Saracen

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A historical term referring to a member of a Muslim people originally from the Arabian Peninsula during the Middle Ages
2. It can also denote a term used in medieval European writings to describe Muslims, particularly during the Crusades
3. The word is sometimes utilized in a broader sense to indicate any Muslim or Arabic person in certain historical contexts

Etymology: The name is one of the oldest unresolved puzzles in the history of European words. Ancient Greek writers used "Sarakēnoi" for peoples of the desert frontier, and Late Latin took it as "Saracenus," but nobody agrees on what it meant. For centuries, scholars favoured an Arabic origin in "sharqiyyin," meaning "easterners," since the people so named lived east of most other Semitic peoples. Others in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries proposed "sariqun," "plunderers," which fit the raiding reputation the term later carried. A more curious story comes from the fourth century, when the church writer Eusebius linked the name to the biblical Sarah. He claimed that Hagar's descendants had adopted it to imitate the nobler lineage of the Israelites. The link is almost certainly folk etymology, but it may explain how the term became pejorative and so widely used in European writing. Modern scholarship leans toward a geographic origin. Two place-names are candidates: Saraka in Arabia, and Sarakēnē in Arabia Petrea, apparently in Sinai. The latter may connect to a Bedouin tribe called the Sawārke or Sawārika. On this theory, the Greek writers of Alexandria first met this group, and their name was later extended to all Arab peoples.