The Great Arab Conquests

If you travel along the coast road it is over 2,000 kilometres from Alexandria to Carthage, capital of Roman Africa Proconsularis, and it is about 1,500 more from there to the Straits of Gibraltar.¹ At a good regular travelling pace of 20 kilometres a day, it would have taken almost half a year to make the journey. And that would be without days off, sick horses, obstructive officials or dangerous enemies. The expedition would have taken you through many varied landscapes and environments. On the eastern half of the journey, you would have had to have kept close to the coast, along the flat lands of the Egyptian littoral. In Cyrenaica the mountains of the Jabal Akhdar, the ‘Green Mountain’, came down almost to the sea and attracted enough rainfall to allow permanent settlement, not only on the coast but in the southern valleys of the range as well. A Mediterranean agriculture of wheat, vines and olives flourished.

Pushing further west, the traveller skirted the Gulf of Sirte. It was a long haul. The desert comes down to the sea and for perhaps a month the traveller passed almost nothing in the way of orchards and fields, villages and towns. Not until Tripolitania were settled lands reached once again, with farming land and pastures and the city of Tripoli, ‘a large maritime city, walled in stone and lime and rich in fruits, pears, apples, dairy products and honey’.² West of Tripoli the route led to the settled lands of what is now Tunisia. The southern province was called Africa Byzacena, the northern, Africa Proconsularis or Zeugitania, and the whole came to be known to the Arabs as Africa, or, as they preferred to write it, Ifrīqīya. The two late Roman provinces of Byzacena and Zeugitania were the heart of Roman rule. It was here that the wheat, wine, olives and pottery that constituted the main exports were produced, and it was here that the cities and country towns were most numerous. Carthage, at the north-east corner of Africa Proconsularis, was the real capital, not just of Tunisia but of the whole of Roman North Africa. The capital of Hannibal and the ancient Carthaginians had become the Roman capital and survived as the major political centre into late antiquity.

West of Carthage the main route continues further inland along the high plateaux, which lie between the sea and the coastal mountains to the north and the beginnings of the Sahara to the south, making a sort of natural east-west corridor. On the coast there were little ports built around the mouth of wadis and sheltered anchorages. Inland, the high plateaux were the lands of the nomads. Eventually the traveller would reach the twin cities of Ceuta and Tangier, fortified settlements which looked across the straits of Gibraltar to Spain, rich and tempting. Beyond, south of Tangier, lay the flat, well-watered plains of the Atlantic coast of Morocco and finally the High Atlas mountains, which bordered the northern fringes of the Sahara.

North Africa had been one of the richest areas of the Roman world. Something of the wealth can still be seen in the great ruins of cities like Volubilis in Morocco, Timgad in Algeria and Leptis Magna in Libya, which rank among the most impressive classical sites to be found within the frontiers of the Roman Empire. The large and elegant cities were sustained by a well-tended and vigorous agricultural resource base. Naturally fertile lands were tilled, and arid and inhospitable wastes, like the pre-desert valleys of Cyrenaica, were brought into cultivation by careful irrigation and continual nurturing. Grain was grown, but it was above all the cultivation of olives that distinguished the agriculture of the area, and the export of olive oil, to Rome and all round the Mediterranean basin, was a major source of wealth. The olive oil was transported from North Africa in long cylindrical amphorae, designed to be stacked in the holds of ships. North African potters also mass-produced a fine tableware, African Red Slip, which, like the amphorae, stacked neatly in cargo holds. The shiny red bowls and plates came to be the most common and widely distributed fine pottery of the late antique Mediterranean.

Until the early fifth century, North Africa had been a prosperous part of the Roman Empire, fully integrated into the imperial system, and much of the agricultural surplus was extracted in taxes by the imperial government. The prosperity of the land depended on its links across the Mediterranean, where the markets for its exports were to be found. Its cities were as distinctively Roman as any in Italy, Gaul or Spain with their fora, temples, baths and theatres. There was a developed Latin high culture and Christianity spread early. By the beginning of the fifth century North Africa was as firmly Christian as any other area of the empire. Cities and countryside were adorned with graceful churches and St Augustine (d. 430), the greatest intellectual figure of the age, was bishop of the small North African city of Hippo.

In the fifth century North Africa, like most of the western empire, was lost to imperial control. Germanic tribes, called collectively the Vandals, crossed from Spain and between 429 and 440 conquered all the Roman provinces. The Vandals have given the English language one of its most commonly used words for violence and destructiveness. In reality, the Vandals do not seem to have wrought significantly more havoc than other Germanic invaders of the Roman world, and in many ways they sought to take over the Roman structures and ways of doing things and use them for their own ends. The Vandal kingdom survived until 533 when the emperor Justinian sent a military expedition that successfully put an end to their power and brought the area back under imperial rule once more. The North Africa of the second half of the sixth and the early seventh centuries was, however, different in many respects from that of the second and third centuries, when the great cities had been constructed and the agricultural area had reached its greatest extent. One important difference was that the language of newly revived Roman administration was Greek, a foreign tongue that had never been widely spoken in the area before: it must have made the imperial authorities seem more like alien invaders than restorers of past glories. There were also continuous religious tensions between the African Christians and the imperial authorities in Constantinople, and both Justininian in the sixth century and Heraclius in the seventh resorted to persecution to enforce obedience to their theological views.³ As in the Fertile Crescent, many North African Christians must have been resentful and distrusting of the Byzantine authorities.

