To the Arabs the Mediterranean lands west of Egypt were known collectively as the Maghrib (the West). The nearer part of it, comprising Tripolitania, Tunisia and eastern Algeria, was also known by the name of the former Roman province of Africa, arabised as Ifriqiya. The western Maghrib, comprising western Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania, was al-Maghrib al-Aqsa – the Far West. By the thirteenth century, Islam had been established in the Maghrib for more than five hundred years – so much so that the former Latin Christianity of the coast and its immediate hinterland had long ceased to exist. The Berber language had largely disappeared from the towns and coastal plains of the Mediterranean shore, and the use of Arabic was spreading rapidly even among the rural populations of the interior, thanks to the westward migration of Arab pastoralists in search of new grazing grounds for their sheep and camels. These last, often given the generic name of Banu Hilal, had begun their expansion from the Egyptian province of Cyrenaica during the eleventh and twelfth centuries by moving across the steppe country of Tripolitania and southern Tunisia, towards the Atlas foothills and the desert fringes to the south of them. By the fourteenth century their vanguard had reached the Atlantic seaboard of Morocco and Mauritania.