{UAH} Why do the people of North Africa have almost nothing in common with the rest of Africa or African people?

Why do the people of North Africa have almost nothing in common with the rest of Africa or African people?

A Moroccan here.

If you think North Africa has 'almost nothing' in common with the rest of Africa, you obviously have no real understanding of the cultures of Africa, the north and Sub-Sahara.

First of all, as humans we all have much more in common than the things separating us.

Let's look specifically at my part of North Africa, the Maghreb, and how it fits in to the societies that live to its south.

A small anecdote. Few years ago, I met a Senegalese man whose last name was Tijani. I recognized the name as being derived from an 18th century Sufi brotherhood that I knew was widespread in West Africa, the so-called Tijaniyyah. But the founder of the brotherhood was actually an Algerian, and the Sufi order was most successful in attracting adherents in West Africa, where it went on to become the dominant creed of Sufism. In Morocco and Algeria it died out, losing out against other orders, but it went on to prosper in the countries of West Africa, where many folk can still be found named after the mystical order.

The city I had met the man in was Marrakesh, a major urban settlement of Morocco, the city that gave its name to the country at large. Marrakesh is an old city, having roots in a late 11th century Almoravid military camp. These people originated among a religious reform movement of (semi-)nomadic communities of the south of the Sahel, the border region between what is now Mauritania and Mali.

The countries of North Africa and West Africa have a great many things in common, beyond the obvious ties in religious experiences.

For the cultures of the Maghreb are Saharan-Mediterranean in character. People often tend to forget the Sahara part. The part that ties them in to West Africa, like a chain ties in one post of a fence to another.

Timbouktou, Mali.

Ghardaia, Algeria.

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Replaced image. The posted image was of a town Yemen. A mistake that isn't entirely random. The southern part of Arabia shares a great deal, culturally, with the Sahara and the Sahel. Yemen really is in many ways a cultural brother of the Saharan Maghreb and the Sahel of Africa.

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Aspects of traditional North African culture that seem most un-African to many observers are those tied to the Muslim Iberian tradition, a tradition that deeply affected the cultures of the Maghreb, especially its urban heritage. It is when observers concentrate on those cultural aspects of traditional Maghrebi life that people often see a cultural heritage that has no counterpart in other parts of Africa.

Selected images from the Moroccan town of Salé: 13th century gate to the Jewish neighborhood, the Great Mosque and a ruined Quranic school, both 14th century.

This architecture here is typical of post 12th century North Africa, when the different countries of the Maghreb and Muslim Granada morphed into a coherent socio-political whole, with the different parts of 'the West' influencing one another. It is this tradition that most strikes invested people when they think of North African or Moroccan architecture. The only

But this heritage isn't all that defines traditional North Africa culture. It's but one part of a bigger whole, a whole that just as neatly ties into the cultures of the Sahel of Sub-Saharan Africa.

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In an earlier answer I touched upon the complicated intertwining of Maghrebi social and cultural life with that of the Muslim cultures of Medieval southern Europe, Sicily and Cordoba in particular, and how that interaction helped give form to the cultures of the Maghreb. Check it out, it's pretty cool.

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