A History of Islamic Societies

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.

Tunisia

Tunisia by contrast had a deep history of centralized states. The Tunisian state from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries was essentially a reconstruction of a past form of centralized state based on an urbanized economy and relatively close political control over rural and pastoral populations. Although the regime of the eighth and ninth centuries had lapsed under the pressure of the Hilali invasions and economic decline, it was rebuilt with significant innovations by the Hafsid dynasty (1228–1574). Despite repeated phases of consolidation and disintegration, the Hafsids defined the institutional framework of Tunisian society until the modern era.