The Sanhaja were one of the three great medieval confederations of Berber north Africa, alongside the Zenata and the Masmuda. The name covers a heterogeneous family of pastoral and trans-Saharan groupings that occupied the western and southern Maghreb from the Atlas to the Sahel.
The medieval Arab geographers — al-Bakri, Ibn Hawqal, al-Idrisi — distinguish a northern, sedentary Sanhaja in the central and Middle Atlas, an Atlantic Sanhaja around the Rif and Jbala, and a Saharan or "veiled" Sanhaja whose camel-mounted caravans linked the Maghreb to the Sahel through Awdaghust and Sijilmasa. The veiled Sanhaja are the historical antecedent of the modern Tuareg confederations.
The defining political achievement of the Sanhaja was the Almoravid movement, founded in the eleventh century by Yahya ibn Ibrahim and Abdallah ibn Yasin among the Lamtuna and Gudala of the western Sahara, and consolidated under Yusuf ibn Tashfin from a new capital at Marrakesh. At its height the Almoravid empire reached from the Senegal river to the Ebro in Spain.
The Sanhaja name persists in modern ethnonyms: Zenaga, the western Saharan Berber language now nearly extinct in southern Mauritania, derives directly from it, as does the river name Senegal. Several modern Berber populations including the Aith Soûs and the central High Atlas tribes trace classical descent from a Sanhaja stem.