Hassaniya

The Hassaniya are Bedouin Arab people of the desert edge from the Sous and Draa valleys to the Western Sahara, named for their Hassaniya Arabic. Their ancestors, the Beni Hassan of the Banu Ma'qil, were Yemenite nomads entering the Maghreb in the eleventh century with the Hilalian migration and settling Saharan oases such as Tafilalt and the Draa.

Around 1250 they overran Sanhaja Berber lands, and as the Marinids weakened after 1460 they crossed the Atlas while bands pushed into Mauritania, becoming lords of the desert between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In the Char Bouba war they crushed the marabout coalition of Nasr al-Din, and in 1674 founded emirates such as Trarza and Brakna, ruling the Sanhaja as tributary znaga while the Berber-speaking Zawaya kept the religious life, their Arabic displacing Zenata Berber speech across the western Sahara.