The sorceress' mane swirls around her as she screams:
"I, Dihya, will be killed, and my head carried on horseback to the Orient,
exhibited before the King of Arabs."
Her three sons stare in horror: another of her visions!
It’s around 697 in the Maghreb, North Africa. Most of Dihya's army of horsemen are dead,
and the survivors have retreated deep into the mountains.
In the valley below, thousands of spears and swords of General Hassan's advancing
Arab army are glinting in the sun.
"Mother – why won't you flee?"
"I am a queen. And queens do not flee death."
Who was this sorcerer queen, willing to die a horrible death to change the fate of her people?
Free People
In the 7th Century, the coast of what is now Tunisia and eastern Algeria
is ruled from the city of Carthage by the Byzantines.
They are the surviving eastern half of the Roman empire – but the vast interior, all the way to the
Atlantic, belongs to different groups of people the Byzantines call Moors, and the Arabs will call
Berbers, probably from the Greek "barbarian". Today, some of their descendants see this as a
derogatory term and prefer: Imazighen – “Free People.”
These groups have lived in North Africa for thousands of years,
but are often only linked by related languages.
In antiquity some of their kingdoms were absorbed into the Roman empire,
many blending into a diverse Roman-African society.
But after the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century, and the Byzantines were
only able to reclaim a fraction of the land in 534, imperial influence slowly faded.
So two centuries later, Imazighen power is rising again: chiefs rule over small
kingdoms from old Roman towns, others have seized control over Byzantine frontier forts.
Dozens of stubbornly independent tribes follow their animals to the Saharan oases,
or have settled atop the steepest cliffs, so that no one might rule over them.
In one village in the Aurès Mountains, lives Dihya.
Her enemies, the Arabs, will later call her "al-Kahina" – "the sorceress".
But her life reaches us only through stories retold around desert campfires,
so her origins remain mysterious.
Dihya’s tribe stays in the mountains in the summer;
in winter, they follow their flocks down to the desert steppes.
We don't really know what she believes in, most tribes worship pagan gods or their ancestors,
while some have converted to Christianity or Judaism.
But just recently a new faith has erupted into the world,
carried by armies that seem to win everywhere they go, and it is racing toward them: Islam.
Rise of a Queen
Muhammad, the prophet and political leader of what is now Saudi Arabia dies in 632,
but his successors from the Rashidun Caliphate help spread his faith fast.
Within a decade, the Caliphate’s armies have destroyed the Persian Sasanian Empire and
taken the Levant and Egypt away from Byzantium, humiliating two of the world's great powers.
After a bloody civil war ends in 661,
the ambitious Umayyad dynasty takes over the caliphate.
To deal the Byzantines a fatal blow, they wage war on multiple fronts.
And North Africa with its strategic harbors
and vast tax returns is an attractive asset to fuel their growing empire.
While some Imazighen tribes side with the Arabs
early on, others ally with the Byzantines, and fight back hard.
Internal conflict slows the conquest, but in 692 the Umayyad caliph Abd-Al Malik secures control,
eager to prove the strength of his empire.
He sends a new general to the Maghreb: Hassān ibn al-Nuʿmān al-Ghassānī,
part of the Umayyad elite in Syria.
He sweeps west with 40,000 men, the largest Muslim
force ever seen in the region, although the figure was maybe inflated by later Arab historians.
And he goes for the biggest prize first: Carthage, the ancient center of Roman power in North Africa.
When they reach it, the Byzantines have fled in fear – a huge victory for the Umayyad Empire.
Just the land beyond is still not theirs,
so general Hassan asks around: who's the most powerful ruler out there?
In this shifting world of self-ruling tribes and loose confederations,
real power is hard to pin down.
The last king to unite part of them was killed in an earlier Arab raid.
But now many Imazighen regroup around an unexpected new leader – a warrior
queen of immense authority in the Aurès mountains.
Some say she is the old king’s mother.
Others whisper she can see the future.
Her name is Dihya.
The River of Sufferings
Hassan's army fills the horizon from end to end, an endless column of horses, camels and infantry.
In this motley crew, Persians ride back-to-back with Coptic Egyptians, and all sorts of others.
Some are drawn by faith, some by pay and plunder,
and many simply by the Arab Empire’s sheer success.
Many Imazighen tribesmen who had suffered
under Byzantine rule are now betting on the rising power.
Among the Arabs, each clan is riding under its own banner,
bound together by rivalry as much as shared faith.
They look toward the forested slopes of the Aurès Mountains
and see a land handed to them by God. But the mountains are looking back.
Dihya has been watching the dust cloud of Hassan's army for days,
or perhaps, she had seen them in a vision.
She descends with a coalition of thousands of Imazighen horsemen,
their heads shaven for battle, except for long scalplocks marking their clans.
The two worlds meet at the banks of a river, probably near Meskiana in present-day Algeria.
Hassan barks an order: archers drop to one knee, behind them spearmen
drive their weapons into the ground and level their points forwards like a fence.
Dihya’s riders break into a gallop.
Her strategy: overwhelm the Arabs in one furious attack or die trying.
Arrows tear into them and some go down tumbling in the dust, but the charge does not slow.
Their javelins slam into the enemy ranks, snapping men backward off their feet.
