North Africa, the Maghreb and the Sahara, from Morocco to Libya, has a religious significance out of proportion to its frequent neglect, above all for the history of Christianity and Islam. In the Roman period the province of Africa (centred on Carthage, in modern Tunisia) was one of the most vital centres of Latin Christianity, producing a remarkable line of thinkers who effectively created Western theology in Latin: Tertullian, who first wrote Christian theology in Latin and coined much of its vocabulary; Cyprian, the martyr-bishop of Carthage; and, supremely, Augustine of Hippo, whose thought would shape all subsequent Western Christianity.
North African Christianity was also the crucible of great controversies, Donatism over the purity of the Church, and the debates over grace and free will, before it was largely eclipsed. From the seventh century the region was progressively won for Islam, and North Africa became a heartland of the Muslim world: a centre of Maliki legal scholarship, of the great mosque-universities like the Qarawiyyin at Fez (one of the oldest in the world), and of vibrant Sufi brotherhoods whose saints (marabouts) and shrines shape popular Islam across the Maghreb to this day. Before both, the region carried the older Berber (Amazigh) religion and the Phoenician cults of Carthage. North Africa thus stands as a ground where Latin Christian theology was largely made and where a distinctive, Sufi-inflected Islam took deep root.