Islam arrived in the 7th century, when the Arab armies swept out of Arabia,
quickly conquering Egypt.
The Arabs had taken all of North Africa by the start of
the 8th century, and, with Kairouan as its capital, the region became a
province of the fast-expanding Islamic empire controlled by the caliphs of Damascus.
The Berbers adopted Islamic religious teachings readily enough, but they
riled under their harsh treatment by the Arabs. Their uprisings continued until
909, when a group of Berber Shiites, the Fatimids, glommed together disaffected
Berber tribes and took North Africa back from the Arabs.
The unity of the Berbers was to be short-lived. When some of the tribes
returned to the Sunni mainstream, a civil war started and North
Africa was slowly reduced to ruins.
Conflicts arose again when North Africa was caught in
the middle of the rivalry between Spain
and the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the 16th
century. Tunis changed hands half
a dozen times in some 50 years, before the Turks took it in 1574 and it became
an Ottoman territory. Ottoman power lasted through to the 19th century, when France
became the new power in the western Mediterranean and Tunis
came under increasing pressure to conform to their European ways.
World War and Modern Tunisia
Tunisia
became on of the great battlefields of World War Two when Field Marshal
Rommel’s Afrika Korps, reeling from its defeat at El Alemain, made a last stand
against the British forces under Montgomery
pushing from the East, and the American forces moving from the west under
General Patton.
The French granted independence to Tunisia
in 1956, and Habib Bourguiba, who led the Independence
movement, became the first Tunisian president. In accordance with the pattern
prevailing across the developing world in that era, the liberator turned
dictator. His style was marked by a strong anti-Islamic fundamentalist stance.
He was finally ousted from power in a coup by Zine el-Abadine ben Ali in 1987
on grounds of senility.