Banu Hilal

Masters of the vast plateaux of the Najd, they enjoyed a somewhat infamous reputation, possibly owing to their relatively late (for the Arabian tribes) conversion to Islam and accounts of their campaigns in the borderlands between Iraq and Syria.

When the Fatimid Caliphate became the rulers of Egypt and the founders of Cairo in 969, they hastened to confine the unruly Bedouin in the south before sending them to Central North Africa (Libya, Tunisia and Algeria) and then to Morocco.

[3] The Banu Hilal were very numerous, effectively a nation divided into its own sub-tribes, of which the most notable were the Athbaj, Riyah, Jusham, Zughba, Adi, and Qurra.

In Arabia, they lived on the Ghazwan near Ta'if while the Banu Sulaym attended nearby Medina, sharing a common cousin in the Al Yas branch of the Quraysh.

[3] The Banu Hilal first began migrating to the Maghreb when the Zirid dynasty of Ifriqiya proclaimed its independence from the Fatimid Caliphate of Egypt.

[13] To persuade the Bedouin into migrating to the Maghreb, the Fatimid caliph gave each tribesman a camel and money and helped them cross from the east to the west bank of the Nile River.

[6] The Fatimids used the tribe, which began their journey as allies and vassals, to punish the particularly difficult to control Zirids after the conquest of Egypt and the founding of Cairo.

[16] Their influx was a major factor in the linguistic, cultural and ethnic Arabization of the Maghreb and in the spread of nomadism in areas where agriculture had previously been dominant.

Finding their continued presence intolerable, the Almohad Caliphate defeated the Banu Hilal in the Battle of Setif and forced many of them to leave Ifriqiya and settle in Morocco.

[23][24] The accounts and records that the folk poet Abdul Rahman al-Abnudi gathered from the bards of Upper Egypt culminated in the Taghribat Bani Hilal, an Arab epic describing the journey of the tribe from Arabia to the Maghreb.

The first two bring together unfolding events in Arabia and other countries of the east, while the third, called Taghriba (march west), recounts the migration of the Banu Hilal to North Africa.

[25] Until the early 20th century, the story of Banu Hilal was performed in a variety of forms across the Arab world from Morocco to Iraq, as folktale or local legend recounted in poetry.