The very slowness of its decay is a testimony to the toleration it must have received. About 300 years after the Muhammadan conquest there were still nearly forty bishoprics left,[105] and when in 1053 Pope Leo IX laments that only five bishops could be found to represent the once flourishing African Church,[106] the cause is most probably to be sought for in the terrible bloodshed and destruction wrought by the Arab hordes that had poured into the country a few years before and filled it with incessant conflict [[127]]and anarchy.[107] In 1076, the African Church could not provide the three bishops necessary for the consecration of an aspirant to the dignity of the episcopate, in accordance with the demands of canon law, and it was necessary for Pope Gregory VII to consecrate two bishops to act as coadjutors of the Archbishop of Carthage; but the numbers of the faithful were still so large as to demand the creation of fresh bishops to lighten the burden of the work, which was too heavy for these three bishops to perform unaided.[108] In the course of the next two centuries, the Christian Church declined still further, and in 1246 the bishop of Morocco was the sole spiritual leader of the remnant of the native Church.[109] Up to the same period traces of the survival of Christianity were still to be found among the Kabils of Algeria;[110] these tribes had received some slight instruction in the tenets of Islam at an early period, but the new faith had taken very little hold upon them, and as years went by they lost even what little knowledge they had at first possessed, so much so that they even forgot the Muslim formula of prayer. Shut up in their mountain fastnesses and jealous of their independence, they successfully resisted the introduction of the Arab element into their midst, and thus the difficulties in the way of their conversion were very considerable. Some unsuccessful attempts to start a mission among them had been made by the inmates of a monastery belonging to the Qādiriyyah order, Sāqiyah al-ḥamrāʼ, but the honour of winning an entrance among them for the Muslim faith was reserved for a number of Andalusian Moors who were driven out of Spain after the taking of Granada in 1492. They had taken refuge in this monastery and were recognised by the shayk͟h to be eminently fitted for the arduous task that had previously so completely baffled the efforts of his disciples. Before dismissing them on this pious errand, he thus addressed them: “It is a duty incumbent [[128]]upon us to bear the torch of Islam into these regions that have lost their inheritance in the blessings of religion; for these unhappy Kabils are wholly unprovided with schools, and have no shayk͟h to teach their children the laws of morality and the virtues of Islam; so they live like the brute beasts, without God or religion. To do away with this unhappy state of things, I have determined to appeal to your religious zeal and enlightenment. Let not these mountaineers wallow any longer in their pitiable ignorance of the grand truths of our religion; go and breathe upon the dying fire of their faith and re-illumine its smouldering embers; purge them of whatever errors may still cling to them from their former belief in Christianity; make them understand that in the religion of our lord Muḥammad—may God have compassion upon him—dirt is not, as in the Christian religion, looked upon as acceptable in the eyes of God.[111] I will not disguise from you the fact that your task is beset with difficulties, but your irresistible zeal and the ardour of your faith will enable you, by the grace of God, to overcome all obstacles. Go, my children, and bring back again to God and His Prophet these unhappy people who are wallowing in the mire of ignorance and unbelief. Go, my children, bearing the message of salvation, and may God be with you and uphold you.”
The missionaries started off in parties of five or six at a time in various directions; they went in rags, staff in hand, and choosing out the wildest and least frequented parts of the mountains, established hermitages in caves and clefts of the rocks. Their austerities and prolonged devotions soon excited the curiosity of the Kabils, who after a short time began to enter into friendly relations with them. Little by little the missionaries gained the influence they desired through their knowledge of medicine, of the mechanical arts, and other advantages of civilisation, and each hermitage became a centre of Muslim teaching. [[129]]Students, attracted by the learning of the new-comers, gathered round them and in time became missionaries of Islam to their fellow-countrymen, until their faith spread throughout all the country of the Kabils and the villages of the Algerian Sahara.[112]
The above incident is no doubt illustrative of the manner in which Islam was introduced among such other sections of the independent tribes of the interior as had received any Christian teaching, but whose knowledge of this faith had dwindled down to the observance of a few superstitious rites;[113] for, cut off as they were from the rest of the Christian world and unprovided with spiritual teachers, they could have had little in the way of positive religious belief to oppose to the teachings of the Muslim missionaries.
There is little more to add to these sparse records of the decay of the North African Church. A Muhammadan traveller,[114] who visited al-Jarīd, the southern district of Tunis, in the early part of the fourteenth century, tells us that the Christian churches, although in ruins, were still standing in his day, not having been destroyed by the Arab conquerors, who had contented themselves with building a mosque in front of each of these churches. Ibn K͟haldūn (writing towards the close of the fourteenth century), speaks of some villages in the province of Qastīliyyah,[115] with a Christian population whose ancestors had lived there since the time of the Arab conquest.[116] At the end of the following century there was still to be found in the city of Tunis a small community of native Christians, living together in one of the suburbs, quite distinct from that in which the foreign Christian merchants resided; far from being oppressed or persecuted, they were employed as the bodyguard of the Sultan.[117] These were doubtless [[130]]the same persons as were congratulated on their perseverance in the Christian faith by Charles V after the capture of Tunis in 1535.[118]
This is the last we hear of the native Christian Church in North Africa. The very fact of its so long survival would militate against any supposition of forced conversion, even if we had not abundant evidence of the tolerant spirit of the Arab rulers of the various North African kingdoms, who employed Christian soldiers,[119] granted by frequent treaties the free exercise of their religion to Christian merchants and settlers,[120] and to whom Popes[121] recommended the care of the native Christian population, while exhorting the latter to serve their Muhammadan rulers faithfully.[122] [[131]]
[1] Amélineau, p. 3; Caetani, vol. iv. p. 81 sq. Justinian is said to have had 200,000 Copts put to death in the city of Alexandria, and the persecutions of his successors drove many to take refuge in the desert. (Wansleben: The Present State of Egypt, p. 11.) (London, 1678.) [↑]
[2] Renaudot, p. 161. Severus, p. 106. [↑]
[3] John, Jacobite bishop of Nikiu (second half of seventh century), p. 584. Caetani, vol. iv. pp. 515–16. [↑]
[4] Bell, p. xxxvii. But the exactions and hardships that, according to Maqrīzī, the Copts had to endure about seventy years after the conquest hardly allow us to extend this period so far as Von Ranke does: “Von Aegypten weiss man durch die bestimmtesten Zeugnisse, dass sich die Einwohner in den nächsten Jahrhunderten unter der arabischen Herrschaft in einem erträglichen Zustand befunden haben.” (Weltgeschichte, vol. v. p. 153, 4th ed.) [↑]