# Moorish North Africa and the rise of Western epistemology  
Significant advances in understanding the origins of modern concepts of race have been made in recent decades, with a growing consensus locating their origins in the Iberian Reconquista and the almost simultaneous conquest of the New World using the same emergent epistemic concepts (Shohat, 1992; Wynter, 1995; Carew, 1995; Mignolo, 1995). Islamic Iberia and contiguous North Africa, both with close ties to the vast system of Old World civilizations, were important cultural confluence zones between the Mediterranean and Africa, and soon, too, was the Atlantic world. Using geniza and other historical documents from Jewish Mediterranean communities, Schorsch (2004) shows that categories of blackness clearly already existed in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cultural, theological and juridical thinking, well before the Atlantic passage. However, blackness was not yet regularized as having negative connotations, though it may have been trending in that direction in some of the Mediterranean regions; nor was blackness a fixed category with a stable meaning or definite geographic ascription. Rather, it was a highly variable category, to the extent that it surfaced in writing or discourse at all, and was more often ascribed positive attributes than negative attributes (Muhammed, 1985). De Moraes Farias (1985) helps explain that pre-Western and non-Western epistemic categories conceived of identities more as mobile classificatory units of analysis that shift over time and appear in multiple places, alongside other fluid and changing categories. Terms such as 'Moor' in North  
Africa or 'Zanj' in East Africa and the Indian Ocean were neither routinely given negative or positive associations, nor entirely tied to specific places; and frequently those categories overlapped across the enormous expanse of the African continent, southern Asia, and throughout the Indian Ocean.