"Tunisia: A magic land of great contrasts " a Tunisia Travel Page by BarbieGirl

Towards the Berberi's land...

The word "maghrib", according to its meaning means the position of a place compared to the Orient. Now this word means a very specific place. The land where the Berberi's populations resided, between the desert, the castles and the fortress they've built. This is a passage taken from the big opera called "Ibar (The Book of the examples) of Abd-ar-Rahman Ibn Mohammad, best known as Ibn Khaldun, born in Tunis in the year 732 from the Egira (1354 d.c.) and he's considered the father of sociology and of the islamic's storyography. Ibn Khaldun defines with a very great precision the territory and the geneaology of the various berbere's tribes and from his writes emerge a wide geographic panorama and cultural scenery. But at Khaldun's time, that population had lost great part of its identity and almost all of its powers. Nowdays, to find out their traces, we have to move on very stricted and specific areas inside the Maghreb, word that for us means the part of the north-occidental Africa between Marocco and Tunisia.
And here is where my travel begins...let's start on the land of origin of Ibn Khaldun, next to the borders of the Jebel Dahar, the long chains of mountains that divides into two parts the south of Tunisia: at west the beginning of the big Oriental Erg and at east, the Gefara, a flooded area. And it's here that at the beginning of the year 1000, many berbere's tribes came to find some refugees to escape from the arabian invasion. They were nomads at first but after that they became djebalia, that means mountain dweller. And it's here that live most part of the berbere's populations (hardly the 1% of the entire population).