Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0372/03722.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 38KB | 606 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03722}
$Pretitle{289}
$Title{Tunisia
Chapter 1B.   Islam and the Arabs}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Robert Rinehart}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{arab
tunisia
tunis
maghrib
government
ottoman
ifriquiya
islam
political
arabs}
$Date{1986}
$Log{Ancient Roman Capital*0372201.scf
Figure 4.*0372202.scf
}
Country:     Tunisia
Book:        Tunisia, A Country Study
Author:      Robert Rinehart
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1986

Chapter 1B.   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, the
state, and the society under the omnipotent will of God. Islamic rulers
therefore exercised both temporal and religious authority. Adherents of Islam
were called Muslims ("those who submit" to the will of God).

     Within a generation Arab armies had carried Islam north and east from
Arabia in the wake of their rapid conquests and westward across North Africa
as far as Tripoli. There, stiff Berber resistance slowed the Arab advance,
and efforts at permanent conquest were resumed only when it became apparent
that the Maghrib 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 as Ifriquiya in Arabic), where their
commander, Uqba ben Nafi, founded the city of Kairouan as a military base
about 150 kilometers south of Byzantine-held Carthage. The selection of this
encampment in the midst of a plain, separated from both the Roman cities on
the coast and the mountains in Numidia, where the Berber tribes continued
their stubborn resistance, was a deliberate act of policy by Uqba, who
reportedly announced that he was founding a city that would serve "as a strong
point for Islam until the end of time." The name chosen for the new Arab
capital, derived from the Persian word karwan (caravan), also suggests that
Uqba was aware of the commercial possibilities of the site located at a
crossroads of the trade routes.

     Carthage fell in 693, but the last pockets of Byzantine resistance on the
North African coast were wiped out only after the Arabs had obtained naval
supremacy in the Mediterranean. The Arabs cautiously probed the western
Maghrib, and in 710 the governor of Ifriquiya, Musa ibn Nusair, invaded
Morocco and carried 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) and the
Maghrib, which had been conquered within 50 years of the founding of Kairouan,
were organized under the political and religious leadership of the Umayyad
caliph of Damascus.

     Arab rule in Ifriquiya-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 a legal system (sharia) 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 sayings of the Prophet and was derived in part from Arab tribal
and market law.

     Arab rule was easily imposed on the towns, which prospered again under
their new patronage, and in the coastal farming areas. People in the former
valued the security that permitted them to practice their commerce and trade
in peace, while the punicized farmers recognized an affinity with the Arabs to
whom they looked to protect their lands against the nomadic Berber tribesmen.
The Arabs abhorred the tribal Berbers as barbarians, while the Berbers often
saw the Arabs only as an arrogant and brutal soldiery bent on collecting
taxes. Communal and representative Berber institutions also contrasted sharply
and frequently clashed with the personal and authoritarian government that the
Arabs had adopted under Byzantine influence.

     The Arabs formed an urban elite in Ifriquiya, where they had come
originally 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 an extended period to the
townsmen and farmers; but conversion to Islam was also rapid among the nomadic
tribes of the hinterland that stoutly resisted Arab political domination. Many
Berber converts were opportunists, however, and tribes that accepted Islam
under Arab pressure often abandoned it once the intimidating Arab tax
collectors and slave traders had moved on. Some tribes had records of repeated
apostasy and reconversion. Once established as Muslims, however, the Berbers,
with their characteristic love of independence and impassioned religious
temperament, shaped Islam in their own image. They embraced schismatic Muslim
sects-often traditional folk religion barely disguised as Islam-as a way of
breaking from Arab control with the same enthusiasm that their Christian
forebears had accepted Donatism in opposition to Rome.

     The heretical Kharidjite movement surfaced in Morocco as a revolt against
the Arabs in 739. The Berber Kharidjites (seceders; literally, those who
emerge from impropriety) proclaimed their belief that any suitable Muslim
candidate could be elected caliph without regard to his race, station or
descent from the Prophet. Taking a position directly paralleling that of the
Donatists, the Kharidjites maintained that a sinner could no longer be a
believer because faith was not possible without purity, and they thereby
regarded all other Muslims as heretics. The attack on the Arab monopoly of the
religious leadership of Islam was explicit in Kharidjite doctrine, and Berbers
across the Maghrib rose in revolt in the name of religion against Arab
domination. Kairouan was sacked and its mosques desecrated. In the wake of
revolt, Kharidjite sectarians established a number of theocratic tribal
kingdoms, most of which had short and troubled histories. The rise of the
Kharidjites in the Maghrib 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 countryside the ulama (Islamic scholars and teachers) of the
mosques were replaced as the spiritual guides of the people by wandering holy
men (al murabitun), or "those who have made a religious retreat"
(transliterated as marabouts). The marabouts were mystics and seers, miracle
workers endowed with a charisma (baraka), whose tradition antedated Islam in
the Maghrib and was as old as religion itself among the Berbers. They were
incorporated into intensely local cults of saints whose domed tombs dotted the
countryside and who were venerated by Muslims and Jews alike. The marabouts
had traditionally acted as arbiters in tribal disputes, and, whenever the
authority of government waned in a particular locale, the people turned to
them for political leadership as well as for spiritual guidance. Maghribi
Islam thus took shape as a coexisting blend of the scrupulous intellectualism
of the ulama and the sometimes frenzied emotionalism of the masses. In
general, however, Ifriquiya was not as susceptible to the heterodoxy that
characterized popular Islamic practices farther west. Two factors account for
this: first, Ifriquiya came more directly under the orthodox influence of the
mosques and schools of Tunis and Kairouan, and, second, its larger urban and
sedentary population had been more thoroughly arabized than was the case
elsewhere in the Maghrib.

Aghlabids

     After the Arab conquest, Ifriquiya was governed by a succession of amirs
(commanders) who were subordinate to the caliph in Damascus and, after 750, in
Baghdad.