Layers, From Tanit to the Zawiya

The religious history of these peoples is a sequence of layers, none of which erased the one before it entirely. Pre-Islamic practice is known mainly from Roman-era inscriptions and from Latin authors, and it included local divinities, ancestor veneration at tombs, and the goddess Tanit, whose worship in North Africa was shared with Carthage. Christianity took deep root in Roman Africa and produced Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine, the last of them from an Amazigh family in Numidia, along with the Donatist church, whose long confrontation with the Catholic hierarchy had a strongly regional character.

Judaism was present in North Africa from antiquity, and the Jewish communities of the Atlas mountains and the Saharan oases spoke Berber languages and lived alongside their Muslim neighbours until the emigrations of the twentieth century. Islam arrived in the seventh century and is now the religion of almost all Imazighen. Within it, the zawiya, the lodge of a Sufi order attached to the tomb of a saint, has been the characteristic institution of the region, and the marabout, the holy man whose baraka passes to his descendants and his shrine, is the figure around which local practice has organised itself for centuries.