Talk:Saracen

Arabic?

Uh...this article asserts that the name was probably taken from Arabic. I find this rather dubious, as Arabic was not wide-spread in Roman times, especially not as far north as the Sinai, where Demotic or Aramaic are more likely candidates...even Hebrew or Greek. Where did the claim of Arabic come from? Tomer^talk 10:03, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Excerpt that may be of help:

The people known at this period in Greek as ‘Sarakenoi’, ‘Saraceni’ in Latin, from which we get our modern English word ‘Saracens’, had previously been called ‘Scenite Arabs’, the Arabs who dwell in tents (from the Greek skēnē, a tent).

ref: Rodinson, Maxime, Muḥammad, Penguin Books, London 1996, p. 11. --88.152.87.197 20:38, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

It's even more complicated than that. St John of Damascus claims that the term comes from Greek Saras kenoi "empty of Sarah", referring to the Muslims' belief that they (who they? isn't this a mix up of religion and etnics? both the old testament and the Quran agree that the people living southeast of palestine are the offspring of Ismael, so Arabs?, but not congruent with Muslim, since islam didn't exist in biblical times, did it?) come from Ishmael. However, St John was unfortunately fond of folk etymologies. CRCulver 23:23, 18 July 2006 (UTC)

Etymology

This may be more like "reverse etymology," but the French word "sarrasin" (pronounced the same as Saracen) means buckwheat. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised, since the Saracens repeatedly raided France's Mediterranean coast and even managed to occupy some coastal towns (Eze and Gourdon come to mind), if the French named the brown wheat after the brown pirates so as to create an insult retroactively, as it were. Think of Billie Thomas's character Buckwheat in The Little Rascals movies (1934-1944). Dick Kimball (talk) 19:16, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

A Saracen was an Islamic slave raider

This entire argument is pointless pin dancing and evasion: The term "Saracen" -- regardless of its origins -- has a specific historical meaning. It refers to Islamic raiders who terrorized the coasts and borders of Europe until 1830 insearch of slaves and booty. The Battle of Poitiers was fought against Saracens, as was the Battle of Navarino over a thousand years later. Whatever they were called, the Saracens were bloody real to the Europeans.ScottAdler 12:22, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

If that's true (and I have no idea whether it is or isn't), then a semantically plausible etymology for Saracen would be the Arabic sāriqīn 'thieves'. Has this ever been proposed?

There you go again, turning your attention to etymology rather than real, bloody history. The Europeans may not have known, or cared, where the word "Saracen came from, but they bloody well knew that they were occupied, enslaved, castrated, deported, and robbed, year ofter bloody year. The word Saracen simply meant "Muslim invader" -- Check the article Song of Roland. The Norman French who wrote the poem didn't really know who the Saracens were, or even the god they prayed to, but they knew who the enemy was. If you want to know how horrible the Saracens were, read "Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries" by Paul Fregosi. Its mainly a highly readable but depressing account of wars and battles that the politically correct want forgotten. Read the part on what happened at St. Tropez and St. Moritz.ScottAdler 00:48, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Both the 'thieves' and the 'outside-of-Sarah' theories are mentioned and mercilessly refuted by Gibbon (though the latter without much of an argument). As for ScottAdler's argument: did not both the heading and the original poster explicitly say 'ethymology'? You are the only one pin-dancing trying to invoke bloody war in an argument regarding the origins of a word. For what it's worth: the term 'Saracen' was already applied BEFORE Muhammed was born, so it seems incredibly unlikely the origin of the word has anything to do with 'Muslim invader'. Whether they were horrible or not seems rather unrelated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.243.253.102 (talk) 08:41, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Why is Mr Scott Adler repeating the word Bloody so frequently?.. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.123.196.102 (talk) 10:41, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Serkland

Serkland is a short stub dealing with the Norse view of and interaction with the Saracen lands. It's been a short stub for a long time and unlikely to be expanded past stub status anytime soon. As such, integrating it into this article would seem to a reasonable thing to do, tho this article needs some attention itself. Caerwine Caerwhine 21:43, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Merge. I tried to clean it up a bit.

Delete the second sentence of the "Saracens" entry, as it is erroneous.

The second sentence of this Saracen entry is wildly inaccurate:

"The Saracens are credited with many mathematical advances and inventions used in the modern world, including algebra and algorithms, table and bed linens, sherbet and ice cream, and cultivated peaches and strawberries.[1]"

It also contradicts many other wiki entries.

