While the Muslim presence in Spain was being liquidated, Islamic societies in North Africa were entering a new stage of development. With the collapse of the Almohads, North Africa began to take on a new configuration of state and society. Although older claims to a “caliphal” type of religious authority were carried into the new era, with the exception of Libya, North African states increasingly moved toward the Saljuq (and Egyptian Ayyubid-Mamluk) type of Middle Eastern Islamic institutional structure. The new states would be based on client, slave, or mercenary armies and a small household bureaucracy but would depend on a governing coalition of tribal forces. The larger society would be organized into Sufi-led communities. Inspired by developments in the eastern Muslim world and Spain, Sufism took root throughout North Africa in the twelfth and later centuries. The states of the post-Almohad era would have to develop a new relationship with the religious notables. Some of them would surrender their claims to direct religious authority; all would accept the ʿulamaʾ and Sufis as the bearers of Islamic legitimacy and as intermediaries in the government of their societies. In different forms, they implemented the Eastern patronage concept of a Muslim state.

Libya

Libya is an exception to this pattern. Until the Ottoman occupation, Libya was a territory without a history. The invasions of the seventh century helped to Arabize and Islamize the population but did not establish a central regime. Almohad authority was nominal. The Mamluks of Egypt had alliances with tribes in Cyrenaica, which allowed them to claim that they were suzerains of the country. This claim was inherited by the Ottomans. They had conquered Egypt in 1517 and Tripoli in 1551. From 1551 until 1711 Tripoli was governed by Ottoman pashas and janissary soldiers. Ottoman rule established the first state in the territories of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and the Fezzan, which make up modern Libya.