Article concentrates mainly on the period before the Armenian genocide of 1915–1916, when the negative stereotype of the Turk as an ancestral enemy had not yet been so firmly ingrained as today. I am operating on the assumption that this stereotype, today presented as at least 900 years old and vigorously supported by Armenian propaganda, dates in reality from the early 20th century, probably originally concerning the category of Muslims in general and later the ethnic category of Kurds. I am looking for support for my hypothesis about the originally non-ethnically motivated image of the Muslim or of the economically defined category of the Kurd (nomad) with respect to the perception of Armenian authors in the texts of Armenian chronicles from the 16th till 18th centuries from the region of Van. Armenians there constituted the most populous minority in the Ottoman Empire while living in an extremely multicultural environment. The chronicles show a great variety of attitudes towards the category of Muslims and Heretics generally depending on the author, and they also provide an interesting anthropological excursion into the life of the local population.
The Muslim population´s growth rate in Southern Africa has been pretty slow, even though they have been in this part of the African continent for more than a century. With the passage of time, they adapted to the changing socio-political and economic circumstances and saw themselves as an integral part of the populations in this region. As the Muslims were gradually becoming economically mobile, they set up various structures such as mosques and welfare organizations that would serve the interest of their communities and thus achieve their communal goals. Some of them realized the role of the media as one of the most effective instruments to assist in their cause and these groups then established newpapers and radio stations in different parts of the region. In the latter part of the 20th century a fair number of the media have emerged and contributed towards the debates that have taken and are still taking place within in Southern Africa´s civil societies.