North Africa

North Africa, the Maghreb and the Sahara, from Morocco to Libya, has a religious significance out of proportion to its frequent neglect, above all for the history of Christianity and Islam. In the Roman period the province of Africa (centred on Carthage, in modern Tunisia) was one of the most vital centres of Latin Christianity, producing a remarkable line of thinkers who effectively created Western theology in Latin: Tertullian, who first wrote Christian theology in Latin and coined much of its vocabulary; Cyprian, the martyr-bishop of Carthage; and, supremely, Augustine of Hippo, whose thought would shape all subsequent Western Christianity.

North African Christianity was also the crucible of great controversies, Donatism over the purity of the Church, and the debates over grace and free will, before it was largely eclipsed. From the seventh century the region was progressively won for Islam, and North Africa became a heartland of the Muslim world: a centre of Maliki legal scholarship, of the great mosque-universities like the Qarawiyyin at Fez (one of the oldest in the world), and of vibrant Sufi brotherhoods whose saints (marabouts) and shrines shape popular Islam across the Maghreb to this day. Before both, the region carried the older Berber (Amazigh) religion and the Phoenician cults of Carthage. North Africa thus stands as a ground where Latin Christian theology was largely made and where a distinctive, Sufi-inflected Islam took deep root.

North Africa carries two religious histories of the first importance and the evidence for them is of completely different kinds.

Carthaginian religion is known mainly from hostile outsiders and from excavation. The Greek and Roman authors who describe it were writing about a defeated rival, and the practice they emphasise most, the sacrifice of infants at a precinct now called a tophet, is exactly the sort of charge such authors make. Excavation at Carthage and at other Punic sites has recovered large numbers of urns holding the cremated remains of infants and young animals, with dedicatory stelae above them. What that demonstrates is genuinely disputed among specialists: some read it as confirmation of the classical accounts, others as a cemetery for children who died young in a society with high infant mortality. The atlas records the dispute rather than picking a side.

The second history is textual and abundant. Latin Christianity found its voice here. Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine all wrote from North African sees, and the doctrinal controversies that shaped the western church, over the lapsed, over the validity of sacraments administered by the unworthy, and over grace, were argued out in this region first.

Between and beneath both sits Berber religious practice, attested in inscriptions, in Roman-period dedications to local gods and in later ethnography, and much less well recorded than either.