5.  North Africa

The Berbers were the ancient indigenous people of North Africa, west of Egypt. They were made up of many tribes. Berbers were gentle people who lived on agriculture and farming. They had managed to maintain their culture, their Hamitic languages, and self-governance during successive invasions of their land. They were colonized by the Phoenicians (who became the Carthaginians), followed by the Romans, the Vandals (one of the Germanic tribes that destroyed the Roman Empire), the Byzantines, and finally the Arabs. But Arabs destroyed Berbers.

In the 7th century, the Berbers lived in uneasy peace with the Byzantines, who ruled the coastal cities of North Africa, after defeating the Vandals a century before. The ancient city of Carthage was the Byzantine capital in Africa. Some Berbers were Christians, some were Jewish, and some adhered to their ancient polytheist religion. Before the end of the century the region faced a new adversary, the Arabs. Arabs defeated the traditional rivals of the Berbers, the Byzantines and driven them out from Africa. But it was a bad news. Arabs next concentrated on the Berbers. Arabs were nothing like earlier enemies. They poured out of the Arabian Peninsula and flattened everything in their wake. Arabs not only occupied land and demanded dominion over the people but they also obliterated history, culture and language and identity of the defeated race if they somehow survived.

At the time of the death of the Prophet Mohammed in 632, Muslims ruled only in Arabia. But within ten years of Prophet’s death, the Arab Muslims had achieved one of the most spectacular conquests in history. They conquered Palestine (635-636), Syria (638-640), and Egypt (639-642) from the Byzantines and first Iraq (635-637) and then Persia itself (637-642) from the Persians. Wherever they went, they killed male population and made the female population their concubines. Some people who survived these holocausts had the opportunity of getting forced to convert to Islam and become Arabic-speakers. The converted people forgot their language and identity and started considering themselves to be Arabs. This happened with Palestine (today’s Israel), Syria, Levant (today’s Jordan), Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and also partly with Sudan, and Somalia. This trend was reversed only in Persia, where the people, in spite of the brutal Arab conquest, re-asserted their pre-Islamic Persian language after three hundred years of Arab tyranny. But everywhere else the Arab not only Islamized but Arabized the population (Middle East and North Africa) permanently. Middle East and North Africa also got genetically converted to Arab descent through Arab males.

In the 680s the Arabs swept across North Africa from Egypt to the Atlantic. For some time the Byzantines clung to their coastal cities, as the Arab Jihadis in their tearing hurry to cover as much land as possible raced towards the Atlantic. When the Jihadi general Oqba ibn Nafi reached the Atlantic in Morocco, he rode into the sea and slashed at the water with his sword in frustration and said to have exclaimed that there were no more lands to conquer.

On his return in March  683 A.D., the haughty and cruel Oqba was defeated and slain by the Berbers. After this defeat, the Arab aggression paused for a decade but in 698 A.D. the Muslims finally took Carthage, evicting the Byzantine Christians completely from Africa. Now the Muslim aggressors faced their last and most stubborn enemy – the Berbers.

At the time of the Arab aggression, the Berbers were ruled by a Queen of Jewish descent. Her name was Kahina (also spelt Cahina). Kahina's name is also given variously as Dahiyah, Dahia, or Dhabba. The title Kahina meant Prophetess. The Encyclopedia Judaica  says that the term is derived from the old Hebrew "Kahin" ("soothsayer") while some other sources say that "Kahina" was derived from the Hebrew root of the modern Jewish term "Cohen". The Encyclopedia Judaica notes that Arabic authors, notably the major 14th century historian Ibn-Khaldun, say that Kahina and her tribe, the Jerawa of the Aures Mountains in eastern Algeria and Tunisia, were Jewish. Charles-André Julien, in his History of North Africa, notes that another writer gave Kahina "the picturesque appellation of the 'Berber Deborah'" (after Deborah, the judge of ancient Israel). Julien believes that Kahina 's resistance to the Arabs was both; Berber patriotism and Jewish faith. The history of Kahina remains controversial.

What is known is that soon after the Arab general Hassan ibn al Numan took Carthage from the Byzantines, Kahina's forces defeated him. Hassan retreated, probably all the way back to Egypt. Following his retreat, Kahina took Carthage and ruled most of Berber North Africa next twenty years.

According to Ibn-Khaldun, as she waited for the inevitable renewed Arab assault, Kahina carried out a brutal and disastrous policy. She declared that the Arabs wished to conquer North Africa only because of its wealth. She ordered Berbers who were still nomadic to destroy the cities, orchards, and herds of sedentary Berbers, to make North Africa a desert.

If Kahina actually made this amazing decision, she was tragically mistaken. The Arabs were determined to take North Africa regardless of its wealth or poverty, because their sole aim was to convert the people of the world to Islam and because North Africa was a gateway to Spain and Europe. This savage policy of city burning cost Kahina the support of city-dwelling Berbers.

In 702 A.D., Hassan again invaded the Berber lands and quickly defeated Kahina. Kahina died in the battle. There is another version which says she was captured and executed. Anyway her sons were converted to Islam. As was the practice of Arab Muslims, the captured males were killed. Women and children were captured and enslaved. Cities were destroyed. But this ruthlessness did not work so well with the Berbers.The advantage which the nomadic invaders like the Arabs had over settled city dwellers like the Persians and Romans did not hold for nomadic Berbers

Over the ages, settled civilizations are destroyed by nomadic and savage people. The same savage people slowly adopt civilized ways of the defeated settled people and they themselves become settled people to be destroyed by another nomadic people. This happens because the nomadic people had nothing to lose but their lives and the settled people become complacent in their invincibility over few centuries of domination and lose appetite for war. This theory seemed to account for many events in the ancient history including the fall of the Roman Empire to the Germanic Goth and Vandals and also for the swift Arab conquest of the Byzantines and Persians. But the Berbers were not totally settled people. Berbers did not give up. They put up a stubborn resistance against the Arabs, while pushing the Arabs back over and over again in the next few centuries. Even till today the conflict in Algeria is an expression of this Arab-Berber conflict.

