Zenata Erotic

The Zenata were a confederation of Berber tribes that dominated the central and western Maghreb from the Arab conquest to the sixteenth century, and whose descendants survive as Arabic speakers across Morocco and Algeria and as Berber-speaking communities from the Rif to the Sahara. Ibn Khaldun, who served their courts and whose brother wrote the chronicle of Zenata Tlemcen, counted them as one of the three great Berber families with the Sanhaja and the Masmuda. What set them apart was the horse. The Masmuda farmed the Atlas and the Sanhaja worked the deep desert with camels; the Zenata were tent-dwelling herders of the steppe and high plateau who fought from the saddle with short stirrups and light lances. The reputation crossed the sea. The Spanish word jinete, a horseman, comes from their name, and the riding style called a la jineta was theirs before Castile borrowed it.

They began in the east, between the Aurès mountains and Tripolitania, where the Jarawa, counted among the Zenata, produced Dihya, the Kahina, who led the last serious resistance to the Umayyad armies at the end of the seventh century. Once inside Islam, many Zenata chose its Kharijite forms, Sufri and Ibadi, which promised equality among believers and no privilege for Arab blood. They drove the Berber revolt of 740 and founded early trading states at Sijilmasa and Tlemcen. Over the tenth and eleventh centuries the confederation drifted west, squeezed between the Fatimids, their Sanhaja allies, and the Arab Bedouin migrations that followed, and it was in Morocco and western Algeria that Zenata power peaked. The Marinids took Fez in 1248 and built the madrasas that still define its old city; the Zayyanids made Tlemcen a capital of merchants and scholars for three centuries; the Wattasids held Morocco until the Saadi sharifs pushed them out in 1554; and Zenata cavalry, the Volunteers of the Faith, propped up Nasrid Granada, the last Muslim state in Spain.

No nation carries their name, but a great deal survives in pieces. Linguists call a whole branch of Northern Berber Zenati after them, spoken today by Riffians, the Chaouis of the Aurès, the Ibadi Mozabites of the Mzab valley, and the oasis communities of Figuig, Ouargla, Gourara, Djerba and Matmata. In Gourara the language is simply Taznatit, Zenata speech. The plains tribes that switched to Arabic kept their genealogies longer than their words, and Ibn Khaldun's judgment that the Zenata were the most numerous and formidable Berbers of his age still frames how the medieval Maghreb is read.