These ideas, of course, are no legitimate development of Islam, to which they are plainly repugnant, but represent the survival of older pagan beliefs which Islam has not been able to eradicate. At the same time, as we have noted, there are tribes which are completely free from these ideas, and there is, especially in the towns, an element which is strictly orthodox in its rejection of alien superstitions, and there have been many learned theologians and jurists of the Berber race, for the most part of a reactionary and conservative school of thought. The conquest of Spain was carried out by Muslims, amongst whom the Berbers were in the numerical majority, and the Berber element always predominated in Spain, where some of the most brilliant philosophy, literature, and art of the Islamic world was produced. North Africa was always the home of the lost causes of Islam. Whenever the Khalifs of Baghdad tried to exterminate some obnoxious sect or dynasty, the last survivors took refuge in the remoter parts of the West, and there managed to hold their own, so that even now those parts show the strangest survivals of otherwise forgotten movements. But North Africa always gave its readiest welcome to those sects which show a strongly puritan character: though anyone in revolt against the Khalif or other recognized authority could count on a welcome in North Africa for that very fact. In race, language, and religious ideas the Berbers of the North are one with the Berber tribes of the great desert which spreads to the watershed of the Benwe and connects, by regular trade routes following the ridges which traverse North Africa from north-west to south-east, with the Horn of Africa. But these desert dwellers of the south do not enter into the subject of our present enquiry. The Arab conquerors settled along North Africa and down to the desert edge in sporadic groups, their tribes as a rule occupying the lower ground, whilst the older population maintained itself in the mountainous districts. But this does not mean that the Berbers were held at bay as a subject people: the Katama, for instance, possessed some of the best territory in North Africa, and were practically independent of the Khalif. During the invasion of 45 the city of Kairawan was founded some distance south of Tunis. The site was badly chosen, and it is now little more than a decayed village, but for some centuries it served as the political capital of _Ifrikiya_, the province which lay next to Egypt and embraced the modern states of Tripoli, Tunis, and the eastern part of Algeria to the meridian of Bougie. West of this lay _Maghrab_ or “the western land” which was divided into two districts, Central Maghrab, extending from the borders of Ifrikiya across the greater part of Algeria and the eastern third of Morocco, and _Farther Maghrab_, which was the land beyond to the Atlantic coast.