But Arabs were also not a just savage nomadic people. Islam had made them devious, cruel and war maniac. In the face of repeated Berber counterattacks, the cruel Muslim marauder Hassan could not hold North Africa peacefully. During some Berber counterattacks, the Arab conquests of many years were lost in a single day; and the Arab chieftains, overwhelmed by the Berber torrent, repeatedly retired to the confines of Egypt, and appealed for succour from the caliph. The same rebellious Berber spirit was revived under the tyranny of Musa, the successor of Hassan; it was finally quelled by the repeated waves of bloodletting by Musa and his two sons. The ferocity of Berber rebellion can be gauged from the recorded fact that three hundred thousand Berbers were taken captives in the war with Berbers; sixty thousands of whom were sold for the profit of the public treasury. Thirty thousand of the Berber youth were forcibly conscripted in to the Muslim army to be used for the invasion of Spain. Rest were killed.

There are several references to the nature of Berber resistance in the translation by Franz Rosenthal. Ibn-Khaldun notes that the Berbers were given to rebellion and heresy under the Muslims, just as they had been under the Christian Byzantines, before the Muslim conquest. The Berbers continued to rebel and apostatized time after time. The Muslims massacred many of them. Centuries after Islam had been established among the Berber tribes, they continued reverting to their animistic practices and continued revolting and seceding. To merge Islam with their native animism, they adopted dissident [Kharajite] opinions many times.

Ibn Abi Zayd said that the Berbers in the Maghrib [North Africa] revolted twelve times and that Islam become firmly established among them only during the governorship of Musa ben Nusayr and thereafter. That is what is meant by the statement reported on the authority of 'Umar, that "Africa divides the hearts of its inhabitants." The statement refers to the great number of tribes and groups there, which causes them to be disobedient and unmanageable.

The Berber tribes in the West are innumerable. All of them are nomads and members of different tribal groups and families. Whenever one tribe is destroyed, another takes its place and is as refractory and rebellious as the former one had been. Therefore, it has taken the Arabs a long time to establish their dynasty in the land of Africa.

Arabs had another trick in their sleeve. In parallel,they were settling down in Berber land and were taking Berber wives. Fertile lands were grabbed. All facility, wealth, power and position were in the possession of the Arabs and few converts. Berbers were persecuted, conscripted and butchered for disciplining them. And gradually the Berbers accepted Islam. Those who still refused were annihilated or deported. Slowly a mixed race evolved from Arab male and their Beber wives/concubines. They were not only Muslim but also accepted Arabic names, Arabic language, Arabic culture and adopted the history of sandy plains of Asia and Africa. The present day Berbers are not the same Berbers who resisted Arabs. The Muslim Berbers are mixed race and  speak Arabic. They inherited savagery of the Arabs.

Today most of the Berbers have been converted to Islam. But some continue to practice their pre-Islamic nature worshipping religious practices in the remote vastness of the Sahara desert.The Berbers who once occupied the entire stretch of land along the coast of Libya, Tunisia through Algeria up to Morocco, have today been pushed into the vastness of the Sahara desert, in Southern Algeria, North-eastern Mali and North-Western Niger. The Berbers still continue to cling on in small clusters along the fertile coast, which has been largely occupied by the Arab-Berber mixed Muslim population.

Yet in spite of this dissolution of Berber identity in that of the Arabs, some of the Berber tribes still retain their original language, with the appellation and character of White Africans.The tradition of painting their faces is one such element. This is not prevalent among the Arabs.

After the defeat of the Berbers, the ancient polytheistic religions of North Africa disappeared. Most Berbers became Muslims. Many Berbers became Arabic-speakers; while some retained their own languages to be spoken in the privacy of their homes. Berbers were prominent among the Muslim conquerors of Spain. Berbers also joined the vicious trade of slavery. They became as ruthless and brutal as the original Arabs. Christianity disappeared in North Africa, west of Egypt. The Jews were more stubborn and persisted in a few areas, especially in the Atlas Mountains.

The Jewish presence in North Africa was revived by Christian liberation of Spain and Portugal in the late 15th and early 16th Centuries. After the completion of the Christian Reconquista of Spain in 1492, the Inquisition gave the Muslims and Jews of Spain the alternatives of conversion to Catholicism or expulsion. Large numbers of Spanish Jews, as well as most Spanish Muslims, immigrated to Africa.

Another dramatic foreign event ended the long Jewish presence in North Africa. The establishment of Israel in 1948 caused a rise in active anti-Semitism in North Africa. This, combined with the retreat of European colonialism and the independence of Libya, Tunisia, Morocco, and finally Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, led to a mass emigration of Jews. For the first time in about 2000 years, North Africa had almost no Jews.

But the tenacity and persistent opposition of Berbers effectively stopped Muslim progress to further South in Africa as well as deeper in Europe. One way Christendom should be thankful to the Berbers  that they had taken the full blast of Muslim aggression in the west and consumed the energy of Muslim hordes for several centuries by the time Europe was prepared and stopped Islam from getting west through crusades. In the process the Berbers lost their identity, history and even language.

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