Kindly be aware that Maltese uses Christian Arabic terminology as well, such as salib, qassis, isqof, raheb, knisja, dejr, qrar, tqarbin, ruh il-qodos, titlit,g hid il-milied, ghid il-hamsin, xbin, frejha, hadd il-gdid, rfuh (carnival), miru, maghmudija, etc.

Muslim terminology randan, ghasar, zerda, possibly gilwa, not much else.

This is a subject that should be treated on its own.

face the daily double-eged sword of keeping a semblance of a secular state while keeping fundamentalist Islamic parties out of power

That’s the opposite of reality. The de facto dictators down there in the Magreb and Egypt play the left against the right to keep their pants on the seat of power, further polarizing society. The situation explodes sometimes like what happened in Egypt.

If you were commenting a couple of decades ago you would have said that the likes of Mubarak were keeping the communists out of power…

I get irked when priests on TV continue with this tired trope of Islam being intolerant and Catholics are angels. The Ottoman Empire and the Mughal Empire were certainly more tolerant of the various religions and subcultures than Europe.

Let me remind you: Jews and Roma were harassed and massacred in pogroms, inquisitions and worst. We couldn’t even agree on the finer points of the christian faith which resulted in countless wars and massacres since the Council of Trent…

Perhaps it’s because of travel agencies organising tours Malta-Tunisia. Guess they would want to avoid bad publicity for Tunisia, but doubtful that they enjoy so much power over Maltese media.

When some time ago I was in Iceland, I was told that corsairs from Tunisia use to pillage Icelandic villages and take the inhabitants to North Africa as slaves; therefore somewhere in the Mediterranean, there must be some genetic remnants of these persons.

[Daphne – That’s right. The people of Iceland themselves used to raid Ireland for slaves.]

Must be a knee-jerk reaction to reject our ancestry! But as you said somewhere above, sixty miles south of Sicily not 200 miles north of Tunisia got us in the EU.

By the way, seen any Sicilian hairdressers around; they must have been replaced by pots and pans salesmen.

Our language certainly has Semitic origins but the current Maltese language has a majority of words which are not derived from Semitic languages. Therefore our language cannot be simply descibed as a Semitic language but is in fact a mixed language.

The riots and protests in Tunisia and also in Algeria should be reported, and even if these incidents happened in Chile or China. I think that if these incidents happened in Libya they would have been reported.

There were many Maltese or descendants of Maltese in Tunisia and other North African countries but many have now left Tunisia and are now living in France.

The cultural differences between Tunisia and other North African countries and Malta means that we feel cut off from these African countries and we relate and compare ourself to European countries.

[Daphne – In Tunis (the city) you will see no cultural differences. What you will find are breathtaking similarities. I find it quite amusing that so many people here in Malta talk about cultural differences with the Tunisian capital, but amazingly find no cultural differences when they visit, say, Copenhagen, where those cultural differences are so very much greater. My observations tell me that the average Maltese would be far more at home in Tunis than in Stockholm.]

Christ, not this again.

Remember the “huge, earth-shattering” protests in Iran a couple of years ago? What has happened since then? Nothing.

And I’ll tell you why. Because real revolutions occur when one tribe fights against another, when one ethnic group hates the guts of the other ethnic group. This is just a few urbane educated kids fighting against the establishment. In other words, a war between social classes. And it isn’t even the whole educated elite, but the young educated elite.

They may be internet- and media-savvy, and they may wear the latest French fashion and profess liberal values, and for all we know they may represent the torch of liberty, but a revolution it ain’t.

Now I expect that twit Anthony Manduca to write some inane rubbish pawned off The Economist (motto: “Getting it wrong since 1830”).

The age of revolutions is over, ladies and gentlemen. Today’s protesters are just hamming it up for the cameras.

