The Mauritania Quotes

When you fear nothing, you have nothing to fear

By the time I make my way to the border of Mauritania, to the edge of the Sahara, I see no end to being lost. You can spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn't a station you reach but just the general state of going down. Once you make it back, if you make it back, you will stand before your long-lost friends but in some essential way they will no longer know you.

Mauritania officially abolished slavery in 1980, though its own government admitted that the practice continued nevertheless.

Look, you kidnap me from my home in Mauritania, not from a battlefield in Afghanistan, because you suspected me of having been part of the Millennium Plot—which I am not, as you know by now. So what’s the next charge? It looks to me as if you want to pull any shit on me.

Well before Africans were enslaved by Europeans, they were enslaved by other Africans, as well as by Islamic states in North Africa and the Middle East. Some of those states did not abolish legal slavery until recently: Qatar in 1952; Saudi Arabia and Yemen in 1962; Mauritania in 1980.

Arabs invaded northern Africa in the seventh century, sending black African slaves to Asia and Arab countries. In the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, which is Arab, Berber Muslims hold possibly more than one hundred thousand black slaves.24 In Saudi Arabia, a common word for black is abd, meaning “slave.

In my job in my country, I had to make some calls to the U.S. for professional purposes. I remember the following conversation: “Hello, we are dealing with office materials. We are interested in representing your company.” “Where are you calling from?” asked the lady at the other end. “Mauritania.” “What state?” asked the lady, seeking more precise information. I was negatively surprised at how small her world was.

It goes without saying," Miranda had said, in their initial phone call, "but of course no police force is going to investigate this." The closest country to her disappearance was Mauritania, but she'd disappeared in international waters, so it wasn't actually Mauritania's problem. Vincent was Canadian, the captain of the ship was Australian, Geoffrey Bell was British, the rest of the crew German, Latvian, and Filipino. The ship was flagged to Panama, which meant that legally it was a floating piece of Panamanian territory, but of course Panama had neither the incentive nor the manpower to investigate a disappearance off the west coast of Africa. It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.

Although definitive numbers are difficult to find, the Global Slavery Index estimates that at least a hundred and forty thousand people are enslaved in Mauritania, out of a population of 3.8 million.

Dalla festa del nonno ai mulini ecco il catalogo delle spese folli Secondo Confcommercio si buttano 82 miliardi l’anno C’è chi ha uffici in Nicaragua e chi paga corsi di merletto Nella foto a sinistra le «mutande verdi» acquistate dall’ex governatore del Piemonte Cota. A destra Franco Fiorito, in passato capogruppo Pdl nel Lazio, condannato a 3 anni e 4 mesi di reclusione Mattia Feltri | 752 parole Nel cassetto è rimasto un vecchio servizio dell’Espresso, giugno 2000. Un po’ più di quattordici anni fa e comunque non era una primizia: vi si leggeva, già con un margine di scoramento, dei 410 milioni (di lire) spesi dal Molise per commissionare alla Pontificia fonderia Marinelli la campana col rintocco adatto alle celebrazioni giubilari, oppure dei 65 stanziati dal Lazio a sovvenzione della festa del nonno di Ariccia, dove qualche notorietà la si deve alla porchetta più che al vecchierello. Poi c’erano i dieci milioni della Calabria per la cipolla rossa di Tropea, e avanti così, ma non era soltanto un festival dello strano ma vero: la Sicilia tirò fuori quattro miliardi per la valorizzazione dei mulini a vento e sei per l’individuazione di spiagge libere. Da allora i quotidiani e i periodici e la tv d’inchiesta coprono gli spazi e i momenti di noia con servizi di questo tipo, che hanno il pregio di essere infallibili; in fondo sono il modo superpop di cogliere l’attimo carnevalesco e, attimo dopo attimo, di spiegare come le Regioni siano in grado di sprecare 82,3 miliardi di euro all’anno, secondo lo studio presentato a marzo da Confcommercio. Vi si dice, fra l’altro, che il Lazio ne butta oltre undici, la Campania dieci abbondanti e la Sicilia - record - è lì per toccare quota quattordici. Il mondo è pieno di resoconti di questa natura. Il sempreverde è l’articolo sulle sedi di rappresentanza delle Regioni, con l’aneddoto strepitoso delle ventuno sedi regionali a Bruxelles, tutte indispensabili a mantenere il filo diretto fra Bari e l’Ue, Cagliari e l’Ue, Genova e l’Ue; piccolo dettaglio: le Regioni sono ventuno, ma Trento e Bolzano ritennero doveroso farsi una sede per provincia. Ai tempi di Giulio Tremonti si venne a sapere, con molta fatica e qualche approssimazione, che queste sedi sono 178 sparse nel mondo, il Piemonte ne ha una in Nicaragua e un’altra a Minsk, il Veneto in India e in Vietnam, la Puglia in Albania, le Marche a Ekaterinburg, dove ci fu l’eccidio dei Romanov e altro non si sa. Ha provato a metterci mano anche Carlo Cottarelli, il commissario alla spending review, e gli raccontarono (ne scrisse il Fatto) di quel consigliere regionale della Basilicata che voleva aprire a Potenza un ufficio di rappresentanza della Regione, e nonostante la Regione Basilicata abbia sede a Potenza. Insomma, se c’era un affare su cui si raggiungeva l’unanimità della nazione, era questo: le Regioni sono il tombino dei nostri soldi. Eravamo andati a vedere le consulenze distribuite in splendida allegria, i consulenti piemontesi sulla qualità percepita dagli utenti delle reti ferroviarie, i consulenti friulani sulle biblioteche nel deserto della Mauritania e su un corso di merletto, quello umbro sul monitoraggio delle tv locali. Siamo andati a verificare che la Valle d’Aosta (Regione e altri enti locali) ancora lo scorso anno aveva 493 auto blu, una ogni 260 residenti, mentre il Molise ne aveva 368 (tre soltanto a Montenero di Bisaccia, il paese di Antonio Di Pietro) ed era l’unica Regione, insieme col Trentino, che nel 2013 aveva aumentato anziché diminuito il parco macchine. Nel settore, una specie di bibbia è il divertente libro di Mario Giordano (Spudorati, Mondadori) che al capitolo sulle Regioni racconta che la Lombardia ha tirato fuori 75 mila euro nell’osservazione degli scoiattoli e cifre varie nel sovvenzionamento della Fiera della Possenta di Ceresara, dell’International Melzo Film Festival, della festa Cià che gìrum, del gemellaggio Pero-Fuscaldo. E la Lomb