Most of what is now Morocco and western Algeria, with the exception of the fortified city of Ceuta, where Justinian rebuilt the walls and constructed a new church, had ceased to be part of the empire in the third century. In the areas that did remain under imperial control, town and countryside were very different. The centres of many great cities were abandoned. Timgad, a bustling city in inland Algeria with imposing classical architecture, was destroyed by the local tribesmen, ‘so that the Romans would have no excuse for coming near us again’.⁴ The major monuments in any townscape were the Byzantine fort, built in general out of the ruins of the forum, and one or more fourth-or fifth-century churches, often built in suburban areas away from the old city centre. The cities had become villages, with parish churches, a small garrison, the occasional tax or rent collector but without a local hierarchy, a network of services or an administrative structure. Even in the capital, Carthage, where some new building had occurred after the Byzantine reconquest, the new quarters were filled with rubbish and huts by the early seventh century. From the mid seventh century the city suffered what has been described as ‘monumental melt-down’ - shacks clustered into the circus and the round harbour was abandoned.⁵

More than any other province of the empire, Africa had been dependent on the Mediterranean trading and tax system. African grain and olive oil supplied the city of Rome. Much of this was paid as tax, but it is clear that the ships that took the tax also transported African products for sale. The grain tax system was broken by the Vandal conquest of Carthage in 439, the volume of African exports began an inexorable decline and African products began to disappear from Mediterranean markets. The Byzantine reconquest of 533 did not reverse this downward trend. Western Mediterranean markets were now too poor to import much, while the eastern Mediterranean could survive without African products. By 700 African Red Slip was no longer manufactured. Africa had become marginal to the Byzantine Empire.⁶ More than anything this explains the failure of Byzantine troops in North Africa to repel the Arab forces: in the end, the imperial authorities simply did not care enough.

Byzantine North Africa may also have been weakened by political events. In 610 the governor Heraclius had used the army of the province to overthrow the emperor Phocas and claim the imperial title for himself. He then became involved in the struggle for survival against the Persian invasion. There is no sign that troops he had withdrawn from the province, probably the best troops in the area, were ever replaced.

Rural settlement suffered as much as the cities did. Archaeological surveys suggest a general abandonment of settled sites. For example, in the area surrounding the ancient city of Segermes (near modern Hammamet) there were eighty-three settled sites in the mid sixth century. In the next 150 years, half of these were abandoned. By 600 the city of Segermes itself was largely deserted and by the first part of the seventh century, just before the Arab conquest, only three sites in the area, all in high defensible positions, survived. This contraction of settlement happened not in some remote frontier area but in the heart of agricultural Africa Proconsularis, barely 50 kilometres from the capital and centre of government in Carthage.⁷

In Africa Proconsularis, settlement seems to have peaked in the mid sixth century, but in other areas the decline had begun earlier. In Tripolitania increasing insecurity led to the abandonment of many sites from the end of the fifth century, and there is evidence for the increase of semi-nomadic herding of animals at the expense of settled agriculture in Byzacena at the same period. In those settlements that did survive, there was a movement from open villages to communities dependent on gasr (sing. gasr, a dialect form of the classical Arabic qasr/qusr), fortified farmsteads, an architectural form that was con tinued with some variations from the third century until well after the Muslim conquest.⁸

We have, of course, no population statistics, no hard economic data, but the results of archaeological surveys and some excavation suggest that the first Muslim invaders found a land that was sparsely populated, at least by settled folk, and whose once vast and impressive cities had mostly been ruined or reduced to the size and appearance of fortified villages.

This land was peopled by at least three different groups. There were no doubt Greek-speaking soldiers and administrators in Carthage and other garrisons, but there is no reason to suppose that they were very numerous. Living alongside them, in what is now Tunisia, were the Afāriqa (sometimes Ufāriqa), who may have been ultimately descended from the Carthaginians and may still have spoken a Punic dialect as well as Latin. At the time of the Muslim conquest, they were a settled Christian population, with no tradition of military activity. Ibn Abd al-Hakam describes them as ‘servants [khādim] of the Romans, paying taxes to whoever conquered their country’.⁹

The vast majority of the population, however, were Berbers. The name Berber derives, of course, from the term barbari (foreigners) by which the Romans described these people, and it passes into Arabic as Barbar. The range of Berber habitation stretched from the borders of the Nile valley in the east as far as Morrocco in the west. They were in no sense politically united and belonged to a bewildering number of different tribes, but they were united by a common language, or family of languages, totally distinct from both Latin and Arabic. Narrative or administrative texts were seldom written in the language before the twentieth century and Berbers who wished to take part in government or acquire an education were obliged to learn Latin or Greek during the Roman period, or Arabic after the Muslim conquest.

Berber society can be described as a tribal society, but there were many different Berber lifestyles. Some Berbers, mostly in mountain areas, lived in tribal villages, practising agriculture. Others were transhumants, moving their flocks up the mountains in the summer and down in the winter. Still others were ‘pure nomads’, roaming the vast deserts of the northern Sahara. Classical sources provide the names of numerous Berber tribes in North Africa and, a few centuries later, the earliest Arabic sources do the same. Even given the differences in language and script it is difficult to detect much real continuity, and it seems that the period from the sixth to the eighth centuries saw widespread movement among the Berbers and the disappearance of some tribal groups and the emergence of others. In general, Berbers seem to have been moving from east to west in the century before the Arab conquests. This reality is perhaps reflected in the way later Arabic sources report that the main Berber groups came from the Arabian peninsula or Palestine.¹⁰ There is no real evidence for this; indeed, the fact that Berber is not a Semitic language suggests that this is unlikely, but it may reflect a memory of these western migrations. The Laguatan (Luwāta) moved from the Barqa area west into Tripolitania during the sixth century¹¹ and drove the Byzantine governor out of Leptis Magna in 543.¹² They were followed by the Hawāra, another Berber group moving west from Cyrenaica. The process of taghrība, the drive to the west, used of the movements of Arab tribes in the eleventh century, seems to have had precedents among the Berbers of the sixth and early seventh centuries.

