new crops such as oranges, rice, avocados, and bananas, while also introducing new or forgotten technologies such as waterwheels. I mistakenly said avocados despite the fact that those are a New World crop and therefore would not have existed with the Islamic conquests. I meant to say pomegranate. Not sure how I managed to mix those two up, but there you go. Secondly, the prediction that I made of the negative reception on this video is based on the controversy surrounding the racial identity of the Moors and other North Africans like the Egyptians. There tends to be an erroneous belief that any and everything in Africa automatically means black. The entire land mass was a land entirely inhabited by people of black skin and that anyone who doesn't fit that phenotype is a recent foreign invader. I think that this argument is primarily fueled by the fact that here in the United States, African diaspora are referred to as African American, unlike other groups of people who are usually referred to by their respective country rather than their continent. For example, Chinese American, or Mexican American, or German American. In addition to this, black people are not African American, despite where our ancestors may have come from, we're still Americans. I mean, you don't see people going around calling white people European Americans, they're usually just called white, or American. With that said, people in the United States, regardless of race, tend to erroneously view African people and their history from a pan-African perspective and that all of its people are one and the same, all collectively part of the history of black Americans, or African Americans. On the other side of the argument, there are those people who believe that North African peoples were utterly and exclusively non-black peoples, and that any attempt to say otherwise is just an Afrocentric attempt at claiming other civilizations as your own. Despite the fact that I was very clear about Boers not belonging to one particular race, I constantly got accused of blackwashing and whitewashing their history all at the same time by different people. What this shows me is that some people are so obsessed with their own racial self-esteem that prior to clicking the video, they already have it made up in their mind that if I don't exclusively state that the Moors belong to their particular race, or in the case of the white racists, the only criteria is to disassociate Moors from blacks completely, then it's not good enough and I'm appropriating their people and their history to a different race than what it belongs to. In the video, I made it very, very clear that Moors are a very diverse group of people and that it is simply illogical to put them into one single westernized racial category. Asking this question is similar to asking the race of an American. They are a combination of races that could be as white as Europeans or as black as Sub-Saharan Africans. The majority of them, however, were completely indigenous to North Africa and would look something similar to most of North Africa's population today, which would be a medium brown people who are neither black or white, or even Arab for that matter. So now allow me to present a few more facts that I failed to include in the first video. This is an attempt to further stress my point of there being Moors of all shades, which should be apparent in the fact that North Africa has always been a crossroads of civilizations with peoples from all three continents of the old world having empires in the region at various points throughout history. One of the most famous and notable Moor states was founded in the 11th century and was known as the Almoravid dynasty. This fearsome empire began in what is now modern day Morocco and expanded south of the Sahara, temporarily conquering the Seninke empire of Ghana in the year 1076. As we know, the majority of the Moroccan population are of Berber, or more properly, Amazigh ancestry. Amazigh are not the same as Arabs or Sub-Saharan African blacks. We'll touch on that more later though. The Seninke people of the Ghana empire are undeniably what we'd refer to as black people here in the west, phenotypically speaking, or Sub-Saharan African. Roughly a decade later in the year 1086, the Almoravid army famously crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and went on to conquer most of the Iberian Peninsula, or what we know today as the countries of Spain and Portugal. This peninsula is inhabited by people that we'd refer to as white people. So moving back to the conquest of Ghana, the Almoravids became allies of the Kingdom of Takrur, a small state that existed in what is now modern day Senegal, another undeniably black African kingdom that bordered the Empire of Ghana to the west. Both the Almoravids and the Takruri were Islamic states while Ghana was not. Ghana had been a long-time rival of the Kingdom of Takrur and the latter did not hesitate to form an alliance with their more powerful Muslim neighbors to the north. So now that we have all the context out of the way, these black Takruri allies of the Almoravid Empire are known to have supplied 4,000 troops to take part in the conquest of Spain. By the way, the sources for all of this will be cited on my website and Patreon as usual. With that being said, all written documents describing how black the Moors were can easily be explained by instances such as this one, as an army of 4,000 black troops would be quite the sight to behold among a group of people who likely never encountered many if any black people in their entire lives. It's also quite easy to understand why they'd have seen these warriors as members of the Almoravid dynasty despite hailing from a different country much farther away. In any case, however, the Takruri and the Almoravids were both Moors regardless of any superficial racial differences as I so eloquently stated in my previous video. Moor means dark and refers to any African Muslim. Regardless if they were black or brown, they were very dark in color compared to Europeans. Another testament to the existence of peoples with undeniable blackness who are referred to as Moors can be found in this excerpt in Richard Eden's account of Windham's voyages to Guinea that took place back in the year 1555. The king who being black Moor sat in a great huge hall long and wide the walls made of earth without windows the roof of thin boards open in sundry places like unto lovers to let in the air and here to speak of great reverence they give to their king it is such that if we would give as much to our savior christ we should remove from our heads many plagues which we daily deserve for our contempt and impiety so it is therefore that when his noblemen are in his presence they never look him in the face but sit and cowering as we upon our