Le berbère au Moyen ge. Une culture linguistique en cours de reconstitution

Received accounts of the history of the western Muslim world portray the Berbers as an important military and political force, but pay little attention to their languages. This article attempts to redress this omission by using the Berber language to revisit the question of the islamization and the establishment of state control in western North Africa under the Almoravid and Almohad empires. In contrast to the Middle East, where the indigenous Coptic and Syriac languages virtually disappeared, few inhabitants of the Maghreb were able to read or speak Arabic before the twelfth or thirteenth century. Berber was thus the medium of islamization not only in the Maghreb but also in sub-Saharan Africa, a process in which the written language played an important part. In accordance with a prophetic tradition (hoadith), this language was not called Berber but the language of the west. The Almohad-Berbers thus sought to develop a dialect that was the expression of the sacred message.