In my travels from Mauritania to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan to Indonesia, extremist Muslims have shared with me their own deeply held false narratives of America as an oppressive state controlled by Zionists and determined to crush Islam. That’s an absurd caricature, and we should be wary ourselves of caricaturing a religion as diverse as Islam. So let’s avoid religious profiling. The average Christian had nothing to apologize for when Christian fanatics in the former Yugoslavia engaged in genocide against Muslims. Critics of Islam are not to blame because an anti-Muslim fanatic murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011.

<< Los sonidos van y vienen, pero el silencio permanece.>> En cierta ocasión, ta vez cuarenta años atrás, en un hotel mugriento y anónimo al borde del Sahara en la frontera de Mauritania, me depertó el silencio al que se refería el anciano. Pero no fue el silencio, sino la angustia que había adoptado la forma de silencio la que me despertó. No sé cómo explicarlo, yo mismo me transformé, como un animal, en agustia. No sentía miedo de nada, porque me encontraba al límite. Recuerdo el suelo de adobe, el ruido de algo o alguien moviéndose y cómo salí afuera al encuentro del cielo oscuro y la resplandeciente quietud de todas las estrellas. Aquella noche ha quedado escrita en mí con una palabra que ya no soy capaz de leer. A partir de aquel momento opté por una vida que hoy llamo la mía, la existencia del que escribe y describe en el mundo de las apariencias, pero ¿cuántas palabras hay que escribir para ser capaz de leer la única palabra?

Designated mouros or Moors, in view of their association with Mauritania (the Roman name for the Maghreb), these antagonists became the “straw men” for Portuguese nationalist ideologues for many centuries. For, in a sense, the mouros were the midwives attendant on the birth of the nation of Portugal, and once in adolescence the nation still felt the need to define its identity in contradistinction to them.

There is still slavery in Africa to this day. “[A]n estimated 9.2 million” Africans “live in servitude without the choice to do so” at “the highest rate. . . . in the world,” according to the 2018 Global Slavery Index. Slavery is “especially prevalent” in Eritrea and Mauritania, countries noted for the collusion of the government in the practice. In Eritrea, the “one-party state of president Isaias Afwerki has overseen a notorious national conscription service” for forced labor. In Mauritania, “the world’s last country to abolish slavery,” “the situation is more acute,” with the “black Haratin group” inheriting its slave status.51

The Arab slave trade was most active in West Asia, North Africa, and Southeast Africa. In the early 20th century (post World War I), slavery was gradually outlawed and suppressed in Muslim lands, largely due to pressure exerted by Western nations such as Britain and France.[6] For example, Saudi Arabia and Yemen only abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from Britain; Oman followed suit in 1970, and Mauritania in 1905, 1981, and again in August 2007.[13] However, slavery claiming the sanction of Islam is documented presently in the predominantly Islamic countries of Chad, Mauritania, Niger, Mali, and Sudan.

Peter speaks of a church at Babylon; Paul proposed a journey to Spain, and it is generally believed he went there, and likewise came to France and Britain. Andrew preached to the Scythians, north of the Black Sea. John is said to have preached in India, and we know that he was at the Isle of Patmos, in the Archipelago. Philip is reported to have preached in upper Asia, Scythia, and Phrygia; Bartholomew in India, on this side the Ganges, Phrygia, and Armenia; Matthew in Arabia, or Asiatic Ethiopia, and Parthia; Thomas in India, as far as the coast of Coromandel, and some say in the island of Ceylon; Simon, the Canaanite, in Egypt, Cyrene, Mauritania, Lybia, and other parts of Africa, and from thence to have come to Britain; and Jude is said to have been principally engaged in the lesser Asia, and Greece. Their labours were evidently very extensive, and very successful; so that Pliny, the younger, who lived soon after the death of the apostles, in a letter to the emperor, Trajan, observed that Christianity had spread, not only through towns and cities, but also through whole countries.

There is surely no reason for Western civilization to have guilt trips laid on it by champions of cultures based on despotism, superstition, tribalism, and fanaticism. In this regard the Afrocentrists are especially absurd. The West needs no lectures on the superior virtue of those "sun people" who sustained slavery until Western imperialism abolished it (and sustain it to this day in Mauritania and the Sudan), who keep women in subjection, marry several at once, and mutilate their genitals, who carry out racial persecutions not only against Indians and other Asians but against fellow Africans from the wrong tribes, who show themselves either incapable of operating a democracy or ideologically hostile to the democratic idea, and who in their tyrannies and massacres, their Idi Amins and Boukassas, have stamped with utmost brutality on human rights. Keith B. Richburg, a black newspaperman who served for three years as the Washington Post's bureau chief in Africa, saw bloated bodies floating down a river in Tanzania from the insanity that was Rwanda and thought: "There but for the grace of God go I . . . Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive . . . Thank God I am an American".

Saudi Arabia outlawed slave owning only in 1962. The Islamic Republic of Mauritania finally moved toward abolition in 1981, but the practice continued unabated, even after a 2003 law that made slave ownership punishable with jail or a fine. As recently as December 2004, the BBC cited Boubakar Messaoud of Mauritania’s SOS Slaves organization: ‘A Mauritanian slave, whose parents and grandparents before him were slaves, doesn’t need chains. He has been brought up as a domesticated animal.

Islam provides the method by which our hearts can become sound and safe again. This method has been the subject of brilliant and insightful scholarship for centuries in the Islamic tradition. One can say that Islam in essence is a program to restore purity and calm to the heart through the remembrance of God. This present text is based on the poem known as Maṭharat al-Qulūb (literally, Purification of the Hearts), which offers the means by which purification can be achieved. It is a treatise on the “alchemy of the hearts,” namely, a manual on how to transform the heart. It was written by a great scholar and saint, Shaykh Muhammad Mawlud al Ya’qubi al-Musawi al-Muratani, As his name indicates, he was from Mauritania in West Africa. He was a master of all the Islamic sciences, including the inward sciences of the heart. He stated that he wrote this poem because he observed the prevalence of diseased hearts. He saw students of religion spending their time learning abstract sciences that people were not really in need of, to the neglect of those sciences that pertain to what people are accountable for in the next life, namely, the spiritual condition of the heart, In one of his most cited statements, the Prophet said, “Actions are based upon intentions.” All deeds are thus valued according to the intentions behind them, and intentions emanate from the heart. So every action a person intends or performs is rooted in the heart. Imam Mawlud realized that the weakness of society was a matter of weakness of character in the heart, Imam Mawlud based his text on many previous illustrious works, especially Imam al-Ghazali’s great Ihya’ Ulum alDin (The Revivification of the Sciences of the Religion). Each of the 40 books of Ihya‘ Ulum al-Din is basically about rectifying the human heart. If we examine the trials and tribulations, wars and other conflicts, every act of injustice all over earth, we’ll find they are rooted in human hearts.

I withdraw once again in the contemplation of the desert and its sumptuous architecture. How is it possible to have such perfect curves with such pure lines, looking as if drawn for infinity but made of... sand, sculpted by the wind? The little wind furrows are almost the perfect mirror image of those left by the pulses of the sea in the sand of the estuaries and on the beaches.

About Northern Wheatears: ...birds from Alaska flew nine thousand miles to Kenya; those from Canada crossed the Atlantic to spend the winter in Mauritania. For young birds, just a few weeks old, this departure also signals the ultimate coming of age passage. Not only must they soar on brand new wings; they somehow must find their own way. Adults typically depart before the fledgings, leaving them to navigate alone across oceans and continents. If the birds I see make it, they'll leave the company of caribou and musk oxen to sit on the backs of elephants and zebras.

