Eastern Amazigh

The Eastern Amazigh are Berber-speaking communities that held out in Tripolitania and the Tunisian south, above all in the Nafusa mountains and Zuwarah. After the eighth-century Berber Revolt, Ibadi missionaries took refuge in the Nafusa and organized its people; under Imam Abu al-Khattab al-Ma'afari they seized Tripoli in 757 and Kairouan in 758, until an Abbasid army broke them at Tawergha in 761.

The mountains kept an independent Ibadi republic through the ninth century, until Aghlabid emir Ibrahim II defeated them at Manu in 896 and ended their imamate. Ibadi Islam and the Nafusi tongue, already in twelfth-century sectarian manuscripts, lived on in Nalut and Jadu.

Zuwarah, noted by al-Tijani in 1306 and the Catalan Atlas of 1375, kept its Berber speech; Djerba, Ibadi since the Arab conquest of 665, preserved the same heritage under Hafsid and Ottoman rule.