After the many reactions left by his book "Islam of the Berbers", which was presented at the Royal Institute of Berber Culture two weeks ago, by presenting data stating that the Islamic conquest of the Maghreb was a military invasion, and that the Arabs practiced racism against the Berbers, the author of the book explained Muhammad Al-Mahdi Alloush, that his book “is not directed against Islam as a religion, nor against the Arabs as a human race, but rather it is intended to show the truth and expose the actions of some of the so-called conquerors, who carried out actions that have nothing to do with the true message of Islam.”
Alloush, in his interview with the electronic newspaper Hespress, expressed his adherence to the fact that the Arabs, and specifically the Umayyad rulers, “practiced racism against the Amazighs, and that they looked at them with contempt and contempt, and they were not concerned with the Amazighs for their conversion to Islam more than they cared for their money and women.”
This is the text of the dialogue:
In your speech on the occasion of the presentation of your book “Islam of the Amazighs” at the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture, you said that what was called the Islamic Conquest is in fact a military invasion aimed at humiliating the Amazighs and achieving purely material gains that have nothing to do with the noble message of Islam, how is that?
Invasion or conquest, it's the same, these are just words to express events and facts; And historical facts say that the Arabs, when they invaded the land of the Berbers, behaved with the people in a manner that was not appropriate to the message, principles and goals of Islam. I expected this kind of reaction to the use of the word “invasion”, so I set out to explain its meaning and uses in the preface to the book, in order to remove any confusion.
In dictionaries of the Arabic language, including “Lisan al-Arab” by Ibn Manzoor, the word “conquest” has been explained as a source of the verb conquest, which means taking over a country through war: He conquered the country, entered it after conquering its people and subjugating it to his authority. The Islamic conquest means “the entry of Islam into the countries where it spread after wars”; As for the invasion, it is a source of the act of conquering, and conquering the thing, conquering what he wanted and demanded, according to the tongue of the Arabs.
Invasion, then, is the intention or march to fight the enemy and plunder it (plunder it); And the invasion is the one time of the invasion. This is what came in the book of Ibn Manzoor. From the foregoing, we understand that conquest means victory, and it is subsequent to conquest, so there is no conquest except after conquest, nor victory except after war, or surrender without war; Conquest is not considered a conquest unless it is crowned with victory, and both conquest and conquest have different meanings.
I would like to point out in this section that the Arab narrators and historians used the word “conquest” when seizing a city or a village, and they used the word “invasion” in the form of a past tense such as conquered, invaded, invaded, and conquered. Islamic history is full of invasions such as the Battle of Badr, the Battle of the Trench, the Battle of Uhud, and others, as Muslims do not find any embarrassment in naming them, but rather they are proud of them because of their founding role in the beginnings of Islam in the Arabian Peninsula.
In response to some hasty positions on the subject of the book “Islam of the Amazighs”, I want it to be clear in everyone’s minds that my book is not directed against Islam as a religion or against the Arabs as a human race. It has nothing to do with the true message of Islam.
There is not a single phrase in the book that affects the Islamic religion, which is the belief of all Moroccans. Rather, the opposite is true. In the book, Islam is acquitted of the actions of people who rode on religion to achieve purely material goals. As for Islam, it did not spread in Morocco, in fact, except with the Idrisids, and it continued during the era of the Almoravids and then the Almohads, who were the last to eliminate the emirate of Barghawata outside Islam.
You also said that what I called an invasion was aimed at humiliating the Berbers and achieving material gains. Can you explain your words?
With regard to the issue of the humiliation of the Amazighs and their dignity, the narrators recorded for us actions that are completely inconsistent with the spirit of Islam and its tolerant principles. It is true that the logic of wars at that time required killing enemies, confiscating their property, and capturing their women, but what Amr ibn al-Aas and Uqba ibn Nafi did, for example, against the Berbers of Luwata in Cyrenaica (eastern Libya) had no justification.
The Luwata tribes were living under the influence of the Byzantine ruler of Egypt at that time, and the Muslims found them in a state of weakness and division not governed by any authority because of the disintegration of the Byzantine state and its preoccupation with its internal conflicts. The Arabs surrendered at first sight. The Muslims considered them Christians of the People of the Book, like the Copts of Egypt, so they imposed on them the payment of tribute, but they were not able to perform it. And when the news reached Amr ibn al-Aas, the conqueror of Egypt, he wrote that they should sell their sons and daughters for what they owe of the tribute, or he would order them to be killed. This was narrated by Ibn Abd al-Hakam in the ninth century AD, and he was the first to chronicle the conquest of Egypt and Morocco. This happened in the year 642 AD / 21 AH.
