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Libya
ISLAM AND THE ARABS
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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