Al-Andalus

Thank you Hatte, I would be delighted to help with this project.
I will start to look around for source material.

Meanwhile, I launched a Master Project Guide that
would incorporate all Middle Ages Period Projects.
Everyone, please just upload links that belong there, and
then we will eventually sort them out in some sort of order.

http://www.geni.com/projects/The-Dark-Ages-The-Holy-Grail-of-History

I have several books on this subject:
Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of Al-Andalus by Hugh Kennedy. Longman, 1996

The Medieval Spains by Bernard F. Reilly. Cambridge Medieval Textbooks, Cambridge University Press, 1993. This book treats all of Spain, so fits into your broader project on the Medieval era.

One of the pieces I want to have in the project is related to Arabic influences in Spanish. Gib al-Tariq (Gibraltar) is the place where the commander Tariq disembarked in 711. Of course Guadalquivir is the "the large Wadi or River".

Love the Master Project Guide Malka & Ofir, thank you very much.

http://www.geni.com/projects/Geni-Curator-Projects-Guide

I agree Erica. I was very impressed. I'm cleaning up my family projects to try to do better given the stellar examples.

http://www.geni.com/projects/Al-Andalus The project skeleton is created. I'm going to look for profiles that should be part of the project. Please feel free to suggest other topics to cover.

I'm looking for people who know Arabic to help me with the profiles and family tree of the rulers of al-Andalus and their ancestors. Some of the profiles exist in Geni but unfortunately the Arabic names were entered in the wrong data fields so what you see is garbled. Also, there are errors in the family relationships that need to be fixed. I am wondering if this was a Gedcom upload. I'm using Wikipedia and Hugh Kennedy's Muslim Spain and Portugal, which gives detailed family trees. Some of the Wikipedia articles seem to have the genealogy correct and I'll search for other sources as well to make sure. There just will be a lot of work to fix the existing profiles and relationships and add the missing ones. I suspect we're missing the later Berber dynasties for instance.

I take it ALL back. There are very good profiles, created by Paul Douglas Van Dillen who I am hoping would like to collaborate. I have written him.

I'm making progress. In some points in tree of the Umayyad rulers of al-Andalus, there are duplicates and I am merging. We need to have a lesson on Arabic names and put it at the top of the curator notes because each and every time I merge, I have to fix up the name again. And everyone makes a different kind of error.

Some points:

1. There are no surnames traditionally in Arabic
2. The given name may be a phrase such as "Abd al-Rahman" or "Abd Allah". Abd means "servant" "al" is the definite article and cannot be separated from the word. It also assimilates to the next part of the phrase depending upon the initial sound -- "ar-Rahman" "an-Nasir".
3. After that comes the patronymic which begins with "bin" or "ibn" which means son (of) or "bint" which means daughter (of)

I put all that in the FIRST NAME field, e.g., "Abd Allah ibn Muhammad".

I put Emir of Cordoba in the TITLE field.

Right now I am putting other name elements after the patronymic in the first name field. Here's an example:

The first Umayyad ruler of al-Andalus was Abd al-Rahman I (Arabic: عبد الرحمن الداخل; known as "the Immigrant", also the "Falcon of Andalus" or "The Falcon of the Quraysh" 731 – 788). He was the son of Mu'awiyya. al-Dakhil means "the immigrant" or "incomer".

=> Abd ar-Rahman I ibn Mu'awiyya al-Dakhil, Emir of Cordoba

Sometimes they make a chain of patronymics:

Abd ar-Rahman ibn Mu'awiyya ibn Hisham

Shortly I'll be linking to some articles on Arabic names in the Naming Conventions project and I'll try to write up what I think are good practices. Otherwise, each time there's a merge, the profile names will have to be cleaned up.