The conquest of North Africa seems to have begun as a natural follow-on to the conquest of Egypt. Our information about the first raids comes entirely from the Egyptian chronicler Ibn Abd al-Hakam, whose narrative is used by all later sources. It was probably in the summer of 642, very shortly after the final surrender of Alexandria to the Muslims, that Amr led his troops west.¹³ The journey does not appear to have been a difficult one and the army seems to have moved fast and without encountering any real opposition until they reached Barqa. The Byzantine garrison, accompanied by some local landowners, withdrew before them and retired to the coastal port of Tokra (ancient Tauchira), from where they later left by sea. Most of the population of the city seem to have been Luwāta Berbers,¹⁴ and it was with them, not with any Byzantine authority, that Amr made peace in exchange for a tribute (jizya) of 13,000 dinars. The treaty is said to have included the somewhat bizarre provision that the people could sell their sons and daughters into slavery to raise the money. This may point to the beginning of the massive exploitation of Berbers as slaves that was characteristic of the first century of Muslim rule in North Africa. It was also agreed that no Muslim tax collectors should enter the area and that the people of Barqa themselves would take the tribute to Egypt when they had collected it.

Amr then led his men around the Gulf of Sirte, bypassing Tokra, to Tripoli. Here they encountered more serious resistance. The Byzantine garrison held out for a month. Ibn Abd al-Hakam recounts how the end came in one of those anecdotes that enliven the Arab narratives without encouraging any belief in their credibility. The story goes that one day one of the Arabs besieging the city went out hunting with seven companions. They went round to the west of the city and, becoming separated from the main bulk of the army and overcome by the heat, they decided to return along the seashore. Now the sea came up to the walls of the city and Roman ships were drawn right up to the walls of their houses in their anchorage. The Arab and his companions noticed that the sea had retreated a little from the walls and that there was a gap between the water and the walls. They made their way through it as far as the main church, where they raised the cry ‘Allhu akbar!’ The Romans panicked and fled to their ships with what they could carry, hoisted sail and fled. Amr, seeing the chaos, led his army into the city, which was then pillaged.¹⁵ There is no evidence of Arab occupation at this stage and the city probably reverted to Byzantine control when the Muslim forces left.

Amr was soon off again, leading his men west to Sabra (Sabratha). Here the local people, imagining that Amr was far away and occupied with the siege of Tripoli, had dropped their defences. The city was taken and plundered. Soon after this Leptis Magna (Labla) also fell into Arab hands. Amr then returned to Egypt, no doubt well pleased with the booty he and his followers had amassed. It had been a great raid, but it was not a conquest. Only in Barqa did Amr leave any sort of presence by imposing taxes and appointing a governor, Uqba b. Nāfi, who was to become the hero of of the Muslim conquest of North Africa and whose name, like that of Khālid b. al-Walīd in Iraq and Syria, was to go down in history and legend as an example of military leadership and derring-do.

The dismissal of Amr from the governorship of Egypt in 645 (see p. 164) meant that there was a pause in Arab operations. It did not last long. In 647 the caliph Uthmān sent a new army to Egypt to help in the African campaign. A list of the composition of the army suggests that it numbered between 5,000 and 10,000, mostly recruited, like the majority of the Arabs who had originally conquered Egypt, from south Arabian tribes.¹⁶ They were commanded by the new governor of Egypt, Abd Allāh b. Sa^cd b. Abī Sarh. The expedition moved fast along the North African coast into what is now southern Tunisia. They do not seem to have wasted time trying to retake Tripoli. The Byzantine forces in the area were commanded by Gregory, the exarch of Africa. He seems to have decided to move from the traditional capital at Carthage and base himself at Sbeitla in southern Tunisia, probably so that he could meet up with Berber allies and oppose the invaders more effectively. The two armies met outside the city. The Byzantines were heavily defeated and, according to Arabic sources, Gregory was killed in the battle, though according to Theophanes and other Christian sources, he escaped and was later rewarded by the emperor.

This was the only major military encounter between the Muslims and the Byzantine forces in North Africa. It is interesting to note that Gregory made no attempt to use the Byzantine fortresses constructed in the area, but chose to encounter the enemy in an open field battle. After this defeat, what remained of the imperial army seems to have retreated to Carthage and left the Arabs and the Berbers to fight for control of the countryside.

For almost twenty years after this Arab forces made no extended attempt to make more permanent conquests in North Africa. It is probable that Barqa and Cyrenaica remained under Muslim rule in this period, but that seems to have been the limit of expansion. Intermittent raids by Arab-Egyptian leaders using Egyptian troops were made into Tripolitania and the Fezzan but the armies always returned to their bases after seizing as much booty as they could.

During this long period, only Uqba b. Nāfi seems to have maintained a vision of doing anything more than short-term raiding. In central Algeria, where the mountains of the north gradually flatten out and meet the fringes of the Sahara, lies the little town of Sidi Okba, built around an ancient shrine, still visited by pilgrims, hoping for the baraka (blessing) that can be acquired from coming close to a great saint. The term Sidi comes from the classical Arabic sayyidī, meaning ‘my lord’: it is this Arabic word which gave the title El Cid to the Castillian hero. The Okba is Uqba b. Nāfi al-Fihri, the man credited in historical record and popular imagination with bringing Islamic rule to the Maghreb. He is the only one of the great early Muslim commanders whose grave is still honoured in this way. He also had a claim to be a Companion of the Prophet, if only in the sense that he had met Muhammad when he was a small child. This gave him immense prestige in the eyes of posterity. Born in Mecca towards the end of the Prophet’s life, Uqba came from Muhammad’s own tribe, Quraysh, but from a different sub-group, the Fihr. His background in the urban aristocracy of Mecca was typical of that of the men who formed the elite of the early Islamic state and led its armies. He was the only Companion to have played an important role in the conquest of Algeria and Morocco, and he can be said to have brought the baraka of the Prophet himself to this part of North Africa. In addition, he was the only important member of Quraysh to have fought there, which also contributed to his status and reputation. To cap it all, Uqba became a martyr when he and his small band of warriors were confronted by a much larger Berber army in 683 and he himself was killed.

