The description Moors has referred to several historic and modern populations of Berber, Black African and Arab descent from Northern Africa, some of whom came to conquer and occupy the Iberian Peninsula for nearly eight hundred years, at which time they are Muslim, although earlier the people had followed other religions.

They call the territory Al Andalus, comprising most of what is now Spain and Portugal.

"Moors" are not a distinct or self-defined people.

Medieval and early modern Europeans applied the name primarily to Berbers, but also at various times to Arabs, Muslim Iberians and West Africans from Mali and Niger who had been absorbed into the Almoravid dynasty.

Mainstream scholars observed in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica that "The term 'Moors' has no real ethnological value."

The Andalusian Moors of the late Medieval era inhabit the Iberian Peninsula after the Moorish conquests of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates.

The Moors' rule stretches at times as far as modern-day Mauritania, West African countries, and the Senegal River.

Earlier, the Classical Romans had interacted (and later conquered) parts of Mauretania, a state that covers northern portions of modern Morocco and much of north western and central Algeria during the classical period.

The people of the region are noted in Classical literature as the Mauri.

Through the cultural Arabization of Muladi (Islamicized inhabitants of former Visigothic Spain and their descendants) and their increasing intermarriage with some Berbers and Arabs present in Iberia, the distinctions between the different Muslim groups become increasingly blurred in the eleventth and twelfth centuries.

The populations mix with such rapidity that it is soon impossible to distinguish ethnically the elements of foreign origin from the natives.

Thus they merge into a more homogeneous group of Andalusi Arabs generally also called Moors.