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Berber

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Alternate titles: Amazigh, Imazighen, Maxyes

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Michael Brett

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The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Dec 10, 2022 • Article History

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Berber tent

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Key People: Ptolemy of Mauretania Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-Shīʿī Ibn TūmartRelated Topics: Mʾzabite Shawiya Kabyle Rif Zemmour Amazigh

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Berber, self-name Amazigh, plural Imazighen, any of the descendants of the pre-Arab inhabitants of North Africa. The Berbers live in scattered communities across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Mali, Niger, and Mauritania. They speak various Amazigh languages belonging to the Afro-Asiatic family related to ancient Egyptian.

An accurate count of Berbers is difficult to come by for a variety of reasons, including a lack of thorough surveys. The two largest populations of Berbers are found in Algeria and Morocco, where large portions of the population are descended from Berbers but only some of them identify as Amazigh. Roughly one-fourth of the population in Algeria is estimated to be Berber, while Berbers are estimated to make up more than three-fifths of the population in Morocco. In the Sahara of southern Algeria and of Libya, Mali, and Niger, the Berber Tuareg number more than two million.

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 Islamic world: Imazighen

From about 2000 BCE, Berber (Amazigh) languages spread westward from the Nile valley across the northern Sahara into the Maghrib. By the 1st millennium BCE, their speakers were the native inhabitants of the vast region encountered by the Greeks, Carthaginians, and Romans. A series of Berber peoples—Mauri, Masaesyli, Massyli, Musulami, Gaetuli, Garamantes—then gave rise to Berber kingdoms under Carthaginian and Roman influence. Of those kingdoms, Numidia and Mauritania were formally incorporated into the Roman Empire in the late 2nd century BCE, but others appeared in late antiquity following the Vandal invasion in 429 CE and the Byzantine reconquest (533 CE) only to be suppressed by the Arab conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries CE.

It was the Arabs, who had enlisted Berber warriors for the conquest of Spain, who nevertheless gave those peoples a single name, turning barbarian (speakers of a language other than Greek and Latin) into Barbar, the name of a race descended from Noah. While unifying the indigenous groups under one rubric, the Arabs began their Islamization. From the very beginning, Islam provided the ideological stimulus for the rise of fresh Berber dynasties. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, the greatest of those—the Almoravids and the Almohads, nomads of the Sahara and villagers of the High Atlas, respectively—conquered Muslim Spain and North Africa as far east as Tripoli (now in Libya). Their Berber successors—the Marinids at Fès (now in Morocco), the Ziyanids at Tlemcen (now in Algeria), and the Ḥafṣids at Tunis (now in Tunisia) and Bijaya (now Bejaïa, Algeria)—continued to rule until the 16th century.

 

Meanwhile, Berber merchants and nomads of the Sahara had initiated a trans-Saharan trade in gold and slaves that incorporated the lands of the Sudan into the Islamic world. Those achievements of the Barbar were celebrated in a massive history of North Africa (Kitāb al-ʿIbār) by the 14th-century Arab historian Ibn Khaldūn. By then, however, the Berbers were in retreat, subjected to Arabization of two very different kinds. The predominance of written Arabic had ended the writing of Amazigh (Berber) languages in both the old Libyan and the new Arabic script, reducing its languages to folk languages. At the same time, an influx from the east of warrior Arab nomads from the 11th century onward was driving the Berbers off the plains and into the mountains and overrunning the desert. Together those factors were turning the population from Berber speakers into Arabic speakers, with a consequent loss of original identities. From the 16th century onward the process continued in the absence of Berber dynasties, which were replaced in Morocco by Arabs claiming descent from the Prophet and elsewhere by Turks at Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.

 

When the French conquered Algeria in the 19th century and Morocco in the 20th, they seized on the distinction between the Arab majority and the Berbers of the mountains. On the strength of Ibn Khaldūn’s history, the latter were once again classified as a people under their modern name of Berbers. The identification and description of their language, the anthropological study of their society, and their geographical isolation all gave grounds for their separate administration as a people going back before the time of Islam to a pagan and Christian past. Those colonial studies and policies have determined much of the history of the Berbers down to the present but meanwhile have left a record of their manners and customs before the advent of modernity.

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By the beginning of the 20th century, the Berber world had been reduced to enclaves of varying size. In Tripolitania and southern Tunisia those were chiefly formed by the hills of the Nafūsah Plateau and the island of Jerba, in eastern Algeria by the mountains of the Aurès and Kabylie, and in Morocco by the ranges of the Rif, the Middle and High Atlas, the Anti-Atlas, and the Saharan Atlas. In southern Morocco they consisted of the oases of the Drâa valley, and in the northern Sahara mainly those of the Mʾzab with those of Ghadames, Touggourt, and Gourara. In the central and southern Sahara was the vast area of the Ahaggar mountains and the desert to the south.

