Is There a Specific Term For This Style Of Moroccan Dagger???

[A.alnakkas]

Originally Posted by ariel

You might be right, but what's the alternative? There is very little ( or not at all) tradition of academic scholarship in the so-called " native" societies.


Had it not been for Stocklein, the swords of Topkapi would not have been decribed till 2001 ( Yucel's book). Pant's book on Indian weapons repeats assertions from Eggerton, Stone and Rawson. The Iranians waited for an expatriate Mr. Khorasani to publish a book on their traditional weapons. According to Khorasani, the very first attempt to catalogue Persian swords from Persian (!) museums was made by the Soviet art historian Romanovsky in the 1950's, and the best book on the subject was issued from Poland.
It took an Israeli (!) Daniel Ayalon to start academic studies of the Egyptian mamelukes, and African weapons would not have been academically known without Spring and some other European authors. Encyclopedia of Indonesian weapons? Van Zonneveld. Arabian weapons? Elgood and Jacob. The best book on Turkish weapons? Astvatsaturyan from Russia. Tibet? La Rocca. Ancient Central Asia? Gorelik from Russia. Best museum exhibition catalogues ? All from Europe. South Asian? Macao exhibition book with marvelous articles by some of the Forumites ( plus Japanese, Korean and Chinese chapters on their own weapons). Had it not been for the efforts of the European collectors like Moser, Eggerton and Stone we would not have known not only the correct name for a Salawar Yataghan, but even what it looks like.

Perhaps only the Japanese have demonstrated comparably-serious academic tradition of study of their own weapons.

I would be delighted to read books on Afghani, Sudanese, North African, Thai, Vietnamese, Ethiopian or a multitude of other weapons written by native authors and teaching us the inside view of their arms and armour. But meanwhile, the only sources of information come from the European researchers.

Thus, the wrong names.

Please feel free to write and publish an academic book on traditional Omani weaponry with all the correct names, and I shall be the first one to buy it and to rely on the original, "native", information.

With best wishes.

I think for us collectors, trying to change the wrong names is counterproductive. I merely commented on why the natives do not know on the names we use to describe certain items

Though I will keep pointing it out if presented wrongly, for example, the name nimcha was presented wrongly by LP, he did correct it though (at first, it was presented as arabic, when in fact its persian. Thats a wrong info that needed to be corrected) So to me, as someone who knows arabic, I find it to be a positive thing to point out when non-arabic words are described as arabic, or when a certain name is flagged as "native" when in fact its not. This doesnt mean I have no respect for the effort of non-native researchers but a wrong info is just that, a wrong info. And when it exists in an academic paper, one needs to point out where are the wrong information. Even with something as irrelevant as weapon names :-)

PS: I have a project set to make an arabic site dealing with the arms and armour of the Islamic world. In it I will try to get information from native museums, elderly people, muslim collectors and ofcourse, non-native experts (many of them here)

Also, in a telephone discussion with Saqir alAnizi, we discussed how much info we had here was lost due to the art being transmitted orally rather then academically.

Question to you, Ariel, I would like 1 LOGICAL reason why a speaker of arabic should not point out a misconception about a certain word? The question is valid ofcourse, if we both look at this academically (or just simply wanting to know the truth behind the simplest things)