The upbringing that an Arab woman receives in a tent is not exactly calculated to ensure in any way a moral tone. A young girl is from the very outset of her innocent life apt to see and learn much that to us appears offensive.
Whereas the man has every possible right of control over his wife, she has only the “justice of God” (el hak Allah), meaning that he must fulfil his obligations towards her as her husband, failing which she can demand a divorce, not an infrequent occurrence.
After the enactment of the law emancipating slaves, the men in some tribes married their negresses, with a view to thus evading the law. But it befell that the former went into court and complained that they were defrauded of their rights as wives.
Although the Arabs, as aliens, have always been in a minority in the land of the Berbers, yet they were the masters until the arrival of the French. They had steadily spread themselves over all the open plains and lower tablelands, moving ever from east to west. Thus each tribe continually changed its territory, one tribe ever pressing another before it farther westward.
Long before Mohammed’s day this immigration had already begun, but it was not until after his time that it made any real headway, and the conquest of the country and its conversion to Mohammedanism took place.
Not until much later, in the middle of the eleventh century, was the great migration accomplished, in which both Mongols and Egyptians were included. Such great waves, however, always cause a counter wave. When the tribes reached the shores of the Atlantic on the most distant coasts of Morocco, the tide turned. Thus the tribe that claims to be the chief of all the tribes, namely, the Shorfa, or “Followers of the Prophet,” is precisely that which, having been to Morocco, returned eastwards.
Yet another receding wave brought back the “Arabs” who had conquered Spain, and who were afterwards driven forth again.
These Spanish “Arabs” were for the most part Berbers who had been carried westward by the tide, and who returned, after a long sojourn on the Iberian peninsula, blended with other races—Ligurians, Iberians, Celts, and Western Goths.
The greater proportion of these refugees, who are known in Barbary as “Andaluz,” established themselves in the towns, where they introduced a new strain into the already mixed race of Moors. These Spanish Moors are more especially represented in Tunis.
It is quite natural that, in a country so often invaded and peopled by foreigners who to this day have never really amalgamated, there should be an entire lack of patriotism such as is found in Europe. It is as Mussulmans that these races have united to make war against the Christian. Amongst themselves they are often at enmity.