12 PHILIP D. CURTIN
This influence can be traced back to the social and political setting of
the western Sahara, especially to the division between 'clerical' and
'warrior' tribes, which emerged by the sixteenth century. Islam had
penetrated to this part of the world much earlier. By the tenth century,
some at least of the Sanhaja or Znaga Berbers of the western Sahara were
already converted. By the eleventh century, Islam had spread onward to
the Senegal valley, where at least one Muslim ruler is reported as early
as A.D. I040.3 Later in the eleventh century, militant Islam in the western
Sahara appeared in the rise of the Murabitiin, whose movement led to
the fall of ancient Ghana and the establishment of the Murabit or Almora-
vid dynasty in the Maghrib and Spain.
Some Sanhaja tribes who remained in the western Sahara retained a
strong tradition of Islamic learning, grafted to their Berber culture and
nomadic way of life. Then, in about the fourteenth century, Arabs began
to arrive in the western Sahara. They were off-shoots of the tribes who
had pushed westward across north Africa in the eleventh century, and who
ultimately formed the basic population for the Arabization of the Maghrib.
One of these tribes, the Banii Ma'qil, came into southern Morocco in the
course of the thirteenth century, then moved out into the desert in the
fourteenth. In the process, it sub-divided into further tribes, each bearing
the name of the eponymous ancestor who founded the sub-division.
There is little value in tracing the full complexity of this process, or
entering the genealogical maze that forms the framework of traditional
Mauritanian history, but some of the confusion of terminology is un-
ravelled by following a single branch through the sequence of subdivisions.
Thus, the Banii Ma'qil divided, and one branch was the Banui Hassan.
When the Hassani divided, one branch was the Awlad Udaya; and one
sub-division of the Udaya was the Awlad Maghfar, which divided once
more into the Trarza and Brakna Moors who dominated the desert north
of the Senegal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.4
These Arab immigrants were, of course, Muslim, but they came from
a bedouin tradition. They supplemented nomadic pastoralism with
raiding and tribute collection as a normal and necessary source of income.
Islamic learning was valued but not pursued, as it was among the Sanhaja.
By the end of the sixteenth century, these 'warrior' tribes had established
their hegemony in south-western Mauritania, reducing the Sanhaja to a
status of respectable subordination. They were not tributaries in the
ordinary sense, though they were forced to pay the ghardma, a form of
protection money. Instead, they were thought of as people who specialized
in religious learning and commerce, a peace-loving people who needed
the special protection of those who specialized in warfare.
3 Abou Obied el-Bekri, Description de l'Afrique septentrionale, rev. ed. (Paris, I965), 324.
Translated by MacGuckin de Slane.
4 G. M. Desir6-Vuillemin, Histoire de la Mauritanie (Nouakchott, I964), 9o-i; H. T
Norris, 'Znaga Islam During the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', Bulletin of the
School of Oriental and African Studies, xxxii (I969), 496-526, see p. 498.
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