Uqba owed his initial rise to power to the fact that his maternal uncle was none other than Amr b. al-Ās, the conqueror of Egypt. It was only natural that Amr should entrust his able and ambitious young nephew with important roles. Uqba soon showed his appetite for adventure. He joined in Amr’s first campaign to Cyrenaica in 642 and distinguished himself by leading a raiding party to the oasis of Zuwayla, to the south of Tripoli. We hear of him raiding as far away as Ghadāmis, deep in the Libyan desert, and, perhaps more importantly, establishing links with the Luwāta Berbers in the Tripoli area.¹⁷ According to the Arab geographer Yāqūt, Uqba ‘had remained in the area of Barqa and Zuwayla from the days of Amr b. al-Ās and he gathered around him the Berbers who had converted to Islam’.¹⁸

In 670 the Caliph Mu^cāwiya appointed Uqba as governor of the land under Muslim rule in North Africa under the overall control of the governor of Egypt.¹⁹ He decided to launch a campaign to conquer Ifrīqīya (that is roughly modern Tunisia) and bring it firmly under Muslim rule. With his long experience in the area, Uqba would have known that it was a good moment to strike. The Byzantine administration was weakening by the day. The Arabs were attacking Constantinople itself and all the resources of the empire were required to defend it. Just as dangerous was an outbreak of that internal dissent which had undermined the empire so often before. Emperor Constantine IV (668-88) was faced by a pretender to his throne in Sicily and had been forced to withdraw troops to combat him. The Romans, however, were not the real challenge: it was conquering or working with the Berbers which was to be the crucial issue.

Uqba arrived in southern Tunisia with an army largely drawn from the Arabs of Egypt. He is said to have had 10,000 Arab horsemen with him and the numbers were swelled by Berbers, probably mostly from the Luwāta tribe, who had already converted to Islam. His first objective was to establish a military base in the heart of Ifrīqīya. The story of the foundation of the city of Qayrawān is told by the thirteenth-century geographer Yāqūt working from older sources now lost to us.

He went to Ifrīqīya and besieged its cities, conquering them by force and putting the people to the sword. A number of Berbers converted to Islam at his hand and Islam spread among them until it reached the lands of Sudan.^h Then Uqba gathered his companions [ashb] and addressed them saying, ‘The people of this country are a worthless lot; if you lay into them with the sword, they become Muslims but the moment your back is turned, they revert to their old habits and religion. I do not think it would be a good idea for the Muslims to settle among them but I think it would be better to build a [new] city here for the Muslims to settle in.’

Uqba went on: ‘I have only chosen this place because it is well away from the sea and Roman ships cannot reach it and destroy it. It is well inland.’ Then he ordered his men to get building, but they complained that the scrub was full of lions and vagabonds and that they were afraid for their lives and refused to do it. So Uqba collected the members of his army who had been Companions of the Prophet, twelve of them, and cried out, ‘O you lions and vermin, we are Companions of the Prophet of God, so leave us and if we find any of you here we will kill them!’ Then the people witnessed the most extraordinary sight, for the lions carried their cubs and the wolves carried their young and the snakes carried their offspring and they left, one group after another. Many Berbers were converted to Islam as a result of this.

He then established the government house and the houses for the people around it and they lived there for forty years without ever seeing a snake or a scorpion. He laid out the mosque but was uncertain about the direction of the qibla and was very worried. Then he slept; and in the night heard a voice saying, ‘Tomorrow, go to the mosque and you will hear a voice saying “Allhu akbar”. Follow the direction of the voice and that will be the qibla God has made pleasing for the Muslims in this land’. In the morning he heard the voice and established the qibla and all the other mosques copied it.²⁰

With all its miraculous trappings, this foundation myth still reveals a good deal about the motivation for the founding of the city. It was to be a permanent garrison for the Muslims in this area. The site was chosen because there were no earlier buildings there. Different accounts also stress the importance of grazing in the area.²¹ It was well away from the coast. The Romans were still considered to be a threat from the sea, if not on land. Founding the city was quite simple. It required only the laying out of the mosque, the government house and the plots on which people could build their houses. There is no evidence that the Arab authorities constructed markets, baths, funduqs or any other public building. Despite its modest beginnings, Qayrawān thrived. Alone of all the garrison towns erected by the Arabs in the immediate aftermath of the conquests, it has remained an inhabited city on the same site down to the present day: in Iraq, old Basra is a hardly visible ruin on the edge of the desert, old Kūfa has disappeared, Fustāt in Egypt is a deserted archaeological site and rubbish tip and Merv in Khurasan a vast desolate ruin field. Qayrawān, by contrast, is a charming old town, redolent with Muslim antiquity.

The new governor, Abū’l-Muhājir, was not an Arab at all but a mawla ū (freedman) of Uqba’s superior, the governor of Egypt. He may have been of Coptic, Greek or even Berber origin. He brought with him new troops from Egypt who may also have been non-Arabs, and when he arrived in Ifrīqīya he established himself outside Qayrawān, perhaps because he knew that many of the inhabitants remained loyal to his predecessor.²² The new governor’s first priority was to win over the most powerful Berber leader in the Maghreb. Kusayla (also Kasīla) was ‘king of the Awraba Berbers’ with a domain that stretched from the Aurès in western Algeria to Volubilis in the plains of Morocco. Kusayla and probably many of his followers were Christians who had had good relations with the Romans. Abū’l-Muhājir confronted him at his power base in Tlemcen and succeeded in converting him to Islam and winning him over to the Muslim cause. Kusayla came to live with the governor in his base outside Qayrawān. This brilliant strategic alliance meant that Abū’l-Muhājir was now free to attack Carthage. He set up a blockade in 678 and though the city did not fall at this time, Roman rule was now confined to Carthage and its immediate surroundings.

As often in the history of the Arab conquests, events were shaped by changes in the government of the caliphate as much as by events on the campaign. In 680 the caliph Mu^cāwiya died and his son and successor Yazīd I decided to reappoint Uqba to his old command. Now it was Abū’l-Muhājir’s turn to be kept in chains as Uqba returned in triumph. His reappearance marked an important change of policy. His predecessor’s conciliatory attitude to the Berbers was sharply reversed. Kusayla joined his patron and ally in chains and Uqba prepared for his last great adventure.

