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Tunisia - Islam and the Arabs

By the time of his death in A.D. 632, the Prophet Muhammad and his followers had brought most of the tribes and towns of the Arabian Peninsula under the banner of the new monotheistic religion of Islam (literally, submission), which was conceived of as uniting the individual believer, the state, and the society under the omnipotent will of God. Islamic rulers therefore exercised both temporal and religious authority. Adherents of Islam were called Muslims ("those who submit" to the will of God). Within a generation Arab armies had carried Islam north and east from Arabia in the wake of their rapid conquests and westward across North Africa as far as Tripoli. There, stiff Berber resistance slowed the Arab advance, and efforts at permanent conquest were resumed only when it became apparent that the Maghrib could be opened up as a theater of operations in the Muslim campaign against the Byzantine Empire.

In 670 the Arabs surged into the Roman province of Africa (transliterated as Ifriquiya in Arabic), where their commander, Uqba ben Nafi, founded the city of Kairouan as a military base about 150 kilometers south of Byzantine-held Carthage. The selection of this encampment in the midst of a plain, separated from both the Roman cities on the coast and the mountains in Numidia, where the Berber tribes continued their stubborn resistance, was a deliberate act of policy by Uqba, who reportedly announced that he was founding a city that would serve "as a strong point for Islam until the end of time." The name chosen for the new Arab capital, derived from the Persian word karwan (caravan), also suggests that Uqba was aware of the commercial possibilities of the site located at a crossroads of the trade routes.

Carthage fell in 693, but the last pockets of Byzantine resistance on the North African coast were wiped out only after the Arabs had obtained naval supremacy in the Mediterranean. The Arabs cautiously probed the western Maghrib, and in 710 the governor of Ifriquiya, Musa ibn Nusair, invaded Morocco and carried their conquests to the Atlantic. In 712 they mounted an invasion of Spain and in three years had subdued all but the mountainous regions in the extreme north. Muslim Spain (called Andalusia) and the Maghrib, which had been conquered within 50 years of the founding of Kairouan, were organized under the political and religious leadership of the Umayyad caliph of Damascus.

Arab rule in Ifriquiya - as elsewhere in the Islamic world in the eighth century - had as its ideal the establishment of political and religious unity under a caliphate (the office of the Prophet's successor as supreme earthly leader of Islam) governed in accord with a legal system (sharia) administered by qadis (religious judges), to which all other considerations, including tribal loyalties, were subordinated. The sharia was based primarily on the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet and was derived in part from Arab tribal and market law.

Arab rule was easily imposed on the towns, which prospered again under their new patronage, and in the coastal farming areas. People in the former valued the security that permitted them to practice their commerce and trade in peace, while the punicized farmers recognized an affinity with the Arabs to whom they looked to protect their lands against the nomadic Berber tribesmen. The Arabs abhorred the tribal Berbers as barbarians, while the Berbers often saw the Arabs only as an arrogant and brutal soldiery bent on collecting taxes. Communal and representative Berber institutions also contrasted sharply and frequently clashed with the personal and authoritarian government that the Arabs had adopted under Byzantine influence.

The Arabs formed an urban elite in Ifriquiya, where they had come originally as conquerors and missionaries, not as colonists. Their armies had traveled without women and married among the indigenous population, transmitting Arab culture and Islamic religion over an extended period to the townsmen and farmers; but conversion to Islam was also rapid among the nomadic tribes of the hinterland that stoutly resisted Arab political domination. Many Berber converts were opportunists, however, and tribes that accepted Islam under Arab pressure often abandoned it once the intimidating Arab tax collectors and slave traders had moved on.

Some tribes had records of repeated apostasy and reconversion. Once established as Muslims, however, the Berbers, with their characteristic love of independence and impassioned religious temperament, shaped Islam in their own image. They embraced schismatic Muslim sects - often traditional folk religion barely disguised as Islam - as a way of breaking from Arab control with the same enthusiasm that their Christian forebears had accepted Donatism in opposition to Rome.

The heretical Kharidjite movement surfaced in Morocco as a revolt against the Arabs in 739. The Berber Kharidjites (seceders; literally, those who emerge from impropriety) proclaimed their belief that any suitable Muslim candidate could be elected caliph without regard to his race, station or descent from the Prophet. Taking a position directly paralleling that of the Donatists, the Kharidjites maintained that a sinner could no longer be a believer because faith was not possible without purity, and they thereby regarded all other Muslims as heretics. The attack on the Arab monopoly of the religious leadership of Islam was explicit in Kharidjite doctrine, and Berbers across the Maghrib rose in revolt in the name of religion against Arab domination. Kairouan was sacked and its mosques desecrated. In the wake of revolt, Kharidjite sectarians established a number of theocratic tribal kingdoms, most of which had short and troubled histories. The rise of the Kharidjites in the Maghrib coincided with a period of turmoil in the Arab world during which the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads and relocated the caliphate in Baghdad.

