Ibn Khaldun, however, was probably closer to the truth in proposing that his origins were perhaps not so humble, that Maysara was probably a significant chieftain or sheikh of the Berber Matghara tribe.
As a result, many Berbers grew receptive to puritan Kharijite activists, particularly those of the Sufrite sect, that had begun arriving in the Maghreb, preaching a new political order in which all Muslims would treated without regard for ethnicity or tribal status.
His regional deputies, notably Omar ibn al-Moradi, governor of Tangiers, implemented some inventive and highly oppressive schemes to extract more revenues from the Berbers.
[citation needed] By 739 or so,[vague] the main Berber tribes under Omar's jurisdiction in western Morocco - principally the Ghomaras, Berghwata and Miknasa—decided they had enough and prepared for rebellion.
Maysara and the Berber commanders seemed to have been careful enough to wait until the bulk of the Ifriqiyan army had left North Africa on an expedition to Sicily before springing into action.
Maysara assembled his coalition of Berber armies, heads shaven in the Kharajite fashion, Qur'ans hanging from their spears, and led them bearing down on Tangiers.
[citation needed] The rumor that Maysara was a lowly 'water-carrier' probably got started around this, if only to make the caliphal pretension seem even more self-aggrandizingly ridiculous, and consequently the entire rebellion misguided.
And one of the central tenets of Kharijite ideology is precisely that the caliphal title is open to any good pious Muslim, regardless of dynastic or tribal qualifications.
While awaiting their return, Obeid Allah assembled and dispatched an Arab column from Kairouan, under Khalid ibn Abi Habib al-Fihri, towards Tangiers, to keep the rebels in check and prevent them from moving east into the middle Maghreb.
The Arab column, following their instructions, did not give pursuit, but held a line south of Tangiers, awaiting the reinforcements from the Sicilian expedition.
that the puritan Sufrite preachers that accompanied the Beber rebel armies as religious commissars found some flaw in the piety of his character, and declared him unfit to be caliph.
And it certainly seems that after Maysara's fall, the leadership of the Berber rebellion gravitated rather quickly and firmly into the hands of the eastern Zenata chieftains and their Sufrite preachers.