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This article only links from Amy Chua's biography page (which is also pending discussions for deletion). The book is not notable, and is not a commercial/academic success. It warrants deletion based on a lack of notability.
The claim that Chia "mentions a Muslim advisor at the service of Roman Emperor Trajan (AD 98-117)." cites a book review from the Los Angeles Times; the quote from that review is presumably "The emperor Trajan, she points out, was a Spaniard whose top advisors included a Greek, a Muslim and a Jew...". [1]
An online copy of her book I found on the Intertubes, has, instead, the quote "The emperor Trajan, who ruled from AD 98 to 117, was born in Spain. His top advisory included a Greek, a Moor, and Gaius Julius Alexander Berenicianus, a descendant of the Israelite king Herod the Great." That appears to mostly match the review's quote; however, it speaks of a "Moor" rather than a "Muslim". The page Moors says that "The term Moor is an exonym first used by Christian Europeans to designate the Muslim populations of the Maghreb, al-Andalus ( Iberian Peninsula), Sicily and Malta during the Middle Ages." However, it also says that
suggesting that the Romans had a term similar to "Moor" that may have been a predecessor to "Moor". Chia may have meant "Moor" in the sense of "from Mauretania".
I don't know who turned "Moor" into "Muslim" in that review. It's possible that the author of the review did, although I'd expect a senior editor at Foreign Affairs not to blithely assume that Chua meant Muslim there, given the extent to which both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars of Islam would be shocked by solid evidence of the existence of Islam between 98 and 117 AD, several hundred years before the generally-accepted date of Muhammad's birth in approximately 570 AD. My guess is that some LA Times editor "fixed" the use of the word "Moor", replacing it with "Muslim" because either 1) they were concerned that "Moor" would be considered an ethnic slur or 2) they didn't think the readers would understand the term, and were sufficiently clueless as to think that, in that context, "Muslim", rather than some geographical or other ethnic term, was the correct fix.
In any case, absent any solid evidence, independent of a possibly-misedited statement in a book review, that Amy Chua has found evidence of the existence of Islam in the early Roman empire, that paragraph should be removed. Guy Harris ( talk) 06:03, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
References
![]() | This article is rated Stub-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
This article only links from Amy Chua's biography page (which is also pending discussions for deletion). The book is not notable, and is not a commercial/academic success. It warrants deletion based on a lack of notability.
The claim that Chia "mentions a Muslim advisor at the service of Roman Emperor Trajan (AD 98-117)." cites a book review from the Los Angeles Times; the quote from that review is presumably "The emperor Trajan, she points out, was a Spaniard whose top advisors included a Greek, a Muslim and a Jew...". [1]
An online copy of her book I found on the Intertubes, has, instead, the quote "The emperor Trajan, who ruled from AD 98 to 117, was born in Spain. His top advisory included a Greek, a Moor, and Gaius Julius Alexander Berenicianus, a descendant of the Israelite king Herod the Great." That appears to mostly match the review's quote; however, it speaks of a "Moor" rather than a "Muslim". The page Moors says that "The term Moor is an exonym first used by Christian Europeans to designate the Muslim populations of the Maghreb, al-Andalus ( Iberian Peninsula), Sicily and Malta during the Middle Ages." However, it also says that
suggesting that the Romans had a term similar to "Moor" that may have been a predecessor to "Moor". Chia may have meant "Moor" in the sense of "from Mauretania".
I don't know who turned "Moor" into "Muslim" in that review. It's possible that the author of the review did, although I'd expect a senior editor at Foreign Affairs not to blithely assume that Chua meant Muslim there, given the extent to which both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars of Islam would be shocked by solid evidence of the existence of Islam between 98 and 117 AD, several hundred years before the generally-accepted date of Muhammad's birth in approximately 570 AD. My guess is that some LA Times editor "fixed" the use of the word "Moor", replacing it with "Muslim" because either 1) they were concerned that "Moor" would be considered an ethnic slur or 2) they didn't think the readers would understand the term, and were sufficiently clueless as to think that, in that context, "Muslim", rather than some geographical or other ethnic term, was the correct fix.
In any case, absent any solid evidence, independent of a possibly-misedited statement in a book review, that Amy Chua has found evidence of the existence of Islam in the early Roman empire, that paragraph should be removed. Guy Harris ( talk) 06:03, 14 June 2024 (UTC)
References