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The British and British interpretation of Islam and the Jihad against arrival Muslims and then Christians.

They also controlled trade across the Sahara and were rich from West African Gold.

There's Tablets Marrakesh which became the greatest city in the region and they stopped the Christians overrunning Muslim Spain after the fall of Toledo in 1085,

helping postponed by 400 years what Christians called the Rican Quista.

We need to discuss the Amoravid Empire, American Benicent, Professor in History of Culture, in History of Culture of the Magrad at the University of Cambridge.

Nicholas Clark, Lecturer in the History of the Islamic World at your Kassli University and Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic at Sirus University of London.

Amor Abenicent, what does Amoravid mean and is it a place of people and idea?

The word Al-Moravid actually comes to us from Spanish. It's a name of a group, it's about people.

It relates to the Arabic root, Robata which is to Thai and it is a sense of people who are either tied to God in the sense of being particularly committed to a particular religious message.

It's often attributed in later sources to being given to the group at a particular moment of time by their leader Ibn Yer Sin,

when they had had a particularly bad battle, many had died and he encouraged them and galvanized them by saying you are an Arabic Al-Moravidun, the ones who are tied to God and your commitment will be rewarded.

In terms of the people who they actually were from another perspective they were predominantly St. Harja Burbas from the Saharan Desert.

So, did they come together with people, whether people before they started on the track to the road to conquest or were they individual tribes and how related were they in the sense of a cohesive force?

The St. Harja are a tribal people, many different tribes made up the confederation, they were sometimes hostile to each other and it is really the religious message preached to them by Ibn Yer Sin which gradually unites more and more tribes.

However, that process of unification was not simply a matter of persuasion to follow a particular form of Islam but it also could be coercive in the sense of tribes fighting each other and the defeated party joining the movement.

So, the St. Harja are a number of different tribes scattered throughout the Sahara who become gradually united into a single group, the Al-Moravids, who then go on to create an empire.

So, how are so big? Can you give us any idea of the size of the army that then came together?

It's very difficult to say for the 11th century we don't really have any statistics so I would hesitate to put numbers on this.

The sources don't routinely talk about numbers but I don't think we're not talking about massive armies by any means.

We're not talking about 20,000 people.

In terms of the entire confederation, one might be and I suppose the point to make here is that tribesmen are generally not civilians and soldiers.

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