If we take “Arab” to mean one who originates from the Arabian peninsula, I am inclined to say that probably a minority of North Africans are really Arab though they, of course, speak Arabic and profess the Muslim faith. My impression is that Tunisians prefer to be called simply Tunisians rather than Arabs. The Muslim invasion of North Africa was so devastating that little, if anything, survived from previous cultures. Christianiy was completely wiped out, much more radically than, for instance, in Egypt. Many find it surprising that the North African culture had been very much part of the Roman world and later the Byzantine one. Augustine, of Roman stock, hailed from Hippo in Algeria and Emperor Septimius Severus, native North African, came from Leptis Magna, Libya. Huge and wonderful archeological remains of Roman towns are found in Tunisia as in other North African countries. Unfortunately, most Maltese who go to Tunisia never go to Dougga, Sbeitla, Tuburbo, El Jem (which boasts the largest well-preserved Roman amphitheatre after the Colosseum) and many other similar sites which are rather far from Tunis. The Bardo museum in Tunis probably houses the largest and best collection of Roman and Byzantine mosaics in the world. These sites are still undeveloped for tourism and some are wary not to stress too much the pre-Islamic history of Tunisia. Of the original Carthage, little is left (the Romans raised it to the ground – Cato famously said Cathago delenda est) apart from the old circular harbour and very little survives of the Roman Carthage either. The fact that Tunisia was dominated by Ottoman rule for a long time did not help it.

There are very nice sandy beaches with clean sea in Tunisia. There are also some reasonably good wines at very affordable prices. Kairouan is said to be the fourth holies Muslim shrine. It has nice architecture going back to the the 17th century and earlier. Tunisia also has a small but ancient Jewish community, many of them in Djerba.

By the way, I hold no brief to advertise Tunisia for tourists. I am Maltese. I am also very sorry to see the latest events happening in Tunisia though I was by no means surprised. Such trouble has been brewing for a very long time.

The university of Malta conducted a study into the Y-chromosome of Maltese males and demonstrated that it is identical to that of males in southern Italy up to Calabria. I have not heard of a similar study on females yet. The Y-chromosome is transmitted through males only and remains unchanged. Language is a separate issue from genetics. Many North Africans are Berber (especially in Algeria and Morocco) and yet they speak Arabic. Berber is an Afro-asiatic language unrelated to Arabic. It seems there are a few Berber words in Maltese. There are movements for preserving Berber language and culture. Of course, there are Arab genes in the Maltese population as well as in that of most Mediterranean countries. A steady influx of genes from other peoples during the last 800 years, however, must have diluted the original “Arab” gene-pool quite heavily, I should think. DCG is right that we have nothing to be ashamed of if we speak a basically Arab language (heavily Latinized and somewhat anglicized) and have some Arab genes. When the “Arabs” took Malta, Islamic culture was in its golden age. There are few “Arab” surnames in Malta but they are highly diffused. Italian surnames are more numerous and some of them are also very common (e.g. Vassallo, Grech). I agree with DCG that we should be proud of our mixed heritage which is found very interesting by foreigners. Finally, my apologies to whoever has had the patience to read this for its rather disorganized structure owing to impromtu drafting.

The language proof is probably dubious. Judging by their language, neither the Spaniards nor the Sicilian could be termed Tunisian – which is in fact your claim.

[Daphne – I did not say that the Spaniards and Sicilians are purely of Tunisian origin. I said that the genetic make-up of those populations would in a significant part be derived and shared with the people of the Maghreb (including Tunisia) because the Iberian peninsula and Sicily were under Arab dominion (via the Maghreb) for many centuries. Yet their original language survived despite that. This is because language is ‘of the essence’. The fact that the people of Malta spoke (speak?) only Arabic tells us that they were Arabic. If they were not, then their original language would have stayed alive. It didn’t because there was none to be kept alive. More evidence: toponyms predate incoming languages and survive linguistic change if there is continuity of population. Look at England, where so many place-names are Anglo-Saxon still today. But Maltese toponyms are all Arabic.]

The same applies to the Lombards – we know they are Germanic, still they speak Italian, which is Romance. Any Sicilian who migrates to Lombardy will produce children who will grow up speaking Milanese. The Irish are giving up Gaelic in favour of English – still the Irish are not Germanic, whereas the Anglo-Saxons are. The Americans speak English, yet they are the melting-pot par excellence. The language issue was a late 18th- and 19th-century blind alley.

[Daphne – You are making the wrong comparison: talking about incomers being subsumed into the existing language, when you wish to prove the point that, in Malta, the incomers imposed their language on the existing population. You should know that this isn’t possible: Malta was under British rule and with a very heavy British presence here for 160 years, during which time the only official language was English. Yet how many people speak English as anything other than a foreign language and very badly at that?]