Sanhaja

[1] Many tribes in Algeria, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia and Western Sahara bore and still carry this ethnonym, especially in its Berber form.

The historian Al-Idrīsī presents one example of the Himyarite myth as following: He then traced the origin of the Ṣanhādja and Lamṭa tribes to their common male ancestor Lamṭ, son of Za‘zā‘, who was from the children (min awlād) of Ḥimyar, and thus attributed to both of them the South Arabian roots.

According to a legend, his and his tribe’s abode was in Hejaz, but they left it in search of lost camels, so that crossed the Nile and reached the Maghrib, where al-Muṣawwir married Tāzikāy, the mother of Ṣanhādj and Lamṭ.After the arrival of the religion of Islam, the Sanhaja spread out to the borders of the Sudan as far as the Senegal River and the Niger.

In the mid-11th century, a group of Sanhaja chieftains returning from the Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) invited the theologian Ibn Yasin to preach among their tribes.

The Zenaga, a group believed to be of Gudala (the southernmost Sanhaja tribe) origin, inhabit southwestern Mauritania and parts of northern Senegal.