In 640 CE, Amr ibn Al-`Aas conquered Egypt through Fustat and assumed other lands of the Byzantine Empire along the Mediterranean, where the people had been exploited and non-Romans were second-class citizens. Ibn Abi Sarh in 646–652 achieved this when he continued the march across North Africa to Western Tunisia, Northern Algeria and the majority of the Sahara. Uqbah ibn Nafi’ followed that up by spreading Islam into Morocco, and the march was supposed to have even reached the Atlantic Ocean. Uqbah also moved south, and the propagation of Islam continued into the Sahara, up to the area surrounding Lake Chad. In the beginning, the spread of Islam in North Africa had been military, but at a later phase, it became peaceful and spread by trade and intermarriage. Islam also spread through Islamic education, knowledge, and Arabic all the way down to West Africa, mainly through such peaceful means, especially the trans-Saharan trade routes.
In 1039, Sheikh Abdullah ibn Yasin formed the Al-Murabitun (Almoravids) movement amongst the Sanhaja Berber community. Their basic tenets were ordering good and forbidding evil, and fighting illegal forms of taxation. They probably emerged in response to a decline in Islamic standards in their Maghribi region. In 1051, Al-Murabitun had a new leader in the Maghrib, Yusuf ibn Tashfin, under whose leadership the movement flourished and spread into West Africa, through Abdullah ibn Yasin, to set up rubut as far as the Niger River. Around 1062, Ibn Tashfin established the movement’s capital at Marrakesh, and soon after, led forces into Seville (Sequiliyya) in Andalusia (Muslim southern Spain) to help the Muslims fight against the encroaching Christian armies because of a tax dispute. He came to their aid again in 1088, against the Christian forces encroaching from the northern provinces.
When Al-Murabitun became successful in Andalusia, the Muslims weakened in their Islamic practice, so the Al-Muwahhidun (Almohads) succeeded them and entered Andalusia in 1146. The leader of Al-Muwahhidun was Muhammad ibn Tumart, a Masmuda Berber from southern Morocco who had been influenced by the writings of Al-Ghazali, which drove him to try to revive Islam in the Maghrib (all of Northwest Africa except Egypt). Under Ibn Tumart, Al-Muwahhidun, who preached the importance of tawheed (Oneness of Allah), defeated Al-Murabitun in Andalusia in 1146, and thereafter Islam was able to bloom once again and produce brilliant thinkers and scholars such as the philosopher and fiqh (Islamic law) scholar Ibn Rushd. However, as the famous North African sociologist Ibn Khaldun – whom many consider to be the founding father of sociology – has said, whenever any society experiences success and prosperity, it is only a matter of time before decadence sets in, and thereafter, decay, decline, and then another rise. Andalusia is an excellent example of his social theory, and it finally fell to the Christians in 1492.

* This essay is dedicated to Khalida Khatun (may Allah be pleased with her), who was the driving force behind the book in which this essay was meant to be published, if it weren’t for her return to Allah.
** Zahrah Awalah holds a BA in Arabic language and an MA in Islamic studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. She resides in London with her husband and two children. You can contact her at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .
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