As for what Uqba bin Nafeh did in the year 670 AD / 50 AH to the sheikhs of these tribes in Wadan and Fezzan in the desert of Libya, it was harsher and more horrific, as he cut off the ear of one of them and amputated the finger of another, and insulted a third by forcing him to walk a long distance on his feet until he started spitting blood. And when they asked him why he did that to them when they came to him obediently and submissively, he said to each one of them: “It is your etiquette, if you mention him, you did not fight the Arabs.” Then he imposed on each one of them three hundred slaves and sixty slaves.
I did not find anything in these actions and words that linked them to Islam, nor to jihad, which had its conditions and purposes that were precisely defined by Islamic jurists. These words were mentioned by Ibn Abd al-Hakam, al-Baladhuri, al-Bakri and other Muslim narrators. We also do not forget what this same leader did with Prince Axel, known in the Arab sources as Kasila, where he inflicted a severe insult on him, which was the reason for Axel’s departure from Islam after that, and he killed Uqba upon his return from Al-Aqsa Morocco.
As for the realization of material gains, I mentioned one incident out of dozens of incidents, all of which indicate that the conquering Arabs rushed for spoils and captives without any interest in the purpose for which they came, which is to invite the Amazighs to enter Islam. When Abdullah bin Abi Sarh defeated the Byzantines in the first battle with them in Sbeitla in southern Tunisia in the year 647 AD / 25 AH, and those who died and those who fled from the Roman army died, the Arab commander sent companies and teams of soldiers in various directions to take the spoils and collect money. And when the people of Ifriqiya saw that scene, they asked the Arabs to take whatever money they wanted and leave their country, so they accepted the money, and the narrators did not mention that they said a single word about Islam.
Al-Baladhuri mentioned two narrations about the same incident: the first was narrated on the authority of Abdullah Ibn Al-Zubayr himself, in which he acknowledges the agreement of “the greats of Ifriqiya” to pay three hundred quintals of gold in exchange for leaving the country, and the second narration on the authority of Ibn Ka’b, in which he stated that “Abdullah bin Saad Ibn Abi Sarh Saleh in an African penguin for two thousand five hundred thousand dinars (2,500,000).
As for the captives, their numbers are estimated at hundreds of thousands, according to the narrators, and I am ashamed to go into them in this interview, as they are presented in all the details in the book. What is important here is that the Umayyad caliphs were insistent in asking for the Berber captives, and they did not care, according to the accounts, the status of Islam and the extent of its spread among the Berbers, which means that their main goal was something other than spreading Islam. And if we learn the behavior of some of the Umayyad caliphs, we realize that Islam was not a priority in their interests.
I talked about the resistance of the Berbers to the Arab (Islamic) armies for more than sixty years, while some historians say that the Moroccans did not fight battles against the Muslims. When was this resistance, where and how?
It is true that the Moroccans did not resist the Muslims much, according to many narrators, and it is also true that the resistance was long and desperate. How is that? My book talks about all of the Berbers from western Alexandria to the Atlantic Ocean, and it was not limited to the Berbers of Al-Aqsa Morocco. The Berbers confronted the resistance of the Arab armies after the dissolution of the Byzantine presence in North Africa, following the battle of Sbeitla in the year 647 AD / 25 AH. The first leader to lead this resistance was Prince Axil (Kusaila), who was king over the tribes of Europe and Sanhaja. His story with Uqba bin Nafie is known in history books.
The organized Berber resistance began with Axel, with the killing of Uqba in the year 683 AD / 63 AH. After the killing of Axel, a Berber woman from the Jarawa Al-Zanati tribe confronted the resistance of the Arab armies and defeated Hassan bin Al-Nu'man in several battles before retreating and dying at the hands of the latter thanks to the reinforcements that came from the east. This resistance lasted more than sixty years.
This military resistance was paralleled by an ideological resistance represented in the Berbers' rejection of Islam because they did not recognize it in the first place because of the conquerors' preoccupation with collecting money and capturing women. And in that, Ibn Khaldun said that the “Berbers” apostatized from Islam 12 times. But when they were actually convinced of Islam, they expelled the Arabs in the year 740 AD, but they kept Islam in its external, revolutionary form against the rulers of the Sunni Umayyads. Nevertheless, the region touching us with the coastal plains in the far west of Morocco remained on the religion of the Barghawata outside Islam until the Almohads destroyed them in the twelfth century AD, that is, five centuries after the entry of Islamic armies into Morocco.
And what about the Moroccan exception, which some Moroccan historians say?
