A Slow Conversion That Made the Berbers Partners in Conquest

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's own religious character is treated by historians as inseparable from its unusually long duration. Unlike the rapid collapse of Sasanian Persia within a single generation, North Africa's Berber population was not a single defeated imperial army but numerous separate confederations that resisted, negotiated, allied with and eventually widely converted to Islam over the course of the long campaign and the generations that followed it afterward.

Widespread Berber conversion to Islam over the following decades reshaped the whole Maghreb religiously in a way the initial military campaign alone had never achieved on its own. The newly converted Berber and Arab forces this slower process ultimately produced went on to launch the conquest of Iberia within just a few years of Musa ibn Nusayr's own completion of the North African campaign itself. Berber Muslim converts therefore became central participants not only in their own region's Islamization but in the subsequent conquest that carried Islam into Iberia soon afterward. Al-Kahina's own resistance, and her eventual defeat, is treated by historians as marking the last major organized Berber military stand against the caliphate before conversion, rather than continued warfare, became the dominant pattern of the region's own relationship with Islamic rule.