ABSTRACT

This chapter demonstrates how Berber society has continued to show an indestructible vitality and despite its decadence. The Berbers are a great people, but the tribes which comprise ‘Barbary’, from western Egypt to Morocco and Senegal, are scattered throughout the different regions of North Africa, “like the membra disjecta of a nation” in the words of Ibn Khaldun. In Berber areas, moreover, the religion has freely assumed a quite particular form, for the tribes have adapted it over the centuries to their own intellectual and political requirements. The millennial task of the Makhzen has been to break the structure of the small independent Berber ‘republics’; to bring all tribes—each with its distinctive features—within the embrace of a single, unified empire, under the same law and under the same absolute ruler. The Sherifian Empire demonstrated until then certain features that remind one of the barbarian empires of the West, after the fall of Rome; the Merovingian and Carolingian kingdoms, for example.