knees so they upon their buttocks with their elbows upon their knees and their hands before their faces not looking up until the king command them as you notice as well he referred to the king specifically as a black Moor which in and of itself debunks any solidarity to the racial identity of Moors collectively the need to specify his blackness not only indicates that there were indeed black Moors but it also shows that not all Moors were black otherwise what's the point of saying black Moor that would be no different than saying white Scandinavian or Native American Aztec the need to specify that he's a black Moor is a clear indicator that black people were not the only Moors so this excerpt alone would be enough to finish this video but there are also many more elements to cover so another common argument I get to attest to the blackness of Moors is that the modern inhabitants of North Africa are Arabs that displaced or mixed with the original black inhabitants after the Islamic invasions as mentioned earlier Amazigh and Arabs are not the same people they have different languages cultures and even different writing systems and only began to practice the same religion after the Arab invasions in the 7th and 8th centuries Ibn Battuta for example was a Moorish explorer from Morocco from the 14th century he was a Muslim who spoke Arabic but he was neither an Arab or a Sub-Saharan African he was a Moor of Amazigh after the Muslim invasions of North Africa the Amazigh effectively became culturally Arabized but still genetically Amazigh people of North Africa have been generally lighter skin than Sub-Saharan Africans and darker skin than Europeans since long before the Arab invasion the earliest archaeological evidence of Amazigh presence in North Africa dates back to roughly 12,000 years ago long before humans even had the slightest concept of Arabs or Islam these people primarily inhabited the Mediterranean coast of Africa notably Morocco, Libya, Algeria, and Tunisia even the Guanches the indigenous peoples of the Canary Islands were a light-skinned complexion and were both genetically and linguistically similar to Amazigh people despite being isolated from the mainland for thousands of years so much so that they were still using stone and wooden tools when the Spanish first arrived on the islands in the 15th this should make sense as there is a natural gradient in skin color depending on proximity to equator this trend is more pronounced in the old world but is still present in the new world to some extent while it is true that there were so-called black populations in parts of the Sahara desert in the past there are a few things to consider firstly the Sahara was once a much wetter place in a period known as the Green Sahara several large inland seas covered this vast area which was primarily composed of grasslands and savannah this is confirmed by archaeological evidence including cave paintings found deep in the heart of the Sahara desert depicting large herds of animals and human populations that simply could not exist there today and large subterranean aquifers found in those respective regions are all that remain of these ancient seas as these grasslands receded so did human populations with many black populations migrating south to the river Niger Lake Chad and east to the Nile Valley as a result of these increasingly arid conditions those indigenous Amazigh remain in their northerly Mediterranean homes without any need to leave since the climate remained wet enough for continuous human habitation and still does today those of the desert simply retained a nomadic lifestyle moving in and out of areas formerly occupied by phenotypically black Africans on the southern fringes of the Sahara mixing did indeed occur in some populations such as the case with the Toreg who can be phenotypically identical to Sub-Saharan Africans, Amazigh, and everything between however it is simply nonsensical to think that a few Arab armies can go to a land area larger than the entire United States and can replace nearly every single black person with their own while mixing most certainly did happen it is not an explanation as to why North Africans aren't black especially considering that darker skin is a dominant gene in other words the people would be darker if they had mixed with Sub-Saharan Africans this can be observed in populations farther to the south like the aforementioned Toreg nomads this is also seen in Egyptian populations both modern and ancient mixing did occur in some places as climate continued to dry as it never stopped drying and still continues to do so today various populations converged in the fertile green Niger and Nile river systems however the modern inhabitants of North Africa are not collectively a product of mixing last major inconsistency with this mixing theory is that nobody ever mentions the Romans Romans held territories in North Africa for several centuries if Arabs supposedly had such a tremendous influence on the North African gene pool why didn't the Romans the Almoravids that many radical Afrocentrists claim to have been black invaded Spain several centuries after Rome had conquered it so how would it be possible for their populations to have remained purely black African and phenotype after being under Roman control for so long why would things change so suddenly when Arabs arrive but not with the Romans in conclusion Moors are not black nor are they white nor are they Arabs Moors are just Moors they're not an ethnic group or a linguistic group they're not one unified people they're not a particular race or a particular nationality they have no specific homeland or unified state and they never have more is nothing more no pun intended than just a blanket term for North Africans or African Muslims in a general sense nothing more still no pun intended nothing less the word more denotes a dark complexion which could be brown tawny or black in color all of which are indeed dark in comparison to any European and the word more derives from the languages of the European continent despite the fact that I was very clear and concise and backed up everything I have with sources references and even direct quotes confirmation bias is a very powerful thing especially when it involves race but at the very least for the majority of you watching who are level-headed and open-minded I hope that this follow-up provided some clarity to the mysterious Moorish people if you enjoyed the video don't forget to comment like and subscribe if you want more videos like these for sources check out my website linked below if you'd like to support future projects you can do so there as well or by clicking the join button below or by becoming a patron I hope you all enjoyed the video thanks for watching as usual and always remember we don't come from nothing