According to one Arab chronicle, Uqba hardly paused to draw breath in Qayrawān.²³ He left his son in charge of the troops there, saying ‘I have sold myself to God most high,’ and, expressing his doubts that he would ever see them again, he set out west, to lands no Muslim forces had ever visited. He and his small army moved fast through the plateaux that lie to the south of the coastal mountains. His first encounter was at Bāghāya at the foot of the Aures mountains, where he defeated a contingent of Romans and captured a large number of horses. He then went west to Monastir. The defenders came out to challenge him and the fighting was fierce but ‘God gave him victory’. The Muslim forces do not seem to have taken the city but collected a lot of booty before moving on to Tahert, where Berbers and Byzantines awaited him. Once more the fighting was fierce and once more the Muslims triumphed.

The expeditionary force pressed on. One has the impression of a band of men, perhaps a few thousand strong, moving quickly through a largely empty landscape. There is no record of any resistance until they reached Tangier. Tangier was one of the very few urban settlements in what is now Morocco. According to the thirteenth-century historian Ibn Idhārī it was one of the oldest cities of the Maghreb, but, he goes on, ‘the ancient city, the one mentioned in accounts of Uqba’s raid, has been buried by the sand and the present city stands above it on the coast: if you dig in the ruins you can find all sorts of jewels’.²⁴ Tangier was governed by the mysterious Julian, who later plays an important part in the history of the first Muslim invasion of Spain. His main concern seems to have been to get rid of Uqba as quickly as possible, and so he dissuaded him from attempting to cross the straits to Spain and instead encouraged him to go down the Atlantic coast of Morocco.

His next stop was the city of Walīla. In contrast with Tangier, we know quite a lot about Walīla at this time. Under the name of Volubilis it had been one of the most important cities of Mauretania in Roman times. Although imperial government had effectively withdrawn in the third century, 400 years before Uqba’s raid, it had retained an urban aspect and at least part of the old city area was still inhabited. Although most of the population were probably Berbers, and they certainly lived in Berber-style houses, the sixth-century tombstones show that they had Roman-style names and titles.²⁵ Once again, Uqba is said to have defeated the local Berbers but moved on quickly. He was now heading south across the flat plains of Morocco towards the Atlas mountains. It would seem that he crossed the mountains to the Wadi Dra in pursuit of some fleeing Berbers and then came back to besiege the town of Aghmāt, near where Marrakesh stands today. The town was inhabited by Christian Berbers, and it seems to have been one of the few places that Uqba took by force.

He now penetrated into the Atlas again, following the passes that led down to the fertile lands of the Wadi Sūs, which runs between the High Atlas and the more barren Anti-Atlas mountains down to the sea near Agadir. This was the land the Arabs called Sūs al-Aqsā, furthest Sūs. It had never been conquered by the Romans and it was to mark the final frontier of Muslim rule for centuries to come. In contrast to many of the areas Uqba had passed through, Sūs seems to have been densely populated by Berber tribes living in mountain villages, as they do to this day. They put up some stiff resistance to this band of marauders. Uqba had some successes, and when he conquered the little town of Naffīs he is said to have founded a mosque there, probably more a votive offering for his victories rather than as the place of worship for a Muslim community. In other places he was less successful and a ‘Place of Martyrs’ (mawd al-shuhad) and another ‘Cemetery of Martyrs’ (maqbarat al-shuhadā) recorded for posterity the places where his companions fell in combat.

It was at the end of his raid in the Sūs that Uqba reached the Atlantic. The moment has passed into legend. He is said²⁶ to have ridden his horse into the sea until the water came up to its belly. He shouted out, ‘O Lord, if the sea did not stop me, I would go through the lands like Alexander the Great [Dhū’l-Qarnayn], defending your faith and fighting the unbelievers.’ The image of the Arab warrior whose progress in conquering in the name of God was halted only by the ocean remains one of the most arresting and memorable in the whole history of the conquests.

From the western edge of the continent, he made his way back east to the Aurès mountains. Here he divided his army, allowing many of his troops to go home. He kept by him a small force with the intention of conquering Tubna in the Zāb. There he came up against a large army led by Kusayla, who had escaped from his enforced confinement in Qayrawān. He had now repudiated his earlier alliance with the Muslims and had established himself once again as leader of the Berber resistance. It seems to have been a short and unequal struggle and Uqba found the martyrdom to which he is said to have aspired.

Uqba’s expedition to the west remains one of the most important foundation myths of the Muslim Maghreb. In practical terms, however, the results were fairly meagre. He is said to have been reluctant to besiege fortified strongholds, preferring to raid further and further in the deserted lands of the west.²⁷ When he returned, he left no garrisons in the places he had ‘conquered’ and no arrangements for the collecting of tribute or taxes. Apart from the mosque at Qayrawān itself, just two mosques in Sūs and the Wadi Dra are attributed to him²⁸ and there is no evidence that either of them was a lasting and substantial structure. There was, however, a more sinister side to his exploits. He is said to have acquired human booty in the form of young Berber girls, ‘the likes of which no one in the world had ever seen’.²⁹ They could fetch 1,000 gold dinars in the slave markets of the Middle East and were much favoured by the elite: the mother of the great Abbasid caliph Mansūr (754-75) was one such Berber girl, captured at about this time. This slave trade was to continue through much of the first half-century of Muslim rule in North Africa and provoked bitter resentments among the newly Islamized Berbers.