The Arab cavalry surges out and they clash with the Imazighen,
trampling warriors into the riverbank mud.
Hassan drives forward flanked by his elite Syrian forces,
but then she appears, her hair flowing like a dark banner: the warrior-queen.
A roar moves through her ranks, and men who were falling back turn and charge again.
Their spears punch through cloth and flesh, and their sling-stones smash faces.
Men who have defeated armies from Persia to Egypt
now run for their lives, leaving hundreds of bodies in the river.
Hassan and his army flee east and do not stop until they reach modern day Libya,
almost two thousand kilometers away.
Disgraced, the Arabs call the site of their destruction “the river of sufferings”.
Dihya takes eighty prisoners, but releases all except Khalid ibn Yazid,
whom she adopts – maybe for his bravery, maybe for his beauty.
Some say she makes it official through a shared meal with her two other sons.
Folklore tells us she seals the adoption by breastfeeding.
Dihya's victory does not just stop Hassan for now, it's a disaster.
While he’s waiting for orders, the Byzantines retake Carthage.
For a brief moment Arab power in the Maghreb is about to collapse almost
as quickly as it had appeared.
And it is said that Dihya rises higher than ever, as more and more Imazighen tribes rally around her.
She has proven the Arab Empire can be beaten, and standing with her is the
best way to stay free – for now.
And now back into the desert!
The Last Stand
About five years later the people in Carthage experience a déjà vu.
Out at sea, a massive fleet appears – general Hassan is back.
The Byzantine ships take one look and flee, and the city empties again.
To make sure they can never return, Hassan reportedly tears down the walls, fills the
harbor with rubble and starts building the new city of Tunis right next to it.
After first arriving more than 800 years ago, Rome's
political domination in Africa is finally over. There is only one person standing between Hassan
and the rest of the Maghreb: Dihya, the sorceress. She makes a desperate calculation.
The tribes around her may not stay united for long,
and the Arabs have been raiding North Africa for decades before trying to conquer it.
If the region's wealth keeps pulling them in, the only way to stop them is to destroy that wealth.
She orders a scorched-earth campaign,
burning orchards and crops and destroying towns and fortresses.
She only thinks about the enemy, and not about the people she's supposed to defend.
As they watch their homes and harvests go up in flames, respect turns to fury.
Thousands abandon Dihya for the Arab side, and she is left ruling nothing but ash.
But we should be careful.
The earliest written accounts of Dihya come from Arab historians more than 150 years
after her death and they had every incentive to portray her as cruel to justify the conquest.
Some modern historians suggest that the Arabs themselves may have done the burning
and blamed her, while she destroyed only key parts to create a defensive buffer.
Still, by the time Hassan returns, Dihya’s power seems to be fading.
Worse, betrayal reached her own family.
According to legend, her adopted Arab prisoner Khalid is said to have passed
messages to Hassan for some time, hidden in bread or tucked into the knob of a saddle.
So when the two sides meet again, Hassan is no longer riding blind.
This time, Dihya’s forces are broken and
Hassan drives her back to her stronghold in the mountains.
And there, legends say, she has the vision of her own death that her sons watch in horror.
But for them, she predicts a different fate.
Turning to Khalid she says: “I have adopted you for a day such as this one.
I am dying, and I would recommend that you take good care of your two brothers.”
She tells her sons to go to Hassan, sue for peace and convert to Islam – and predicts
their bright future among the Arabs. When Hassan’s forces finally close in,
a merciless battle follows, and both sides suffer heavy losses.
The exact year is unclear, but probably in the late 690s, Dihya is killed.
She fights without fear, knowing how her story would end.
But the story of her people is far from over.
The Eternal Queen
With Dihya gone, resistance begins to break apart.
Under Hassan's successor, many Imazighen convert to Islam.
They join the Arab armies in enormous numbers, as they push farther west
until even Tangier falls under Arab rule. By 711 their joint forces cross into Spain
and at its peak around 730, the Umayyad Caliphate stretches from Iberia to the borders of India.
It's the largest empire the world has ever seen.
But the Imazighen are treated badly under the new order, and twenty years later
a massive uprising shatters the Maghreb into many independent Muslim states.
The pattern remains: By the time European colonization arrives in the 19th century,
the tribes of the Aurès Mountains revolt against the French multiple times.
When the war for Algerian independence ignites in 1954, the first shots are
fired in the mountains of the warrior-queen. It seems as if Dihya’s spirit is immortal.
But it's more complicated.
For 1300 years, she has been reflecting the viewpoints of
whoever tells her story like a mirror.
In medieval times, Arab historians portrayed
her as a ruthless queen whose downfall was entirely justified.
French colonial writers used her to claim that they were actually
saving the Imazighen from Arab oppression.
And some Jewish writers claimed her as a heroic Jewish queen,
despite her religion being somewhat unknowable. Now for some of the tens of millions of
Imazighen living today, Dihya has become a symbol of indigenous pride and resistance.
Her face shows up as graffiti, people name their daughters after her, and in 2003 she
even got a statue in northeastern Algeria – her arm raised in a gesture of eternal rebellion.
This is what legends do: They turn complicated history into a clear, powerful story.
The version you choose to believe probably says less about Dihya herself than it does about you.