The Berber rebellion of the 740s occurred in many of the same areas where there had been uprisings against the Byzantines two centuries before, but now the main Berber actors were not just Christians, but also Kharijite Muslims, who adhered to a form of Islam that opposed the monopolization of power by one clan and sought to make the post of caliph open to all and its holder accountable to his subjects. This suited well a people who felt little in common with the remote caliphs of Damascus and their Arab agents, and who were accustomed to chiefs of more humble standing. Their principal motive was probably still regional pride and dislike of domination by outsiders, as it had been in Byzantine times, though control of the lucrative trade in gold and slaves with sub-Saharan Africa also played a part. The Arab conquest was still recent and the Arab presence principally limited to garrisons, and so much of the resident population would have viewed the Arabs as an alien occupying force and resented their meddling in local affairs. Though brief, notices in Christian chronicles do seem to confirm this sense of difference and remoteness: “Many Saracens [i. e., Arabs] were killed by the Romans [i. e., natives/non-Arabs] of Africa” and “the people of Africa rebelled and killed their governor and every Muslim [i. e., Arab] there.”
Our earliest Muslim account of the uprising says that the two initiators, one Berber and one Byzantine African, both converts to Islam, led coordinated revolts in August 740, at a pre-arranged time, in the region of Tangiers. At the first major confrontation, in November of that year, the revolutionaries annihilated a large Arab force and killed a considerable number of the local Arab leaders, which led to this engagement being dubbed the Battle of the Nobles. A new governor of Africa was hastily dispatched from Damascus and the following year he led a sortie against the Berbers, now under the command of a chief of the Zanata tribe, who were “naked and wearing nothing but undergarments.”8 Once more, however, the Arabs were defeated and the new governor was slain. A certain 'Abd al-Wahid ibn Yazid of the Berber Hawwara tribe, who had been acclaimed as their caliph, wiped out another Arab force during the autumn of 741. The caliph Hisham appreciated that the situation was becoming critical, and so he sent his most experienced general, Hanzala ibn Safwan of the powerful Syrian tribe of Kalb, to serve as the new governor of Africa with just one mandate: crush the insurrection. He arrived at Qayrawan in March 742 with a huge army and immediately set about arming all adult males in the city so as to bolster his military strength even further. 'Abd al-Wahid approached Qayrawan a couple of months later, but though he and his men put up a fierce fight, killing many of their enemy, they were outnumbered and Hanzala remorselessly pushed home his advantage until all opponents had died or fled.
Although the dream of a unified Berber caliphate in Africa was shattered in 742, the region continued to drift away from central control from this time onward. Numerous local dynasties popped up across the region, some of them very long-lived and many of them incorporating ingredients from Berber culture. For example, the Barghawata polity on Morocco’s Atlantic coast endured for over four centuries (744-1058); they allegedly had their own Berber holy family beginning with the prophet Salih, used a Berber version of the Qur’an, and held to a number of Berber dietary and magical practices.9 This process culminated in the emergence of the two most powerful Berber kingdoms, the Almoravids (I062-II47) and the Almohads (1147-1248), who came closest to realizing the idea of a Berber Empire, at one point holding the entire African littoral from Benghazi to the Atlantic and the southern part of Spain.
World History
