Acknowledgments

   I would like to thank Thomas Park for encouraging me to write this book and Aomar Boum and Imad Abbadi for sharing additional material and stories on the Berbers. I would also like to thank Abdellah Hammoudi and Nabil Chbouki for their interest in my work and encouragement and Jessaca Fox for tracking references. I would also like to acknowledge the interlibrary desk at Iowa State University whose work has made my task so much easier. I owe special thanks to both the series editor and the press for accommodating my delays as the tenure process shifted my attention. Most important, I acknowledge my wife, Ann, and my other family in Berber country for having patience with my endeavors.

It is generally recognized that efforts at transliterating North African vernacular terms and proper names and places, whether Berber or Arabic, present a real challenge for nonnative speakers of North African languages. To make sense of these terms, I have followed the conventions of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. For Arabic and Berber, the consonant kh is pronounced as in Bach and gh as the French r. The Arabic 'ain has been rendered with ', and the hamza, the glottal stop diacritical mark, with `. Place-names and common proper names with English and French spellings appear as they do in English and French and are not transliterated. Thus, ksar, not qsar or al-qasr; Qur'an, not Quran.