¿Cuál fue la causa de tanta conmoción repentina? El emperador Caracalla había decretado que todos los habitantes libres del imperio, dondequiera que viviesen, desde Britania hasta Siria, desde Capadocia a Mauritania, adquirían a partir de ese momento la ciudadanía romana. Fue una decisión revolucionaria que borró de un plumazo la distinción entre autóctonos y extranjeros. Un largo proceso integrador culminó en el instante de la aprobación del decreto. Fue una de las mayores concesiones de ciudadanía documentadas en la historia, si no la mayor: decenas de millones de provincianos se convirtieron legalmente en romanos de la noche a la mañana. Ese repentino regalo todavía desconcierta a los historiadores, porque rompió con la política antiquísima —y tan contemporánea— de convertir en ciudadanos plenos solo a un pequeño porcentaje de los aspirantes, de forma gradual y restrictiva. El político y cronista antiguo Dion Casio sospechaba que bajo la aparente generosidad de Caracalla se ocultaba la necesidad de recaudar dinero, puesto que los nuevos romanos contraían ipso facto la obligación de pagar el impuesto de sucesiones y el gravamen por la manumisión de esclavos. Como afirma Mary Beard, si ese fue el motivo, resultó una manera harto engorrosa de abordar el asunto. No creo que ningún estado actual se plantee legalizar a treinta millones de individuos de golpe, por muy suculenta que resulte la perspectiva de cobrarles impuestos. Sin duda, la decisión del emperador tuvo una importante carga simbólica. En tiempos de crisis, dar a más gente razones personales para identificarse con Roma podía ser una medida inteligente. Como es lógico, la extensión de la ciudadanía devaluó su importancia. Al caer una barrera de privilegio, rápidamente se alzó otra en su lugar. A lo largo del siglo III, ganó importancia la distinción entre los honestiores —la élite enriquecida y los veteranos del Ejército— y los humiliores —los más humildes, concepto intemporal que no necesita traducción—

Escocia, Galia, Hispania, Siria, Capadocia y Mauritania? ¿Cuáles eran los vínculos que a lo largo y ancho de tan enormes extensiones ayudaban a los romanos a entenderse, compartir aspiraciones y descubrirse miembros de una misma comunidad? Una urdimbre de palabras, ideas, mitos y libros.

Colonel Gaddafi was sitting under a tree that I had planted, we had planted several thousand hectares of forest there in Mauritania. He was sitting there under that tree and he was drinking the salted coffee that the Bedouins drink. And he was impressed. He asked me to work out a project with him in Libya as well.

Before I got the Royal endowment, I was not allowed to work. I always wanted to. And I have always been contradicted on that front. I have never asked to depend on others, I have always wanted to be independent. That's why I want to do these projects.

I may not always be taken seriously. I often come off as rather humorous: not serious, not academic enough. But that is simply not my style. I regret that I often get comments about that. That people think I have no sense of reality. But people don't know me. Sometimes I find it really disturbing, the criticism I've been getting since I was young. I'm 55 now: if I had really done something wrong, it would have been known by now.

I've experienced things I didn't want to know and I'm not happy at all with what's happening now. Those bad people will one day have to answer for their actions. I tell you again: in Libya there are people who have been murdered, because of the money that has been released here. And exactly no one has done it.

As a child, I had not known the world anthropology or that there was a thing called Ivy League. I had not known that you could spend your days on planes, moving through the world, studying death, your whole life before this life an unanswered question...finally answered. I had seen death in Indonesia and Korea. Death in Mauritania and Mongolia. I had watched the people of Madagascar exhume the muslin-wrapped bones of their ancestors, spray them with perfume, and ask those who had already passed to the next place for their stories, prayers, blessings. I had been home a month watching my father die. Death didn't frighten me. Not now. Not anymore. But Brooklyn felt like a stone in my throat.

skinned outsiders who wanted to buy them. They themselves had slaves. And captives were secured precisely to be sold, a market that made many of the local kingdoms rich and underlay their power. Slavery in Africa, again, had no correlation to skin color—except in Arab countries, where the lighter-skinned Arabs had Negro slaves. De facto and even legal slavery existed in Africa until the modern era; Mauritania only outlawed it in the 1980s. The fact that the Arabs were some of the biggest slave traders in the continent makes it grimly amusing that during the civil rights era in America, some black people converted to Islam and learned rudimentary Swahili, the patois of the Arab east coast, apparently believing that Islam was more pro-black than Christianity. Some African kingdoms were bigger slavers than others: two of the most active were the Buganda kingdom that borders Rwanda in what is now Uganda