In the countryside the ulama (Islamic scholars and teachers) of the mosques were replaced as the spiritual guides of the people by wandering holy men (al murabitun), or "those who have made a religious retreat" (transliterated as marabouts). The marabouts were mystics and seers, miracle workers endowed with a charisma (bara/ca), whose tradition antedated Islam in the Maghrib and was as old as religion itself among the Berbers. They were incorporated into intensely local cults of saints whose domed tombs dotted the countryside and who were venerated by Muslims and Jews alike. The marabouts had traditionally acted as arbiters in tribal disputes, and, whenever the authority of government waned in a particular locale, the people turned to them for political leadership as well as for spiritual guidance.

Maghribi Islam thus took shape as a coexisting blend of the scrupulous intellectualism of the ulama and the sometimes frenzied emotionalism of the masses. In general, however, Ifriquiya was not as susceptible to the heterodoxy that characterized popular Islamic practices farther west. Two factors account for this: first, Ifriquiya came more directly under the orthodox influence of the mosques and schools of Tunis and Kairouan, and, second, its larger urban and sedentary population had been more thoroughly arabized than was the case elsewhere in the Maghrib.

Aghiabids

After the Arab conquest, Ifriquiya was governed by a succession of amirs (commanders) who were subordinate to the caliph in Damascus and, after 750, in Baghdad. In 800 the caliph appointed as amir Ibrahim ibn Aghlab, who established a hereditary dynasty and ruled Ifriquiya as an autonomous state that was subject to the caliph's spiritual jurisdiction and nominally recognized him as its political suzerain. The ninth century has been described as the region's "golden age," from which it developed as a politically and culturally distinct entity within the Islamic world.

In 827 the reigning amir, Ziyat Allah, diverted the energies of the restless Arab military caste to Sicily, where rebellious subjects of the Byzantine emperor had invited Aghiabid intervention. The Arabs seized part of the island and conquered the rest piecemeal over the next 75 years. For a time they held Sardinia and gained a foothold in southern Italy as well, and in 846 Arab raiders plundered the suburbs of Rome and sacked the basilica of Saint Peter. The Aghiabids contested control of the central Mediterranean with the Byzantine Empire and played an active role in the internal politics of Italy. Palermo, noted for its wealth and cosmopolitan culture as the capital of Aghiabid Sicily, was one of Europe's largest cities. Meanwhile, in Ifriquiya the Aghlabid amirs repaired the neglected Roman irrigation system, rebuilding the country's prosperity and restoring the vitality of its cities and towns with the agricultural surplus that was produced.

At the top of Ifriquiya's political and social hierarchy were the court, the military caste, and an Arab urban elite that included merchants, scholars, and government officials who had come to Kairouan and Tunis from many parts of the Islamic world. Members of the large Jewish communities that also resided in those cities held office under the amirs and engaged in commerce and the crafts. Converts to Islam often retained the positions of authority held traditionally by their families or class in Roman Africa; but a Christian community, speaking the provincial Latin dialect of Africa, lingered on in the towns until the twelfth century.

During the golden age Aghiabid patronage transformed Kairouan into the center of Maghribi religious and intellectual life. Kairouan was a great market for books in Arabic and Hebrew that had been copied by scribes. Its mosques and schools attracted pilgrims and scholars-Jewish and well as Muslim-from all parts of the Islamic world. So important was the reputation of Kairouan as a holy city that, according to custom, seven pilgrimages made there by a devout Muslim were the equivalent in merit of the required hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca. The most outstanding cultural figure of the golden age was the poet-scholar Ibn Rachiq, renowned for his literary commentaries and historical works. His contemporary at Kairouan, Ibn Zeid, codified the Malikite branch of Islamic law that applied throughout the Maghrib, and more than 40 volumes on jurisprudence are attributed to him.

The Aghiabids established a tradition of intellectual excellence that survived the dynasty. In the tenth century Constantius Africanus, a Christian from Carthage knowledgeable in medicine, natural science, and astronomy, introduced Arab learning in those fields to Europe from the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino in Italy, where he translated works of Arabic scholarship into Latin. It was primarily through Arabic texts that classical Greek learning in science and philosophy was transmitted to the scholars of Europe over the next two centuries. The tension and interplay between the Islamic and Christian worlds-most evident on the frontiers iii Sicily and Spain, where the two cultures were in constant conflict-was a major stimulus for Europe's twelfth-century renaissance.

