Historical Dictionary of Western Sahara Third ... - Scarecrow Press

xlvi • INTRODUCTION
Ibn Tashfin, who set the Castilian army to flight in 1086 and unified—
if only briefly—all of Muslim Spain under Almoravid rule.
The Almoravids, for all their fervor, overextended themselves by occupying
such a broad swath of territory. Subject to periodic revolts
against their authority, the adherents of Ibn Yacin could not maintain
their hold on Morocco or Spain longer than the 12th century, as the Almohad
movement in Morocco and the Catholic reconquista in Spain
proved too powerful for them to resist. As for Western Sahara and Mauritania,
Almoravid rule lasted about a century longer, due in large part
to the sheer isolation of those territories. But many Berbers in the region
had never fully reconciled themselves to Ibn Yacin’s followers, and by
the 14th century, the resistance to any form of supra-tribal rule had reasserted
itself, and the Almoravids were soon relegated to memory,
leaving behind as one of the only reminders of their existence a puritanical
form of Islam imported to the area by Ibn Yacin.
With the Almoravids gone, another contestant for primacy in the region
appeared. The Maqil Arabs (sometimes known as the Beni Hassan after a
component part of the Maqil), who had originated in Yemen and who possessed
a martial inclination that made the Almoravids seem almost benign
by comparison, filtered into Western Sahara in the 14th and 15th centuries,
at times amalgamating with the still-dominant Sanhaja Berbers,
and at other times reducing them to the status of vassals or tributaries
(znaga) and forcing them to pay a humiliating tribute known as horma to
the hassan, or warrior, tribes who had defeated them on the battlefield.
This subordinate status was not altered until well into the 20th century,
and its presence was still felt in Mauritania and elsewhere into the 21st.
In an attempt to salvage at least a degree of their once-proud status, some
of the defeated Berbers, by the inventive use of genealogies and religious
study and teaching, made themselves into zawiya or “people of the book”
who renounced the use of arms and instead practiced and propagated Islam.
The zawiya then came to occupy a place in the social hierarchy only
slightly below that of the hassan tribes, and could nearly always count on
them for help in times of adversity. Other occupational castes existed in
Western Sahara, but the implantation of this form of social stratification
was by far the most important development in the region since the conquests
of the Almoravids several hundred years before.
While all this was transpiring mostly in the Saharan interior, another
form of struggle for supremacy was taking place, this time on the part of