Umayyad policies may have promoted Arabization and Islamification but not both of them equally everywhere. In North Africa, Arabization proceeded rapidly, perhaps because the patchwork of indigenous cultures had long ago been fragmented by Phoenician colonization—the Romans had deposited a Latin layer, the Vandals had come in with a Germanic glaze, and finally Christianity had permeated the region. North Africa had no single language or culture to bind it together; when the Arabs arrived with their powerful conviction, no correspondingly unified and powerful indigenous conviction was there to
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