North Africa entered the Muslim imperial sphere during the Arab conquests of the seventh century, with Egypt serving as the eastern base of expansion into the Maghrib. This incorporation brought the region into a wider political, religious and commercial system that connected the Mediterranean with the Sahara and the western Islamic lands.

The region did not remain permanently subordinate to the first Arab empire. After the mid-eighth century, Spain, North Africa and later Egypt gradually achieved independence and followed their own political paths. By the end of the eleventh century, the original empire had been replaced by a varied landscape of regional powers and competing dynasties, many of them non-Arab in origin.

North Africa’s cultural and linguistic transformation was not identical to its initial conquest. The seventh-century expansion is associated here with the Islamization of the Maghrib, whereas the Hilali invasion of the eleventh century is associated with its Arabization. These processes unfolded within a broader Muslim world in which religion provided a shared identity across diverse peoples.

The western Islamic lands also experienced distinctive monetary conditions. The Maghrib and Muslim Spain remained for a long time within the orbit of silver currency, partly because accessible gold mines were lacking. This changed in the tenth century as gold imports from the Western Sudan increased, eventually contributing to the prominence of the Almoravid dinar.