The so-called Moroccan exception, which says that the Moroccans did not resist the Arabs, which some historians considered as welcoming Islam without fighting. This statement requires clarification.
First: The saying that Uqba bin Nafi' did not fight any battle in the far west is not correct, and there is no consensus on it among the narrators. Ibn Khaldun mentioned that Uqba ibn Nafeh was subjected to fierce resistance at the hands of the Al-Masamdah tribes that besieged him in Mount Darn (the High Atlas), and he would have been defeated had it not been for the Zanata Berber tribes that rose to break the siege on him and save him from destruction (Ibn Khaldun, Book of Lessons, vol. 6, p. 142). ), and Ibn Qutayba and al-Bakri told us about fierce battles that took place between the Arabs and the Berbers over the far lands of Morocco, west of Moulouya, in a place called Sokouma.
In these battles, in which the Arabs were victorious over the defenseless tribe of Europe, Musa bin Naseer asked the sons of Uqba Ayyad, Othman and Ubaidah and told them to “heal from the killers of your father Uqba.” So Ayyad killed six hundred of them, of their best and senior men, before Musa ordered him to stop. Uqba was killed by Prince Axel of Tahuda in Algeria in the year 683 AD / 63 AH, that is, about 20 years before the campaign of Musa bin Naseer.
This is how the Umayyad army and their leaders acted. They considered the “Berbers” as one race, and they took revenge on the people of Morocco because of the actions committed by others in faraway countries for a long time. This is the height of racism that punishes people because of their ethnicity and not because of the actions they committed.
Second: Even if we go along with the saying of the Moroccan exception, which states that the Berbers will not resist the Arab armies, we must recall the political and security situation in Morocco at the time: the Far Maghreb did not have a political system or an organized entity capable of mobilizing the tribes to stand up to the invaders, whoever they were. It was an independent tribe from each other, living in the way of the ancestors since the withdrawal of the Romans in the third century AD.
And as a reminder, except for the city of Ceuta, Morocco did not submit to the Far East, neither to Byzantine rule nor to the Vandals. And when the Arabs came, they found Morocco devoid of any authority ruling the country. All that there are separate tribes that often quarrel between them, and they were not united nor able to form an army the size of the Arab armies, which included tens of thousands of trained soldiers experienced in the arts of war and fighting. Thus, the Arabs found the way open to them and opened the country without real resistance.
Your book states that the Arabs were racist in their treatment of the Berbers, and that they behaved with them, even after their conversion to Islam, as if they were non-Muslims?
That's right. However, with the emphasis that I did not mean all the Arabs, but rather I talked about the Umayyad rulers and their policy, which looked at the Berbers with a look of contempt and contempt, and they were not concerned with the Berbers for their conversion to Islam more than they cared for their money and women. And I am not the one who said this, because the facts that the narrators conveyed to us confirm this phenomenon, which leaves no room for any doubt about its occurrence. I will suffice here with one example that al-Tabari transmitted to us in his book “The History of the Messengers and Kings” about the treatment of the Umayyad rulers of the Berbers.
Al-Tabari narrated that a delegation of Berber notables traveled to Damascus to raise their complaint to Caliph Hisham bin Abd al-Malik against his rulers in Morocco as a result of the injustice, humiliation and humiliation they were suffering from. This delegation was led by a Berber leader named Maysara al-Matghari.
Al-Tabari says: “Maysarah went out with a group of ten people to go to Hisham, and they asked for permission, but it was difficult for them, so they came.” Al-Abrash, and they said: Inform the Commander of the Faithful that our Commander will wage war with us and his soldiers, and if he strikes, he will let them down without us. I have more right to it, so we said: He is the most faithful to our jihad, we do not take anything from him if we have it, they are in a solution from him, and if we do not want it. And they said: If we besiege a city, he said: Advance and delay his army, so we said to each other: Advance, for it is an increase in jihad and reward. And like you, he who sufficed his brothers, so We protected them with Ourselves and sufficed them.
Then they took our cattle and began to graze them on dungarees, asking for the white fur of the Commander of the Faithful. You are the color of a thousand sheep in leather, so we tolerated that, and we left them with whatever they wanted, and we said: How easy this is for the Commander of the Faithful! Then they begged us to take each of our beautiful daughters and one-fifth of our zakat (25 percent instead of 2.5 percent, multiplied by ten times), so we said: We did not find this in a book or a book. And we are Muslims, so we would like to know: Do you mean the opinion of the Commander of the Faithful on that or not? ?
Al-Abrash said: I will, God willing. When they got tired of waiting and Hisham did not give them permission, they wrote their names on parchment and presented them to the ministers, saying: These are our names and our genealogies. How many princes of the believers on our behalf, so tell him, then their face was to Ifriqiya. (Al-Tabari, History of the Messengers and Kings, Part 4, pg. 254,255).
