Baranis Erotic

The Baranis were one half of the Berber world as medieval North African genealogists drew it: a family of tribes spread from Tunisia to Atlantic Morocco and the western Sahara, prominent between the 7th and 13th centuries, whose descendants form much of the Amazigh and Arabic-speaking population of the Maghreb today. The other half were the Butr. The two were said to descend from brothers, Burnus and Madghis al-Abtar. Berber genealogists built the scheme, and Ibn Khaldun set it down most fully in the 14th century. Whether it preserved a native division or tidied a messy political map into a family tree is still debated.

The name invites guesses. One links Baranis to the burnous, the hooded wool cloak still worn across North Africa, and reads Butr through an Arabic word for something cut short, as if the split were between long cloaks and short tunics. Colonial-era French historians preferred a cleaner story: Baranis as settled farmers, Butr as nomads. The tribe lists do not cooperate. The Sanhaja, firmly Baranis, included the veiled camel herders of the Sahara. The sources did not agree on every tribe either, and the Hawwara turn up on both sides.

The branches mattered more than the label. The Awraba, led by Kusayla, killed the Arab commander Uqba ibn Nafi in 683 and briefly held Kairouan. A century later, settled around the Roman ruins of Volubilis, they took in the fugitive Idris ibn Abdallah and backed the dynasty that built Fez. The Kutama of the eastern Algerian highlands took up the Ismaili cause and supplied the army that brought the Fatimids to power in 909. Sanhaja lines produced the Zirid and Hammadid rulers, and the desert Sanhaja, the Lamtuna and Guddala, launched the Almoravid movement that founded Marrakesh and crossed into al-Andalus. The Masmuda of the High Atlas rallied to Ibn Tumart and carried the Almohads to empire.

Religion ran through this. Before the conquest these tribes lived alongside Roman and Byzantine Christianity and older local beliefs. Afterward they took up Islam and bent it to their own politics, from Kutama Shiism to Almoravid Maliki rigor to the Almohad doctrine of God's absolute unity. On the Atlantic plain the Barghawata, counted among the Masmuda, went further and kept a prophet and scripture of their own for centuries.

No one calls themselves Baranis now, but the tribal names persist: in the Tashelhit-speaking communities of the Souss and High Atlas, long linked to the Masmuda; in Kabylia, where the Kutama and their Zwawa kin once held the hills; and in Mauritania's Zenaga language, whose name comes from the same Berber word as Sanhaja.