Berque wrote several histories on the classical and medieval periods in the Arab world, as well as highly influential works on modern era colonisation and decolonisation.
As such he was viewed as a sympathetic observer of Muslim society, arguing that the role of Islam was key to any work on the Middle East and North Africa.
Five years of residence among them led to the book which established his scholarly reputation, Les Structures Sociales du Haut Atlas (1955).
He lived his last years and died in a village in the Landes, the region in south-west France from which the Berque family originates.
He was made director of Muslim Sociological Studies at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes, and a year later, in 1956, was appointed Professor of the Social History of Contemporary Islam at the Collège de France, a post he occupied until his retirement in 1981.
Based on a reading of 15 texts which he had taught at the Collège de France, the book runs to more than 500 pages, and is an important document on the history of the Maghreb.
He believed in the importance of bringing together different, but related, regions, whether in the Arabic- speaking world or in the Mediterranean, as can be seen from the titles of two of his books, De l'Euphrate a l'Atlas ("From the Euphrates to the Atlas", 1978) and Memoires des deux rives ("Recollections from Both Shores of the Mediterranean", 1989), the latter described by Ernest Gellner, as 'a splendid account of what it was to be a pied-noir slowly converted to anti-colonialism'.