A Gateway to Hell, A Gateway to Paradise: The North African Response to the Arab Conquest.

• Author: BONNER, MICHAEL
• Position: Review

A Gateway to Hell, A Gateway to Paradise: The North African Response to the Arab Conquest. By ELIZABETH SAVAGE. Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, vol. 7. Princeton: DARWIN PRESS, 1997. Pp. x + 206. $29.95.

Unlike the native populations of most of the Near East, the Berbers of North Africa converted in large numbers to Islam soon after their conquest by the Arabs in the second half of the seventh century. However, we have little reliable evidence for how and when these conversions look place. As soon as we find Berbers as protagonists in the Islamic history of the Maghrib, it is often (though not always) as dissident Muslims of the Kharijite persuasion. In the 740s the Maghrib saw spectacular revolts in which both Berbers and Kharijism were central. After more decades of instability, one form of Kharijism, Ibadism, prevailed over its rivals and, beginning in 160/777, found its political expression in the Rustamid imamate of Tahert. This Rustamid state held loose and shifting control over the cradle-shaped tribal hinterland of the [[blank].sup.c]Abbasid province of Ifriqiya and its successor, the Aghlabid amirate. As Elizabeth Savage shows here, the Rustamid and Aghlabid states lived in a largely symbiotic relat ionship, despite doctrinal and other differences, until the demise of both at the hands of the Fatimids in 296/909.

This complex story presents a number of puzzles which Savage has undertaken to clarify in this book, The result is highly interesting and in some cases illuminating, even if some of the puzzles remain unsolved. In the introduction the reader may have difficulty in identifying the book's precise focus. The thesis implicit in the subtitle does not emerge until later, as at p. 90:

Many Berbers became Muslim, possibly not Muslims in a strictly religious sense, but rather in terms of throwing in their lot with Muslim leaders who seemed most likely to protect their interests. It is at any rate clear that Khariji Islam spread like wildfire from the early eighth century, when the motivation was less spiritual than a pragmatic vigorous response to the Arabs' military invasion, political usurpation, and regular enslavement.

It might have been more effective to feature this and similar ideas from the beginning.

The first chapter is devoted to the Rustamid imamate. The founding figures of Ibadism in the East (mainly Basra) were claimed afterwards as Imams by North African Ibadi tradition. However, the Rustamid Imams of...