Much has been written and discussed here about the origins of algebra, but as the wiki page about the History of Algebra shows (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Algebra), the concept existed in many ancient societies, including India, Greece, Babylonia and so on; and that the Arabic-speaking mathematician al-Khwārizmī who coined the word "Algebra" was himself actually Persian, not a "Saracen." Same argument applies to algorithm; just because the word algorithm has an Arabic root does not mean that the mathematical concept was invented in Arabia, or by Saracens.

As for "table and bed linens" being invented by Saracens -- what??? That makes no sense. There were bed linens in ancient Rome, and in ancient China, and I'm sure elsewhere as well. I think all of this "information" comes from one non-scholarly book that shoiuld be discounted.

As for sherbet and ice cream, this claim too contradicts other wiki entries, such as this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream#Precursors_of_ice_cream , which states that both sherbet and ice cream have complicated multi-cultural origins, and are only perpherically connected to Saracens. If it is any Middle Eastern group that can claim to have invented Sherbet, it is again the Persians, who were not Saracens (except in the later European condemnation of all Middle Easterners as "Saracens").

Peaches? Peaches come from China, and were cultivated there for millennia before reaching the Middle East -- as the wiki entry for peaches correctly states: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peach. And I have never seen any reference to strawberries being a Saracen invention -- everything I've ever read says strawberries are endemic to Europe and were only cultivated to be the large juicy fruits we know today in recent centuries, long after the Middle Ages.

In short, basically every single historical claim in the second sentence of this entry is inaccurate, and I propose that that sentence be deleted. Jackanape2 00:39, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

A Saracen was a warrior

If a Saracen was the just your average muslim in the street, or (as characterised in the discussion above) a "slave raider" who terrorized Europe and committed barbaric massacres, then:

• Why did the British Army name an armoured car after them?
• Why did the Royal Navy name several ships after them?
• Why was a prominent sports team named after them in Victorian London, by people with no Islamic connections? (Saracens Rugby Football Club, a professional team currently ranked about 3rd in England, which inlcudes a crescent moon and star -- Islamic symbols - in their flag).

The answer: Saracens earned the grudging respect of their English Crusader opponents as formidable warriors. The article and this discussion does no more than scrape the surface of what a Saracen was. "Teacher".

Because the bloody history of the Saracens is largely forgotten. In British history, they were replaced by the Turks, who occupied a slave base on the Engish island of Lundy off Bristol in the seventeenth century, by the "Saley Rovers," pirates from Morocco who prawled English waters until roughly 1700, and by the "Barbary Pirates" who weren't stopped until a decade after the Bombardment of Algiers in 1816. The Saracens are simply overlooked and romanticized.Scott Adler (talk) 08:47, 16 March 2008 (UTC)

This is a WP:OR argument so not really get into it. The page is however "not complete". If you feel some aspect has been overlooked then maybe you can add to it. I do note however there is linkage between the term and it's military connotations.--Tigeroo (talk) 05:46, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

The generic term Turk was used in the Renaissance for all tribes from that region, including the Saracens who were, however, still very much in evidence.--dunnhaupt (talk) 00:15, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Saracen attack on Rome

The article San Sebastiano fuori le mura refers to a Saracen attack on Rome after 826. Why is it not mentioned here?.--dunnhaupt (talk) 00:12, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

This article is lacking much

That's all I can say, cause I don't know much about the Saracens, but in reading other sources, I can see that much is missing. Check this out, the chapter on Saracens to begin with: http://books.google.ie/books?id=t8jQStJcVmAC&lpg=PA172&ots=C8GYyZQMkS&dq=Saracen%20mathematics&pg=PA172#v=onepage&q=Saracen&f=false 89.101.225.125 (talk) 14:25, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

Images

While it is preferable for images to appear with related text, it is not strictly necessary, and "stacking" should be avoided (WP:STACKING). There is simply not enough text on this page for both of these images to appear in the medieval section because the second image gets pushed below the body of the article. Further, with so little text, the image still appears near the appropriate text even when placed in the section above. The images bunched together at the bottom, with the second one pushed out of the body, looks terrible and emphasizes the lack of text. Laszlo Panaflex (talk) 13:11, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

I wasn't going to move the image until there was discussion on the issue, but placing it in the intro is inappropriate. Laszlo Panaflex (talk) 15:13, 21 March 2013 (UTC)

I have just now deleted the second image because it has no information value with regard to Saracens (it doesn't depict Saracens; see also Auchinleck manuscript), andthen I relocated the first image to the Medieval section. It would now be desirable to find a suitable image for the section entitled "Early usage and origins", but I don't know of one offhand. Seanwal111111 (talk) 16:31, 21 March 2013 (UTC)