Page:Arabic Thought and Its Place in History.djvu/242

 I. i. Abo, Finland, 1920), and from Dr. Montet's Le culte des saints musulmans dans l'Afrique du nord (Geneva, 1905).

Amongst the Berber tribes in perpetual conflict with the Arab garrisons there was always a refuge and a welcome for the lost causes of Islam, and so almost every heretical sect and every defeated dynasty made its last stand there, so that even now those parts show the strangest survivals of otherwise forgotten movements. No doubt this was mainly due to a perennial tone of disaffection towards the Arab rulers, and anyone in revolt against the Khalif was welcomed for that very fact.

The conquest of Spain towards the end of the 1st cent. A.H. (early 8th cent. A.D.) was jointly an Arab and Berber undertaking, the Berbers being in the great majority in the invading army, and most of the leaders being Berber. Thus in Andalusia the old rivalries between Arab and Berber figure largely in the next few centuries. At first Andalusia was regarded merely as a district attached to the province of North Africa, and was ruled from Ifrikiya.

In A.H. 138, after the fall of the Umayyads in Asia, a fugitive member of the fallen dynasty, 'Abdu r-Rahman, failing in an attempt to restore his family in Africa, crossed over to Spain, and there established a new and independent power, with its seat of government at Cordova, and in A.H. 317 one of his descendants formally assumed the title of "Commander of the Faithful." The Umayyads of