History and belief

Before Islam

Belief and customs in ancient North Africa

Sun, mountains, springs and the ancestors: what the sources tell us about belief in ancient North Africa.

About the time before Islamization we know less than the length of this text suggests. The sources are foreign: Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, later Arab chroniclers. They describe from the outside. What comes out of that is a picture with many gaps, and a few astonishingly clear lines.

Nature as a holy place

Sun and moon were venerated, along with forces bound to places: mountains, caves, springs, single trees. Holiness lay not in a building but in the landscape.

The dead

The deceased remained responsible. People went to them, asked them, brought them something. Graves were not end points but addresses. Herodotus reports of Libyan groups who spent the night at the graves of their ancestors in order to receive an answer in a dream.

Added from outside

Egypt, Carthage and Rome left traces. Carthaginian deities were taken over, Roman inscriptions name local gods with Latin names. Later came Jewish communities, which are very old in North Africa, and Christianity: the church in North Africa was one of the strongest of early Christianity, and Augustine came from what is now Algeria.

What remained

From the 7th century onward Islam found its home in the Maghreb, and it shapes the lives of the Amazigh to this day. Some old customs live on as folk tradition: festivals tied to the farming year, protective signs against the evil eye, the esteem for certain trees and springs.