The defeat and death of Uqba might have meant the end of the Arab presence in the Maghreb. His aggressive expedition had united most of the main Berber tribes to oppose the Arab invaders. They came together under the leadership of Kusayla, who decided to march on Qayrawān. In the city there was confusion and despair. Men gathered in the mosque to decide what they should do. There were those, like Zuhayr b. Qays, who were determined to hold out and spoke the language of martyrdom: ‘God has bestowed martyrdom on your friends and they have entered the garden of paradise. Follow their example!’ Others were unconvinced, saying that they should retreat to the safety of the east. Despite the stirring words about sacrifice, the majority decided to withdraw and Zuhayr, finding that only his own family had stayed with him, followed the rest, halting only when he reached his palace in Barqa.³⁰

The victorious Kusayla now occupied the city Uqba had founded. Here he established himself as ‘amir of Ifrīqīya and the Maghreb’, giving guarantees of security to those Muslims who wished to remain and perhaps collecting taxes from them, a neat reversal of roles. For about four years (684-8) Kusayla ruled in Qayrawān, holding sway over the interior while the Byzantines still held out in Carthage as their fleet patrolled the coastline, seeking to sustain their remaining outposts and prevent the Muslims attacking Sicily.

In part the weakness of the Arabs can be explained by the chaos that engulfed the caliphate after the death of Yazīd I in 683. Even after the accession of Abd al-Malik as Umayyad caliph in 685, it was some years before the Muslims were in any position to try to re-establish their position in Tunisia. In 688 Abd al-Malik in Syria now ordered the appointment of Zuhayr, the idealist holy warrior, to lead an expedition from Tripoli to retake Qayrawān. One source says that his force consisted of just 4,000 Arabs and 2,000 Berbers.³¹ They seem to have reached Qayrawān without meeting any opposition. As they approached the city, Kusayla received word and decided to withdraw. The city was at this stage unwalled so it offered little protection. He was also concerned that the Muslims still resident there might form a fifth column and he wanted to be near the mountains in case things went wrong. He encamped at a place called Mims on the edge of the Aurès mountains. It was here that Zuhayr’s army defeated and killed him. As so often, it is difficult to see reasons for the military success of the Muslim forces over what was probably a much larger army, well acquainted with the terrain. We can only observe that, once again, when it came to crucial battles, the Muslim forces proved superior.

While the Byzantines do not seem to have offered Kusayla any military support in his final conflict, their fleet was still a force to be reckoned with along the Mediterranean coast. They now launched an attack, which seems to have been intended to divert the attentions of the Muslims to Cyrenaica, and Zuhayr, professing an ascetic distaste for political power and governorship, was obliged to lead his men back east to counter the threat. He found that the Byzantines had now occupied Barqa, which had been in Muslim hands since the first expedition of Amr b. al-Ās half a century before. As he tried to dislodge them, he died as a martyr and his small army was defeated.

The death of Zuhayr at Barqa was the low point in the Muslims’ attempt to conquer North Africa, but all that was about to change. By 694 the vigorous and effective Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik had defeated all his numerous enemies within the lands of Islam. He now had troops to spare, troops who might appreciate the opportunities of booty and plunder to keep them loyal. There were other good reasons for reopening campaigns in North Africa. If Cyrenaica was in enemy hands, Egypt itself would be vulnerable to attack. Besides, the Muslims had never yet surrendered control over lands they had once conquered; no one who claimed to be the Commander of the Faithful could allow that to happen without putting up a strong resistance.

The caliph appointed Hassān b. al-Nu^cmān al-Ghassānī as leader. Hassān was descended from the Ghassānid family, who had led the Arabs of the Syrian desert in the century before the Muslim conquest. Some members of the family had emigrated across the frontier to the Byzantine Empire but others had remained in Syria and been incorporated into the Umayyad elite among those Syrian Arab tribesmen who were the backbone of the regime. He was given the epithet of shaykh amīn, the trustworthy old man. He was to prove an able general and reliable administrator and was, in many ways, the real founder of Muslim North Africa. The caliph also supplied him with an army of 40,000 men, the largest Muslim force that had ever been seen in the area. This was to be a major expedition.

When he arrived in Ifrīqīya after the long march along the North African coast, Hassān decided that his first priority was to make an assault on Carthage, the centre of what remained of the Roman administration in the area. In some ways it is curious that Muslim forces had not attacked the city before. The most likely explanation for this apparent omission is that they realized that the Berbers were a much more formidable enemy and it was important to defeat them or come to some arrangement first. The Byzantines were permitted to shelter behind the walls of the city. The recent naval attack on Cyrenaica had demonstrated that they were still a threat, and Hassān decided to put an end to it once and for all.

The fall of Carthage was a major event because it meant the final, irretrievable end of Roman power in Africa. In military terms, it seems to have been more a peaceful occupation than a major siege. The city, on a wonderful seaside site overlooking the Gulf of Tunis, had been the pivot of Roman power on the North African coast for almost eight hundred years. At one stage it had been graced by numerous monumental buildings, and in late antiquity these had been supplemented by magnificent churches. In the second century AD it is thought to have had half a million inhabitants, and the Antonine Baths, of which fragments still remain, were the largest in the Roman world. The Arab chronicler Ibn Idhārī says that in his day (c. 1300) the city was still distinguished by its impressive remains, vast buildings and huge standing columns, which showed its importance to the people of the past. He adds that the inhabitants of nearby Tunis, just like modern tourists, still visited the site to contemplate the wonders and monuments that had survived the ravages of time.³² The Carthage of 698 was a mere shadow of the great city that had existed since long before the Roman conquest. According to Ibn Abd al-Hakam there were only a few feeble inhabitants.³³ The city seems to have been largely deserted, and there had been no significant new building for at least half a century. With the collapse of Mediterranean commerce, the city had lost its raison d’être, with only a few inhabitants and a small garrison now living among the vast ruins.

Not surprisingly, the city seems to have put up little resistance. According to some sources, inhabitants had already packed their possessions into ships and sailed away at night so that the city was actually deserted when the Arab armies entered.³⁴ We have no accounts of any formal siege and no accounts of the booty seized after the conquest, a further indication that the city may have been almost abandoned before the Arab conquest. After the Muslims were firmly in control, they made no effort to establish a garrison in the city or build a mosque. In fact, the centre of population moved from seaside Carthage to inland Qayrawān, just as in Egypt it shifted from seaside Alexandria to inland Fustāt.

