Berber Queen, al-Kāhina bint D̲j̲arāwa al-Zanāt

Berber Queen, al-Kāhina bint D̲j̲arāwa al-Zanāt: There is no agreement even on her real name, for al-Kāhina is only a nickname given to her by the Arabs. It is said that she was named Dihya—Ibn K̲h̲aldūn.

Dihya (Algerian Arabic: ديهيا, Berber: Daya Ult Yenfaq Tajrawt, Dihya, or Damya), was a Berber queen, religious and military leader who led indigenous resistance to Arab expansion in Northwest Africa, the region then known as Numidia, known as eastern Algeria today. She was born in the early 7th century and died around the end of the 7th century in modern day Algeria.

                         

Accounts from the 19th century on, claim she was of Jewish religion or that her tribe were Judaized Berbers, though scholars dispute this. According to al-Mālikī she was said to have been accompanied in her travels by what the Arabs called an "idol", possibly an icon of the Virgin or one of the Christian saints.

The idea that the Jrāwa were Judaized comes from the medieval historian Ibn Khaldun, who named them among a number of such tribes. Hirschberg and Talbi note that Ibn Khaldun seems to have been referring to a time before the advent of the late Roman and Byzantine empires, and a little later in the same paragraph seems to say that by Roman times "the tribes" (presumably those he had listed before) had become Christianized.

Ibn Khaldun records many legends about Dihyā. A number of them refer to her long hair or great size, both legendary characteristics of sorcerers. She is also supposed to have had the gift of prophecy and she had three sons, which is characteristic of witches in legends. Even the fact that two were her own and one was adopted (an Arab officer she had captured), was an alleged trait of sorcerers in tales.

Another legend claims that in her youth, she had supposedly freed her people from a tyrant by agreeing to marry him and then murdering him on their wedding night. Virtually nothing else of her personal life is known.

Dihyā succeeded Kusaila as the war leader of the Berber tribes in the 680s and opposed the encroaching Arab armies of the Umayyad Dynasty. Hasan ibn al-Nu'man marched from Egypt and captured the major Byzantine city of Carthage and other cities (see Umayyad conquest of North Africa ). Searching for another enemy to defeat, he was told that the most powerful monarch in North Africa was "the queen of the Berbers" (Arabic: malikat al-barbar) Dihyā, and accordingly marched into Numidia.

The armies met near Meskiana in the present-day province of Oum el-Bouaghi, Algeria. She defeated Hasan so soundly that he fled Ifriqiya and holed up in Cyrenaica (Libya) for four or five years. Realizing that the enemy was too powerful and bound to return, she was said to have embarked on a scorched earth campaign, which had little impact on the mountain and desert tribes, but lost her the crucial support of the sedentary oasis-dwellers.

Supposedly, she had a passion for ornithology that shaped science and learning in the early Middle East. Today, many look up to her for her great findings and independence.