The Berbers

Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress's The Berbers is a standard scholarly history of North Africa's indigenous Amazigh peoples from antiquity through the modern period, written by two historians with specialist command of the classical, Arabic and colonial-era sources bearing on the region. Its authority is well established as a synthesizing academic history covering an enormous span, including the region's pre-Islamic religious practice, the process of Islamization, and the persistence of distinct Amazigh identity and custom within Islamic North Africa. As a broad survey covering millennia and a vast geographic range, it necessarily treats some periods and regions in less depth than others, and readers wanting fine-grained detail on a specific era or locality should expect to supplement it with more narrowly focused regional scholarship.