Fatimids

Already in the seventh century a conflict had developed between supporters of rival claimants to the caliphate that would split Islam into two branches - the orthodox Sunni and the Shia - which continued thereafter as the basic division among Muslims. The Shia (from the so-called Shiat Ali, or Party of Au) supported the claim of the direct descendants of Au, the fourth caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, whereas the Sunni favored that of Ali's rival, Muawiyah, leader of a collateral branch of Muhammad's tribe, the Quraysh of Mecca, and the principle of election of the fittest from the ranks of the shurfa (descendants of the Prophet - literally, nobles; sing., sharif). The Shia had their greatest appeal among non-Arab Muslims, who were scorned by the aristocratic desert Arabs.

In the closing decade of the ninth century, a missionary of the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam, Abu Abdullah al Hussein, converted the Kutama Berbers of the Kabylie region to that militant brand of Shiism and led them on a crusade against the Sunni Aghiabids. Kairouan fell in 909, and the next year the Kutama installed the Ismaili grand master from Syria, Ubaidalla Said, as imam (religious leader) of their movement and ruler over the territory they had conquered. Recognized by his Berber followers as the Mahdi (the divinely guided one), the imam founded the Shia dynasty of the Fatimids, (named for Fatima, daughter of Muhammad and wife of Au, from whom he claimed descent) and moved the capital from Kairouan to a coastal stronghold renamed Mahdia in his honor.

Merchants of the coastal towns were the backbone of the Fatimid state that had been founded by religious enthusiasts and imposed by Berber tribesmen. The slow but steady economic revival of Europe created a demand for goods from the East for which the ports of Ifriquiya and Fatimid Sicily were the ideal distribution centers. Trading houses in Ifriquiya opened branches in Egypt, and their merchants, some of whom ventured as far as India in search of trade goods, won a reputation for their daring. The warehouses in the ports of Ifriquiya stored and shipped out grain, drugs, spices, lacquer, and dyes, as well as susiyyat, the cloth woven in Ifriquiya from Egyptian flax for export back to Egypt.

Fatimid rule was harsh and intolerant, persecuting the Sunni ulama of Kairouan and the Kharidjite sectarians alike. For many years the Fatimids threatened Morocco with invasion, but eventually they turned their armies eastward toward Egypt, where in the name of religion the Berbers took their revenge on the Arabs. The Fatimids completed the conquest of Egypt from the Abbasids by 969 and moved their capital to the new city that they founded at Cairo, where they established a Shia caliphate to rival that of the Sunni caliph at Baghdad. The Fatimids left the Maghrib to their Berber vassals, the Zirids, but the Shia regime had already begun to crumble outside Ifriquiya as factions struggled indecisively for regional supremacy. The Zirids neglected the country's economy, except to pillage it for their personal gain. Agricultural production declined, and farmers and herdsmen took to brigandage. The depletion of the gold supply and the shifting of trade routes gradually depressed Ifriquiya's once thriving commerce. In an effort to hold the support of the urban Arabs, the Zirid amir, Al Moezz ibn Badis, defiantly rejected the Shia creed in 1049, broke with the Fatimids, and initiated a Berber return to Sunni orthodoxy.

In Cairo the Fatimid caliph invited beduin tribes from Arabia (known collectively as the Hilalians, who had ravaged Egypt for years) to migrate to the Maghrib and punish his rebellious vassals. The Arab nomads spread over the region, in the words of the historian Ibn Khaldun, like a "swarm of locusts," impoverishing it, destroying towns, and turning farmland into steppe. In 1057 they looted and destroyed Kairouan. Over a long period they displaced Berber farmers from their land and converted it to pasturage.

Many Berbers, driven from their traditional lands, joined the lilahans as nomads. The Hilalian impact on the Maghrib was devastating in both economic and demographic terms, altering the face and culture of the region and completing the arabization of Ifriquiya. In the meantime, the Norman rulers of southern Italy took advantage of the Zirids' distress in North Africa to invade Sicily in 1060 and return it to Christian control. In 1134 Norman knights occupied the island of Jerba to use it as a base for attacks on the African mainland; by 1150 Roger II, Norman king of Sicily, held a string of ports and fortresses along the coast between Tunis and Tripoli and dominated the narrow straits of the central Mediterranean. Norman interests in North Africa, however, were essentially commercial rather than political, and no effort was made to extend their conquests inland.