It was these racist and insulting practices that prompted the Berbers to declare a massive revolution against the rulers of the Umayyads in the year 740 AD, led by Maysara al-Matghari, that is, only 30 years after the stability of the Islamic Umayyad rule in Morocco. There were several battles in which the Berbers were victorious over the armies of the Umayyads, whose elements fled from the far and central Morocco in the direction of Andalusia and Kairouan, where they fortified themselves, and they were able to withstand the Berber armies, whose word then dispersed.
This revolution was known in history books as the Kharijite revolution, where the Berbers abandoned the Sunni sect that was adopted by the Umayyads, believing that the Kharijite sect is more just, merciful, and faithful to the teachings of true Islam. Moroccans will return to Sunni Islam on the doctrine of Imam Malik in the eleventh century AD with the Almoravid state.
The racist nature of the invasion was raised by a number of historians in the East and the West, and so as not to say that Westerners are the enemies of Islam hate Muslims. I will suffice here with the testimony of the latter two: Al-Tha’alabi said in his book “The History of North Africa from the Islamic Conquest to the End of the Majority State” about the Umayyad caliph Hisham bin Abd al-Malik, who was in power during the “external” revolution: “He was one of the most stubborn Umayyad caliphs in the matter of racism and rulership of the Arabs…”.
Abdullah Al-Aroui said in his book “The Brief History of Morocco”: “We do not forget that the Umayyads made the Arab dignity and zeal the mainstay of their rule. Power in the days of Omar was also in the hands of a minority, but that was the minority of the first responders to the call of the Prophet. As for the elite that controlled the Umayyad state, it was based on Arab racism and pre-Islamic prejudice.”
All of this confirms what I said about the lack of observance of the Umayyad rulers and their rulers of the teachings of Islam, which are equal among all races, according to the noble hadith, “There is no difference between an Arab and a non-Arab, nor between a white and a black, except by piety.” They also imposed on the Berbers the payment of the tax at the rate of one-fifth of their production. This also contradicts the equality of all Muslims in the performance of their duties to the treasury, which was summarized in zakat. The Umayyads justified the Amazigh fifths by the fact that they did not enter Islam voluntarily, but rather were forced to do so by compulsion. These words contradict the claim of some Moroccan historians that the Berbers welcomed Islam with open arms and never resisted the Arabs.
Any last word?
I said the last word in the book, and I would like to quote the following phrases from it:
I do not want this work to be understood as a bias of the Amazigh race against the Arabs, because it is impossible at the present time to distinguish between the races that have coexisted on this earth for several centuries. The mixing that took place between the inhabitants of Morocco of different races, and the fertilization that took place in traditions, customs, customs, and fusion resulting from coexistence, cohabitation, and intermarriage left no room for any claim to the purity of race or the specificity of culture.
We may notice here and there differences in some customs and traditions, but they are natural and normal between tribes and even between people of one gender and one origin.”
The difference that we notice in the tongue is only further evidence of Moroccans' adherence to their culture and privacy, but this does not mean at all that the speaker of the Amazigh tongue belongs to the Amazigh race and the one who speaks the Moroccan dialect belongs to the Arab race. It may be the exact opposite is true, and who has the slightest doubt to try addressing individuals from the tribes of Sanhaja (Taounate province) or Doukkala (El Jadida province) or Hawara (Inezgane prefecture, Taroudant province) or Louata (Sefrou province) or Warba (Taza province) in the language of their ancestors Berbers, or trying to convince them of their true origins. They lost their original Amazigh language and took the colloquial Arabic language as the language of communication between them, thinking that they are of Arab origins.
The same applies to the Moroccan colloquial dialect, which includes a large number of vocabulary and expressions, as well as many structures, phrases, and images that the Arabized Berbers transferred to the Moroccan colloquial language. .
From a scientific point of view, genetic studies have proven that the Amazigh race is absolutely dominant in North Africa and is completely different from the genetic makeup of the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula. So let it be clear that my intention is to shed light from other angles on the history of our country so that we know who we are and where we are going. Who we are and what we want to be.
On the other hand, I do not hide my pride in the Amazigh identity, which must be recognized by all, especially those parties that oppose the Amazighs and challenge their identity demands under the pretext of destabilizing the nation's cohesion and threatening the country's unity. This is a falsehood that can only be defended by those with unilateral ideologies and totalitarian approaches that exclude cultural specificities that are considered at the heart of freedoms and democratic rights recognized in all countries of the world.