Kairouan, al-Kahina's Resistance, and Decades to Conquer the Maghreb

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Muslim Conquest of North Africa was the extended series of campaigns by which the Umayyad Caliphate, continuing work the earlier Rashidun Caliphate had already begun, brought the Byzantine-ruled coastal region west of Egypt, known to the Arabs as Ifriqiya and the Maghreb, under caliphal rule at last. Progress was slow and repeatedly contested across several decades: the general Uqba ibn Nafi founded the garrison city of Kairouan around 670 as a forward base for the long campaigns that followed his own initial advance.

Byzantine forces and, more persistently, Berber confederations under leaders including the queen remembered as al-Kahina resisted for decades before the Umayyad governor Musa ibn Nusayr finally completed the conquest of the whole region by 709. Byzantine rule in North Africa ended permanently after this long resistance had at last been overcome, and the region became a core Umayyad province governed from the very garrison city its own conquerors had founded at Kairouan generations earlier. The nearly four decades separating Uqba ibn Nafi's founding of Kairouan around 670 from Musa ibn Nusayr's own completion of the conquest by 709 made this among the longest of the Rashidun and Umayyad conquests, a duration that itself shaped how thoroughly Berber society came to be integrated into the caliphate that finally absorbed it.