Two trends dominate the history of North and north-eastern Africa in the nineteenth century. One is the growing interference of European powers in the internal workings of the Muslim states. The other is the development of Islamic reform, in part as a reaction to the challenges of the European presence, in part indigenous and often pre-dating any European influence. Some of these reformist trends paved the way for the integration of Muslim societies into the colonial ‘modernity’, while others, intentionally or not, became vehicles for intellectual or political resistance to pressures from outside.

Some historians have seen these indigenous reform movements as local emanations of the Wahhābī movement of Arabia. However, most of them had little or no connection to the Wahhābiyya. It would rather seem that a less radical but profound milieu for intellectual reform in Morocco in the later eighteenth century played an important role, as many of these movements, as far away as in Somalia, had their intellectual roots in this milieu. Less inclined than the Wahhābīs to call other Muslims infidels and often linked to Sufi movements, these reformists called for a renewal in legal development (ijtihād) and rejected the absolute authority of the established opinions in the schools of law (madhhabs). Although not initially concerned with politics, many of them became focuses for militant mobilisation when the historical moment called for it.