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( Moors)
The description Moors has referred to several historic and modern populations of Muslim (and earlier non-Muslim) people of Berber and Arab descent from North Africa, some of whom came to inhabit the Iberian Peninsula (but were later expelled by the Christians). The North Africans termed it Al Andalus, comprising most of what is now Spain and Portugal. Moors are not distinct or self-defined people, but the appellation was applied by medieval and early modern Europeans primarily to Berbers, but also Arabs, and Muslim Iberians.[1] As early as 1911, mainstream scholars recognized that "The term Moors has no real ethnological value."[2] In the Spanish language, the term for Moors is moro; in Portuguese the word is mouro. There seems to have been some confusion about the relationship of the word moro/mouro to the word moreno (which means tanned or dark or brown-skinned), both from Greek maúros, i.e. black. However, the two words have different etymological roots. Though most were probably of swarthy complexion, the Moors were not "negro".[3][4] The Al Andalus Moors of the late Medieval era inhabited the Iberian Peninsula after the Moorish conquests of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates, and the final Umayyad conquest of Hispania. These conquests stretched south to modern-day Mauritania, the western Sahara, and West African countries as far south as the Senegal River. Earlier, the Classical Romans interacted (and later conquered) Mauretania, a state which covered northern portions of modern Morocco and much of western and central Algeria during the classical period. The people of the region were noted in Classical literature as the Mauri. The term Mauri, or variations thereof, was later used by European traders and explorers of the 16th to 18th centuries to designate ethnic Berber and Arab groups speaking the Hassaniya Arabic dialect. Today such groups inhabit Mauritania and parts of Algeria, western Sahara, Morocco, Niger and Mali. Mauri was the genesis of the name of the modern Islamic Republic of Mauritania, first applied by the French during their colonial rule. In the Philippines, some residents use a variation of the term to designate some Muslim populations.
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