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Libya
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By the time of his death in A.D. 632, the Prophet Muhammad and
his followers had brought most of the tribes and towns of the
Arabian Peninsula under the banner of the new monotheistic religion
of Islam (literally, "submission"), which was conceived of as
uniting the individual believer and society under the omnipotent
will of Allah (God). Islamic rulers therefore exercised both
temporal and religious authority. Adherents of Islam, called
Muslims ("those who submit" to the will of God), collectively
formed the House of Islam (Dar al Islam).
Within a generation, Arab armies had carried Islam north and
east from Arabia and westward into North Africa. In 642 Amr ibn al
As, an Arab general under Caliph Umar I, conquered Cyrenaica,
establishing his headquarters at Barce. Two years later, he moved
into Tripolitania, where, by the end of the decade, the isolated
Byzantine garrisons on the coast were overrun and Arab control of
the region consolidated. Uqba bin Nafi, an Arab general under the
ruling Caliph, invaded Fezzan in 663, forcing the capitulation of
Germa. Stiff Berber resistance in Tripolitania had slowed the Arab
advance to the west, however, and efforts at permanent conquest
were resumed only when it became apparent that the
Maghrib (see Glossary)
could be opened up as a theater of operations in the
Muslim campaign against the Byzantine Empire. In 670 the Arabs
surged into the Roman province of Africa (transliterated
Ifriqiya in Arabic; present-day Tunisia), where Uqba founded
the city of Kairouan (present-day Al Qayrawan) as a military base
for an assault on Byzantine-held Carthage. Twice the Berber tribes
compelled them to retreat into Tripolitania, but each time the
Arabs, employing recently converted Berber tribesmen recruited in
Tripolitania, returned in greater force, and in 693 they took
Carthage. The Arabs cautiously probed the western Maghrib and in
710 invaded Morocco, carrying their conquests to the Atlantic. In
712 they mounted an invasion of Spain and in three years had
subdued all but the mountainous regions in the extreme north.
Muslim Spain (called Andalusia), the Maghrib (including
Tripolitania), and Cyrenaica were systematically organized under
the political and religious leadership of the Umayyad caliph of
Damascus.
Arab rule in North Africa--as elsewhere in the Islamic world in
the eighth century--had as its ideal the establishment of political
and religious unity under a caliphate (the office of the Prophet's
successor as supreme earthly leader of Islam) governed in accord
with sharia (a legal system) administered by qadis (religious
judges) to which all other considerations, including tribal
loyalties, were subordinated. The sharia was based primarily on the
Quran and the
hadith (see Glossary)
and derived in part from Arab
tribal and market law.
Arab rule was easily imposed in the coastal farming areas and
on the towns, which prospered again under Arab patronage. Townsmen
valued the security that permitted them to practice their commerce
and trade in peace, while the Punicized farmers recognized their
affinity with the Semitic Arabs to whom they looked to protect
their lands; in Cyrenaica, Monophysite adherents of the Coptic
Church had welcomed the Muslim Arabs as liberators from Byzantine
oppression. Communal and representative Berber tribal institutions,
however, contrasted sharply and frequently clashed with the
personal and authoritarian government that the Arabs had adopted
under Byzantine influence. While the Arabs abhorred the tribal
Berbers as barbarians, the Berbers in the hinterland often saw the
Arabs only as an arrogant and brutal soldiery bent on collecting
taxes.
The Arabs formed an urban elite in North Africa, where they had
come as conquerors and missionaries, not as colonists. Their armies
had traveled without women and married among the indigenous
population, transmitting Arab culture and Islamic religion over a
period of time to the townspeople and farmers. Although the nomadic
tribes of the hinterland had stoutly resisted Arab political
domination, they rapidly accepted Islam. Once established as
Muslims, however, the Berbers, with their characteristic love of
independence and impassioned religious temperament, shaped Islam in
their own image, enthusiastically embracing schismatic Muslim
sects--often traditional folk religion barely distinguished as
Islam--as a way of breaking from Arab control.
One such sect, the Kharijites (seceders; literally, "those who
emerge from impropriety") surfaced in North Africa in the mideighth century, proclaiming its belief that any suitable Muslim
candidate could be elected caliph without regard to his race,
station, or descent from the Prophet. The attack on the Arab
monopoly of the religious leadership of Islam was explicit in
Kharijite doctrine, and Berbers across the Maghrib rose in revolt
in the name of religion against Arab domination. The rise of the
Kharijites coincided with a period of turmoil in the Arab world
during which the Abbasid dynasty overthrew the Umayyads and
relocated the caliphate in Baghdad. In the wake of the revolt,
Kharijite sectarians established a number of theocratic tribal
kingdoms, most of which had short and troubled histories. One such
kingdom, however, founded by the Bani Khattab, succeeded in putting
down roots in remote Fezzan, where the capital, Zawilah, developed
into an important oasis trading center.
After the Arab conquest, North Africa was governed by a
succession of amirs (commanders) who were subordinate to the caliph
in Damascus and, after 750, in Baghdad. In 800 the Abbasid caliph
Harun ar Rashid appointed as amir Ibrahim ibn Aghlab, who
established a hereditary dynasty at Kairouan that ruled Ifriqiya
and Tripolitania as an autonomous state that was subject to the
caliph's spiritual jurisdiction and that nominally recognized him
as its political suzerain. The Aghlabid amirs repaired the
neglected Roman irrigation system, rebuilding the region's
prosperity and restoring the vitality of its cities and towns with
the agricultural surplus that was produced. At the top of the
political and social hierarchy were the bureaucracy, the military
caste, and an Arab urban elite that included merchants, scholars,
and government officials who had come to Kairouan, Tunis, and
Tripoli from many parts of the Islamic world. Members of the large
Jewish communities that also resided in those cities held office
under the amirs and engaged in commerce and the crafts. Converts to
Islam often retained the positions of authority held traditionally
by their families or class in Roman Africa, but a dwindling, Latinspeaking , Christian community lingered on in the towns until the
eleventh century. The Aghlabids contested control of the central
Mediterranean with the Byzantine Empire and, after conquering
Sicily, played an active role in the internal politics of Italy.
Data as of 1987
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