ABSTRACT
The fate of Christianity and of the Christian Church after the Arab conquests is one of the more vexed questions in the study of early medieval North Africa. Following Maitland, who in his Domesday Book and Beyond tried to write history backwards,1
I hope to try to change the way we see Roman, Vandal and Byzantine North Africa by looking backwards from Islamic North Africa. To a certain extent this is a tried and tested way of seeing the region in this period. For many scholars it is the rapid end of Christianity in early Islamic Africa which provides the prism through which the earlier periods are seen. In this paper I want to suggest, not that the method is flawed, but simply that the prism needs changing.