The fall of Carthage may have marked the end of the Byzantine presence in North Africa but many Berber tribes remained defiant. The leadership of the Berber resistance was now seized by the mysterious figure of Kāhina (‘the Sorceress’). The reputation of this Berber Boudicca, with her wild, long hair and ecstatic prophecies, has survived through the centuries in history and legend as a symbol of resistance to Arab conquest and the norms of conventional Muslim life. Contemporary cultures hail her variously as champion of female emancipation and power, a heroine of Berber resistance and independence, a Jewish princess ‘who never abandoned her faith’ and a great African queen. She was certainly a Berber from a branch of the great Zanāta tribe, but is said to have married a Byzantine and to have been either Jewish or Christian by religion.

Under the standard of their queen Cahina the independent tribes acquired some degree of union and discipline; and as the Moors respected in their females the character of a prophetess, they attacked the invaders with an enthusiasm similar to their own. The veteran bands of Hassān were inadequate to the defence of Africa; the conquests of an age were lost in a single day; the Arabian chief [Hassān], overwhelmed by the torrent, retired to the confines of Egypt, and expected, for five years, the promised succours of the caliph.

The victorious prophetess assembled the Moorish chiefs, and recommended a measure of strange and savage policy. ‘Our cities,’ she said, ‘and the gold and silver which they contain, perpetually attract the arms of the Arabs. These vile metals are not the objects of our ambition; we content ourselves with the simple productions of the earth. Let us destroy these cities; let us bury in their ruins those pernicious treasures; and when the avarice of our foes shall be destitute of temptation, perhaps they will cease to disturb the tranquillity of a warlike people.’

The proposal was accepted with unanimous applause. From Tangier to Tripoli the buildings, or at least the fortifications, were demolished, the fruit trees were cut down, a fertile and populous garden was changed into a desert and the historians of a more recent age could discern the frequent traces of prosperity and the devastation on their ancestors. Such is the tale of the modern Arabians.³⁵

The reality behind the legend is difficult to assess. Kāhina’s power was centred on the Aurès mountain area. The Aurès are a massif in western Algeria rising to 2,300 metres at the highest point. The heart of the mountains is no more than 100 kilometres from west to east and 50 from north to south. To the north lies the fertile plateau; to the south the land slopes steeply to the fringes of the Sahara. The mountains are rugged and rocky and the deep valleys shelter isolated villages and palm groves. They were in an important strategic position. Although wild and inaccessible, they were only a few days’ march from the plains of Tunisia and the centres of Arab power. The massif also commanded the route from Tunisia to the rest of Algeria and Morocco: until the Aurès were subdued, or at least friendly, no Arab armies could safely operate in those areas. It was a perfect stronghold for those who wanted to resist invaders from outside, and it was always a centre of Berber resistance; the first shots of the Algerian rebellion against French rule were fired in the Aurès in 1954.

Our fullest account of Kāhina comes from the work of Ibn Idhārī. When Hassān entered Qayrawān he asked who was the most important king still surviving in Ifrīqīya, and he was told it was Kāhina in the Aurès mountains and that all the Romans went in fear of her and all the Berbers obeyed her. They added that if he killed her the whole Maghreb would fall into his hands. He set off to confront her. She reached the town of Bāghāya before him, driving out the Romans and destroying the city because she was afraid that Hassān wanted to go there and use it as a fortified base. He approached the mountains and set up camp in the Wadi Maskiyāna, and it was here that Kāhina came to meet him. He was encamped at the top of the wadi while her forces were lower down. The horsemen of both sides made contact one evening but Hassān refused to do battle that day and both armies spent the night in the saddle. The next day there was a long hard fight but in the end Hassān’s forces were put to flight. Kāhina pursued him, killing many, taking prisoners and driving him beyond Gābis. It seems that he took refuge in Cyrenaica, whence he wrote to the caliph, asking for reinforcements and explaining that the nations of the Maghreb had no political progamme or objective but were like freely grazing flocks. The caliph replied, telling him to remain where he was. The castles he and his men settled in near Barqa were still known in Ibn Idhārī’s day, six centuries later, as ‘Qusūr Hassān’ - Hassān’s palaces.

‘The Arabs only want Ifrīqīya for its cities and gold and silver while we only want agriculture and flocks. The only solution is the destruction [kharb] of the whole of Ifrīqīya so that the Arabs lose interest in it and they never return again!’ Her audience approved, so they went away to cut down their trees and destroy their fortresses. It has been said that Africa was shaded from Tripoli to Tangier, villages were continuous and there were cities everywhere, to the extent that no area of the world was more prosperous, or favoured: no area had more cities and fortresses [husn] than Africa and the Maghreb and it went on for two thousand miles like it. The Kāhina destroyed all of that. Many of the Christians and Africans left seeking to escape from what the Kāhina had done, going to Andalus [Spain] and the other islands in the sea.

The account is interesting. It shows a clear recognition in a medieval Arabic source of the environmental and urban degradation of the area which has struck modern archaeologists and other commentators. As such it is most unusual. Of course, as Gibbon noted, the account concertinas the changes of two or three centuries into as many years. It does, however, point to some fundamental truths. The sixth and seventh centuries certainly did see a decline in urban life and settled agriculture in the area, combined with a growth in pastoralism. The narrative also puts the Arab conquests in an unfamiliar light. Here it is the Arabs who appear as preservers of urban life and civilization, not, as often in modern literature, as its destroyers.

