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Mauritania
Index
Beginning with the Arab conquest of the western Maghrib in
the eighth century, Mauritania experienced a slow but constant
infiltration of Arabs and Arab influence from the north. The
growing Arab presence pressed the Berbers, who chose not to mix
with other groups, to move farther south into Mauritania, forcing
out the black inhabitants. By the sixteenth century, most blacks
had been pushed to the Senegal River. Those remaining in the
north became slaves cultivating the oases
(see Black Africans
, ch. 2).
After the decline of the Almoravid Empire, a long process of
arabization began in Mauritania, one that until then had been
resisted successfully by the Berbers. Several groups of Yemeni
Arabs who had been devastating the north of Africa turned south
to Mauritania. Settling in northern Mauritania, they disrupted
the caravan trade, causing routes to shift east, which in turn
led to the gradual decline of Mauritania's trading towns. One
particular Yemeni group, the Bani Hassan, continued to migrate
southward until, by the end of the seventeenth century, they
dominated the entire country. The last effort of the Berbers to
shake off the Arab yoke was the Mauritanian Thirty Years' War
(1644-74), or Sharr Bubba, led by Nasir ad Din, a Lemtuna
imam (see Glossary).
This Sanhadja war of liberation was, however,
unsuccessful; the Berbers were forced to abandon the sword and
became vassals to the warrior Arab groups.
Thus, the contemporary social structure of Mauritania can be
dated from 1674. The warrior groups or Arabs dominated the Berber
groups, who turned to
clericalism (see Glossary)
to regain a
degree of ascendancy. At the bottom of the social structure were
the slaves, subservient to both warriors and Islamic holy men.
All of these groups, whose language was Hassaniya Arabic, became
known as Maures. The bitter rivalries and resentments
characteristic of their social structure were later fully
exploited by the French.
Data as of June 1988
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