THE ARAB CONQUEST 151of Miisa as governor in 705, Berber forces under Arab control were
turned westward. Much of the former Roman province of Mauritania
Tingitania was conquered by Mlisa's Berber armies, and by 710 Tariq
as his deputy in the west was established at Tangiers.^15 The rolling
process of conquest that had started in Tripolitania in 647 had now
reached to within twelve miles of the coast of the Iberian peninsula.Conquest and Society
THE sources for the history of Islamic Spain or Al-Andalus as the
Arabs called it, are incomparably richer than those available for the
preceding Roman and Visigothic periods. Although much that once
existed has now been lost, their bulk alone is impressive. The elev-
enth century historian Ibn I;Iayyan, for example, could give more
space in his work to the recording of the events of a single year than
the slightly earlier Christian Latin chroniclers who were writing in the
Asturian kingdom were prepared to devote to the history of the whole
of the preceding two centuries.^16 Immediately striking to the historian
accustomed to the allusive brevity of such Latin annals is the wealth
of detail provided by the Arab sources, such as information about the
hair and eye colours of the rulers or the size of their annual revenues
to the nearest coin. Such minuteness of description allied to con-
fident assessments of character and motive, together with a wealth of
anecdote, would seem to take us more profoundly into the heart of
this society and into the minds of at least some of its citizens than is
possible for earlier periods.
Alluring as this material undoubtedly is, it does present an array of
serious problems of source criticism and interpretation that need to
be tackled before these texts are used to reconstruct the events of the
period with which they are concerned. The first thing to note is that
virtually all of the extant Arabic historical writing concerned with Al-
Andalus in the period of its conquest and the subsequent centuries
of rule by the Umayyad dynasty (756-1031) is later in date than the
times described; in some cases considerably so. This is markedly true
of the History of the Islamic Dynasties of Spain written by Al}.mad ibn
Mul}.ammad al-Maqqari, originally from Tlemcen in North Africa, in
the years 1628 to 1631. Rather closer in time to the period in ques-
tion is another North African text, the Al-Bayan al-Maghrib of Ibn
Idhari, composed c. 1300. The principal text that is nearest in time
is the Muqtabis of Abu Marwan ibn I;Iayyan (d. 1076), which was