Kabyle

The Kabyles are a Berber people of Kabylia, the rugged hills east of Algiers, called Zwawa in older Arabic sources; their name derives from the Arabic qaba'il, meaning tribes. Their mountains served as a refuge through successive lowland empires, which held the roads and valleys while villages kept their Berber speech.

In the early tenth century Kutama tribes supplied the armies founding the Fatimid Caliphate, and the Sanhaja Zirid dynasty came from these mountains, which later passed to Hammadid and Hafsid rule from Béjaïa. After Spain seized Béjaïa in 1510, two principalities took shape: the Kingdom of Kuku, founded around 1515, which held Algiers from 1520 to 1527 before being driven back into the mountains, and Beni Abbas, ruled by the Mokrani family from a fortified stronghold.

Both long balanced between Spanish presidios and the Ottoman Regency of Algiers, which never fully subdued the Zwawa clans but used them as soldiers. Kabyles farmed olives and figs on terraced slopes, and from the late eighteenth century the Rahmaniyya Sufi order spread among their zawaya.