The economy was largely subsistence agriculture and pastoralism practiced by farmers, transhumants, and nomads, coupled with weaving, pottery, metalwork, and leatherwork, and local and some long-distance trade. Dwellings varied from caves to pitched-roof houses to flat-roofed “castles” to tents. Whatever the dwelling, its construction was designed to create an interior ruled by the women of the family. Outside the home, women would gather at the fountain or well and at the tomb of the local saint, whereas men would meet at the mosque or in the street and square. In the case of the nomadic and matrilineal Tuareg of the central Sahara, the camp was largely controlled by the women, who chose their husbands and, with their songs, were central to social gatherings.

 

The dwelling was home to the nuclear, usually patrilineal family, which was the basic unit of a tribal group going under the name of a common ancestor, whose Ait, or people, they claimed to be. In principle all families and clans were equal, governed by codes of honour likely to give rise to feuds but also by a council of elders, the jamāʿah, who kept the peace by adjudication, rulings on compensation, and determination of punishments. In fact the various societies were not egalitarian. The village and the clan regularly admitted newcomers as inferiors, and the ruling elders came from leading families. If villages or clans went to war, as they frequently did, a chief might be chosen who on the strength of his prowess might attract clients, form his own army, and—like the lords of the High Atlas about 1900—establish his own dominion. The Tuareg of the Ahaggar and southern Sahara, also called Blue Men because of their indigo-dyed robes and face veils, were aristocratic nomads ruling over vassals, serfs, and slaves who cultivated the oases on their behalf; they in turn recognized supreme chiefs or kings, who were called amenukals. They had preserved a form of the old Libyan consonantal script under the name of Tifinagh, though most writing was in Arabic, by a class of Muslim scholars. Such saintly scholars were everywhere figures of authority, and among the Ibadi Berbers of the Mʾzab they ruled the community.

 

While many of those features of Berber society have survived, they have been greatly modified by the economic and political pressures and opportunities that have built up since the early years of the 20th century. Beginning with the Kabyle of Algeria, emigration from the mountains in search of employment created permanent Berber communities in the cities of the Maghrib as well as in France and the rest of western Europe. That emigration in turn has conveyed modern material and popular culture back into the homelands. The independence of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania, Mali, and Niger meanwhile created a new political situation in which Berber nationalism made its appearance. That circumstance was largely a reaction to the policies of the new governments, which have frowned on a separate Berber identity as a relic of colonialism incompatible with national unity. In Morocco the monarchy felt threatened, first by the French use of Berbers to dethrone the sultan in 1953 and second by the role of Berber officers in the attempted assassinations of the king in 1971–72. In Algeria the rebellion in Kabylie in 1963–64 was further justification for a policy of Arabization, resented by Berbers not least because many had been educated in French. Berber studies were forbidden or repressed in both Morocco and Algeria, but in Algeria in 1980–81 the cancellation of a lecture on Berber poetry touched off a “Berber Spring” of demonstrations in Kabylie that were energized by popular Berber songs and singers.

 

Berberism under the name of Imazighenity (from the Berber Amazigh, plural Imazighen, adopted as the proper term for the people) was meanwhile formulated academically by Berbers in Paris who founded the journal Awal in 1985. Berber languages have been revived as a written language called Tamazight (the name of one of the three Moroccan Berber languages) with a modified Latin script as well as Tifinagh, and the people and their culture have been fleshed out in print through UNESCO’s ongoing publication of the French-language Encyclopédie Berbère (1984– ).

 

Growing demands for the recognition of Berbers—in theory as the original inhabitants of North Africa and in practice as distinct components of its society—have met with some success. Tamazight is studied in Algeria and since 2002 has been recognized as a national, but not official, language; despite popular unrest in Kabylie, Berbers have yet to achieve a strong political identity in an Algerian democracy. Berberism in Morocco has led to the creation of a Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture, to schoolteaching in Tamazight, and finally, since 2011, to the recognition of Tamazight as an official language, all in the interest of national unity under the monarchy. Meanwhile, Berber culture provides the invaluable tourist industry with much of its cachet: its distinctive architecture, crafts, and costumes set in a romantic landscape that is specifically Moroccan. In Libya the overthrow of Muammar al-Qaddafi opened the way for the Berbers of the Nefūsah Plateau to demand a recognized position in the new order, but the Tuareg from abroad whom Qaddafi had recruited into his army were driven out of the country. The Algerian Tuareg of the Ahaggar were turned into cultivators, their nomadism surviving only as a tourist attraction. But the Tuareg soldiers returned to the southern Sahara to reignite, in concert with Islamic militants, a long-standing conflict of their people with the governments of Mali and Niger over Berber minority status and to make yet another demand for separate status. Although the outcomes of contemporary conflicts remain uncertain, Berberism is sufficiently established as an ideology and as a cultural and political program to provide the scattered communities of Berbers with a new national identity in place of the old anthropological one.

Michael Brett The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica