In other languages it is pronounced in similar or different ways: Nomadic Berbers, mainly of the Senhaja / Zenaga tribal confederation, inhabited the areas now known as Western Sahara, southern Morocco, Mauritania and southwestern Algeria, before Islam arrived in the 8th century CE.

Berber caravans transported salt, gold, and slaves between North and West Africa, and the control of trade routes became a major ingredient in the constant power struggles between various tribes and sedentary peoples.

On more than one occasion, the Berber tribes of present-day Mauritania, Morocco and Western Sahara united behind religious leaders to sweep the surrounding governments from power, then founding principalities, dynasties, or even vast empires of their own.

In the early 13th century, the Yemeni Maqil tribes migrated westwards across the entirety of Arabia and northern Africa, to finally settle around present-day Morocco.

The latter were primarily acquired through mixing with Wolof, Soninke and other populations of the southern Sahel, and through the acquisition of slaves by wealthier nomad families.

In pre-colonial times, the Sahara was generally considered Blad Essiba or "the land of dissidence" by the Moroccan central government and Sultan of Morocco in Fez, and by the authorities of the Deys of Algiers.

Central governments had little control over the region, although the Hassaniya tribes would occasionally extend "beya" or allegiance to prestigious rulers, to gain their political backing or, in some cases, as a religious ceremony.

The Moorish populations of what is today northern Mauritania established a number of emirates, claiming the loyalty of several different tribes and through them exercising semi-sovereignty over traditional grazing lands.

These colonial intrusions brought the Muslim Saharan peoples under Christian European rule for the first time, and created lasting cultural and political divides between and within existing populations, as well as upsetting traditional balances of power in differing ways.

Their nomadic lifestyle made direct control over the territories hard to achieve, as did general lawlessness, an absence of prior central authority, and a widely held contempt for the kind of settled life that the colonizers sought to bring about.

Mauritania's raiding Moors had been brought under control in the previous decades, partly through skilful exploitation by the French of traditional rivalries and social divisions between the tribes.

In these encounters, the large Reguibat tribe proved especially resistant to the new rulers, and its fighters would regularly slip in out of French and Spanish territory, similarly exploiting the rivalries between European powers.

The Sahrawi-Moorish tribes remained largely nomadic until the early to mid-20th century, when Franco-Spanish rivalries (as well as disagreements between different wings of the French colonial regime) managed to impose rigid, if arbitrary, borders on the previously fluid Sahara.

The wide-ranging grazing lands of the nomads were split apart, and their traditional economies, based on trans-Saharan caravan trade and raiding of each other and the northern and southern Sahel neighbors, were broken.

In Mauritania, they experienced a French non-settler colonial administration which, if light in its demands on the nomads, also deliberately overturned the existing social order, allying itself with lower-ranking marabout and zenaga tribes against the powerful warrior clans of the Hassane Arabs.

For example, both sides in the Western Sahara conflict (Morocco vs. the Polisario Front) draw heavily on colonial history to prove their version of reality.

Proponents of the Greater Morocco ideology point to some Sahrawi tribes calling upon the Moroccan sultan, who until 1912 remained the last independent Islamic ruler of the area, for assistance against the Europeans (see Ma al-'Aynayn).

Pro-independence Sahrawis, on the other hand, point out that such statements of allegiance were almost routinely given by various tribal leaders to create short-term alliances, and that other heads of tribes indeed similarly proclaimed allegiance to Spain, to France, to Mauritanian emirates, and indeed to each other; they argue that such arrangements always proved temporary, and that the tribal confederations always maintained de facto independence of central authority, and would even fight to maintain this independence.

The same kind of ruling was issued with regard to Mauritania, where the court found that there were indeed strong tribal and cultural links between the Sahrawis and Mauritanian populations, including historical allegiance to some Moorish emirates, but that these were not ties of a state or government character, and did not constitute formal bonds of sovereignty.

Thus, the court recommended the United Nations to continue to pursue self-determination for the Sahrawis, enabling them to choose for themselves whether they wanted Spanish Sahara to turn into an independent state, or to be annexed to Morocco or Mauritania.

The organization has maintained a cease-fire with Morocco since 1991 (see Settlement Plan), but continues to strive for the territory's independence as the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) through peaceful negotiations.

The zawiya tribes were protected by Hassan overlords in exchange for their religious services and payment of the horma, a tributary tax in cattle or goods; while they were in a sense exploited, the relationship was often more or less symbiotic.

[23] The number of Hassaniya speakers identifying as Sahrawi in the modern political sense is unknown, and estimates are hotly contested by partisans in the Western Sahara conflict.

Sahrawis' native language is the Hassānīya, a variety of Arabic originally spoken by the Beni Hassan Arabian tribes of the Western Sahara.

The current Moroccan constitution (adopted in July 2011) mentions, in its 5th article, the Hassaniya language and recommends its preservation as a cultural heritage of Morocco.

During colonial times, Spain attempted to assume some of the legitimacy of these traditional institutions by creating its own Djema'a, a state-run political association that supported its claims to the territory.