Banu Hilal invasion of North Africa

1052

The Fatimid caliphate unleashed the warlike Arab Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym tribes from Upper Egypt on the rebellious Zirid territories in North Africa. The resulting destruction wrecked Kairouan's agriculture for generations and fundamentally Arabized the rural population of what is now Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya. The great fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun compared the invasion to a swarm of locusts, devouring everything in its path.