Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: the medieval scene
- 2 Egypt: al-Misr
- 3 Ifriqiya and the Regencies
- 4 The Islamic Far West: Morocco
- 5 The western Sudan and upper Guinea
- 6 The central Sudan and lower Guinea
- 7 Nubia, Darfur and Wadai
- 8 The north-eastern triangle
- 9 The upper Nile basin and the East African plateau
- 10 The heart of Africa
- 11 The land of the blacksmith kings
- 12 From the Lualaba to the Zambezi
- 13 The approaches to Zimbabwe
- 14 The peoples of the South
- Epilogue
- Further reading
- Index
3 - Ifriqiya and the Regencies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: the medieval scene
- 2 Egypt: al-Misr
- 3 Ifriqiya and the Regencies
- 4 The Islamic Far West: Morocco
- 5 The western Sudan and upper Guinea
- 6 The central Sudan and lower Guinea
- 7 Nubia, Darfur and Wadai
- 8 The north-eastern triangle
- 9 The upper Nile basin and the East African plateau
- 10 The heart of Africa
- 11 The land of the blacksmith kings
- 12 From the Lualaba to the Zambezi
- 13 The approaches to Zimbabwe
- 14 The peoples of the South
- Epilogue
- Further reading
- Index
Summary
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Medieval Africa, 1250–1800 , pp. 32 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001