Amazigh Peoples

The indigenous peoples of North Africa west of Egypt call themselves Imazighen, the plural of Amazigh, ordinarily translated as free or noble people. The familiar English word for them, Berber, comes through Arabic from the Latin barbarus, the word Greeks and Romans used for anyone who did not speak their language, and a great many Imazighen reject it for that reason. The atlas uses the endonym as the name and carries the exonym as an alias, which is the treatment this type applies wherever a community has a word of its own.

The grouping covers the Kabyle and Chaoui of Algeria, the Rif and Chleuh of Morocco, the Tuareg of the Sahara, the Siwi of the Egyptian oasis and the Zenaga of Mauritania, among others. The languages belong to the Berber branch of Afro-Asiatic and are not all mutually intelligible. The peoples are attested in Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Arabic sources across three thousand years, and the shared identity is the recent part: it was consolidated by the Amazigh cultural movement of the twentieth century, which won recognition of Tamazight as an official language in Morocco in 2011 and in Algeria in 2016. Tifinagh, the script used for Tuareg and revived in a standardised form for Tamazight, descends from the ancient Libyco-Berber alphabet and is now taught in Moroccan schools, which makes it one of very few ancient scripts brought back into ordinary official use.

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.