Pierluigi Pastore

The Flame of the Almohads Pierluigi Pastore

The following work traces the historical, political and social evolution of medieval North Africa in order to make a reading of the Maghreb society, which distinguished itself from the more properly Arab one. The purpose of this study is to detect how a tribe of mountain people from the Atlas has adopted Islam from the Near East and how it has adapted it to their needs, also through a new theological elaboration. The Almohade empire generated the construction of new cities, the creation of areas of economic development, of which relations with the republics of Genoa and Venice and the coastal cities of Sicily are faithful testimony and finally a heartfelt and fervent philosophical culture. In the centuries analyzed, the Islamization of North Africa involved, from a cultural point of view, a syncretism between Muslim and Berber custom law, between the Semitic Arabic language and the Camitian Berber language and between the Kharigite heterodoxy and the Orthodox Islam. The combination of these elements led to the formation in North Africa of an original reality which was able to transform itself in the Middle Ages into a philosophical and theological development, at least in some territories, absolutely fruitful. When the Almohad Empire fell apart, a political-administrative tripartite division of the Maghreb came between 1200 and 1400 by the dynasties of the Merinids in Morocco, the Abdalwadids in Algeria and the Hafsids in Tunisia. We could say that these extraterritorial formations underlie a primitive form of western state and constitute the prodrome of a modern and contemporary Maghreb.