It seemed that Kāhina’s triumph was complete, and Hassān effectively abandoned Ifrīqīya. He soon received more troops from the caliph. He also attracted large numbers of Berbers who were, presumably, unwilling to accept Kāhina’s authority. It is said that 12,000 of them joined in the jihād. With these he marched to the region of Gābis where he defeated her forces. He then pursued her to her stronghold of the Aures. The final battle occurred north of the modern town of Tobna, probably in 698. We have very few details about the battle in which Hassān defeated and killed Kāhina, except that she is said to have foreseen the catastrophe that was to come upon her. With flowing hair, she uttered wild prophecies of disaster while, at the same time, sending her sons under safe conduct to the Arab camp.³⁶

The rebellion over, Hassān established himself once more in Qayrawān. Here he began to establish the norms of Umayyad administration, establishing a dīwān for the troops and enforcing the payment of the kharāj on the Christians. According to some sources, he founded the new town of Tunis, near Carthage. This was to be a naval base to prevent any more raids by the Byzantines, and 1,000 Coptic artisans were transported from Egypt to work there.³⁷ This marks the beginning of a permanent Muslim administration in Ifrīqīya and another stage in the conversion and recruitment of Berbers into the Muslim army of Africa, a process that was to be fundamental to the Muslim conquest of Spain.

In 704 Hassān was dismissed from his post. The loss of his job was the result of worsening relations between the caliph Abd al-Malik in Damascus and his brother, Abd al-Azīz b. Marwān, the governor of Egypt. Abd al-Azīz wanted to assert his authority, and the authority of Egypt, over North Africa. He also wanted to appoint his own protégé to the position of governor. The man he had in mind was Mūsā b. Nusayr. His origins were humble (see above, p. 105) and he was certainly not a member of one of the great elite families of the Umayyad caliphate. He was an intelligent and forceful man who worked his way up through his own abilities and the trust of his patron. He began his career in Syria, working for the Umayyad government, and first came to Egypt in 684. It was probably while he was there that he first came to the notice of Abd al-Azīz b. Marwān who set out to promote him and advance his career. By 704 Abd al-Azīz and Mūsā had been working together for twenty years; Abd al-Azīz wanted to reward him and knew that he was the ideal man to bring the unruly but potentially lucrative province of Ifrīqīya under his control.

He arrived to find the province in some disarray. Hassān had saved Arab Africa from the Berbers and expelled the Byzantines. Arab authority stopped at what is now the Tunisia-Algeria border. The lightning raid that Uqba b. Nāfi had led to the far west more than twenty years before had not resulted in any permanent settlement. The Berbers of the Aurès mountains and points west were still in a position to resist Arab authority.

Mūsā was determined to change that. Hassān left the province and made his way back to Damascus. When he reached Egypt, Abd al-Azīz despoiled him of all his possessions, even the presents he was taking to the new caliph, Walīd I. Meanwhile, in Africa, Mūsā was planning a great push west into the Maghreb. He began with an assault on the Berber fortress of Zaghwān, only a few kilometres from Qayrawān. It was soon taken and the first prisoners brought into the capital. Prisoners were the main object of his campaigns. In accounts of the Muslim conquests of cities and lands in the Middle East, we find constant references to the amount of booty taken - goods and chattels and, above all, money. And we are told how carefully it was divided among the conquerors. In the account of Mūsā’s campaigns in the Maghreb, it is the numbers of captives acquired and sent east which dominate the accounts. The numbers are exaggerated with uninhibited enthusiasm, and the Islamic jihād looks uncomfortably like a giant slave raid. Almost as soon as he arrived in Qayrawān, Mūsā sent two of his sons on separate raids in the Maghreb and each came back with 100,000 prisoners. When Mūsā wrote to his patron Abd al-Azīz that he was sending 30,000 captives as the government share of the booty, Abd al-Azīz assumed that there had been a mistake in the letter because the number was impossibly large. In fact the scribe had made a mistake, but in the opposite direction: the real figure should have been 60,000.³⁸

Mūsā himself soon set out to the west. At Sajūma he allowed the sons of Uqba b. Nāfi to take revenge for their father’s death and 600 old men of the district were put to the sword. He then went on to subdue the great Berber tribes, Huwwāra, Zanāta and Kutāma, taking prisoners and appointing new chiefs who would be loyal to the Muslim conquerors. There was very little resistance from the settled people because, as the chronicler noted, ‘most of the cities of Africa were empty [khālī] because of the hostility of the Berbers towards them’. ³⁹ Following in the footsteps of Uqba b. Nāfi, Mūsā pushed on to the west, pursuing Berber tribes who were fleeing before him. Unlike Uqba, however, he was not diverted from Tangier. He is said to have taken the city and installed his Berber freedman, Tāriq b. Ziyād, as governor, the first time, as far as we know, that a converted Berber enjoyed a position of command in the Muslim army. With him he left a garrison, mostly made up of newly converted Berbers with a few Arabs, ‘and he ordered the Arabs to teach the Berbers the Koran and to instruct them in the faith’. The garrison at Tangier were given lots to build on (ikhtatta li’l-muslimīn). The establishment of this Muslim outpost, just across the Straits of Gibraltar from the rich and inviting lands of southern Spain, was the prelude to invasion, and the garrison was to be the nucleus of the first Muslim force to invade the Iberian peninsula. Mūsā carried on to the south and west until eventually he reached Sūs and the Wadi Dra, taking hostages from the Masmūda tribe of the Atlas mountains. He then returned east to Qayrawān.

The Muslim conquest and settlement of Tangier was probably complete by 708. It was less than seventy years since the first Muslim troops had crossed from Egypt into Cyrenaica. During that time the war had ebbed and flowed in the most dramatic fashion. Throughout, the key had been the Arab control of Tunisia and their new capital at Qayrawān. By 708 there was a firmly established Arab administration in most of modern Tunisia. To the east both Cyrenaica and Tripolitania were under Muslim rule. The areas of modern Algeria and Morocco remained a real ‘wild west’. The only major Muslim presence in this area seems to have been the garrison at Tangier. In other areas, Muslim control depended on maintaining good relations with the Berber tribal leaders, who may have been converted to Islam, at least nominally. Muslim rule was to be challenged again, notably by great Berber rebellion in 740-41, but it was never to be overthrown.