Culture of North Africa
Language is one of the most important factors identifying the peoples of North Africa. According to the extant studies, the people of the Sahara and Maghreb belong to different dialects of Arabic and Berber (Cheref, 2010). Importantly, the Berber and Arabic language groups have distance relationships, but they are similar in the sense that they both belong to the Afro-Asiatic group of languages. The cited study reports that Saharadialectics, in comparison to the Berber one, have a more conservative approach. Through time, it is further reported, other language groups and cultures, including Phoenicians, Greeks, Nubians, Arabs, Romans, and Egyptians, have significantly influenced the Berber people. Consequently, the Sahara and Maghrebgroups are a combination of indigenous Berber, some elements of the neighboring regions of Africa, and Arab cultures.
Apart from language, religion is a cultural symbol of the people of North Africa. For a long time now, the region has been under intense influence of Islam, which makes it the most dominant of the religions of the people in this region of Africa. While Sunnism is predominant in the region, studies report the existence of strains of Quranist groups—Ibadi and Shia Muslims—and Sufism in the region (Kapchan, 2007).
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Culture of the Middle East
The Middle East has four distinct cultural regions, Iranian, Arab, Turkish, and Israeli cultures. Despite the differences in their location and influence over the vast region, it can be categorized that the regions—the Middle East in this sense—have a cultural resemblance in two major aspects of religion and language although neither of the two elements is universal. Precisely, the region is the birthplace of all monotheistic religions that have continued influencing people in the region and the rest of the world alike, including Christianity, Judaism, and the dominant Islam (Lewis, 2018). Furthermore, while the people of the Middle East belong to different language groups, Arabic is pre-dominant, especially among the countries that are pre-dominantly Islamic with the exception of Turkey where Turkish remains the most widely spoken language.
Q2: Comparing the Middle East and North Africa
North Africa and the Middle East are often grouped together since they share cultural values and legacies despite being geographically distinct. In comparison, one should note the influence of Islam in the two regions. While Islam originated from the Middle East, it has continually influenced the people of North Africa, which is to suggest that the practice of the religion and its principles may vary slightly according to the region in which it is practiced. Nonetheless, based on the element of religion alone, the Middle East and North Africa have the same influence. The difference, however, is the fact that the Middle East has many nations, which are purely Islamic, including Iran and others, while Africa does not have an Islamic State because the Arab Spring of the past decade failed to achieve any significant outcomes for the groups that pressured such changes in the religious identities of nations in North Africa.
The differences in the locations of the two regions imply the existence of underlying variations in the language spoken by people of the two sections of the world. In this case, Islam is pre-dominant in North Africa as it is in the Middle East, yet variations exist in terms of dialect, especially because of differences in the factors influencing the development of language. The interactions of the people of North Africa with their neighbors, for example, explain the extant differences in the dialects of Arabic spoken across the region.
Q3: A Very Brief General History of the Concept of Social Justice
Social justice may be a common phrase among modern people, yet it is a new concept. Its usage implies fair relationships among people in the society based on a fair distribution of wealth and the opportunities for self-advancement as well as other social privileges between persons and the society in which they live. In short, persons have the duty of fulfilling their social roles, and they should receive rewards for their behavior. As much as the idea of social welfare has traces in the Philosophy of Thomas Paine and theology of Augustine Hippo, it emerged explicitly around the 1780s under the influence Luig Taparelli, of a Jesuit Priest (Darling, 2013). The term, the cited literature reports, spreadsignificantlyin the wake of the 1848 revolution under the influential works of Antonio Rosminin-Serbati. Nonetheless, it is reported in the same study that social justice is a term that could be having an older coinage—as early as before the turn of the 19 th century.
Despite the history around the use of the term, social justice received significant attention in the United States and around the world during the progressive era through the contributions of legal scholars who started using it more, especially Roscoe Pound and Louis Brandeis. The idea also transcended international law beginning the onset of the 20 th century, and it is noticeably extant in declarations, including the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action and others (Darling, 2013). Consequently, the ideology of social justice, therefore, has a long history in modernizing and streamlining the relationship between individuals and their societies.
The idea of social justice is fundamental to the practice of Judaism. While it is unknown whether the gentile prophet Bilaam, foresaw the protest tents of the social justice system of Israel, it is clear that another ancient prophet, Amos, defined this spirit of struggle—he insisted that social justice was foundational to Judaism. He opposed society that that taxed the poor beyond measurable standards, as the rich continued living in decadent luxury, which to him, was unsustainable and intolerable. One must understand, therefore, that Judaism is foundational to the concept of social justice in ancient Hebrew culture.
References
Cheref, A. (2010). Gender and identity in North Africa: Postcolonialism and feminism in Maghrebi women's literature .Bloomsbury Publishing.
Darling, L. T. (2013). A history of social justice and political power in the Middle East: The circle of justice from Mesopotamia to globalization .Routledge.
Kapchan, D. (2007). Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video. American Anthropologist , 109 (2), 381.
Lewis, B. (2018). The multiple identities of the Middle East (p. 124127).New York: Schocken Books.
