Lamtuna Erotic

The Lamtuna were the veiled men. Medieval Arab writers called them al-mulaththamun, wearers of the litham, because their men wound a length of cloth over the lower face and kept it there in company, before strangers, often while eating. Their women did not veil. The same custom survives among the Tuareg, their distant desert cousins, and it made the Lamtuna identifiable at a distance: a camel people who could be named before they were close enough to greet.

They belong to the Sanhaja, the great Berber confederation of the western Sahara, and their range ran from the Sous valley in southern Morocco down across sand and gravel to the Adrar plateau. Wandering is the wrong word for what they did. Camel nomadism was infrastructure: it let them hold the wells and the road between the salt pans of the deep desert and the gold moving north out of the Sudan. The caravan town of Awdaghust sat in Sanhaja hands before the empire of Ghana took it.

In the eleventh century a reforming preacher, Abdallah ibn Yasin, found his audience among these tribes, and the movement that came out of that meeting, the Almoravids, put Lamtuna commanders at the head of an empire. Yusuf ibn Tashfin ruled from the new city of Marrakesh, crossed to Spain, broke Alfonso VI at Zallaqa in 1086, and then swallowed the taifa kings he had come to rescue. For roughly a century a desert tribe governed from the Senegal River to the Ebro. When the Almohads ended it, Lamtuna families went north and stayed, and Almoravid remnants held the Balearic Islands and fought on in Ifriqiya long after Marrakesh had fallen.

What remained in the Sahara lost ground to Arab migration. The Char Bouba war of the seventeenth century left Sanhaja groups subordinate to Arab warrior lineages, and much of Berber Mauritania turned to Hassaniya Arabic and to a clerical vocation: law, teaching, the copying of manuscripts. The Lemtuna today are a tribe of southern Mauritania with named houses, Ehl Aly Ibn Ibrahim and Ehl Sidelemine among them, and recognized offshoots such as the Tajakant and the Messouma spread across Mauritania, Western Sahara, Morocco and Algeria. Zenaga, the old Berber tongue, is nearly gone. The veil is not.