Most modern scholarship on medieval Ifr?qiya and the Maghrib in the pre-Aghlabid era deals with the fut???t, the Berbers, and the Kharijites. The various post-conquest era governors of Ifr?qiya also appear in the background. One group that scholars have overlooked, however, is the Ifr?qi baladiyy?n. The baladiyy?n were those Arab Sunni Muslims who were born in North Africa. There is a tendency to lump them together with caliphal agents and soldiers by referring to them collectively as "the Arabs." Doing so, however, obscures the rôle that Ifr?qi baladiyy?n played in shaping the history of the medieval Maghrib. The baladiyy?n did not always work hand-in-hand with governors and other agents dispatched from the calipahal center. In order to highlight the distinctiveness of the baladiyy?n, this paper looks at the short-lived Fihrid amirate (ca. 126/744-138/755), a period in Ifr?qi history in which center-periphery relations were most complicated. Medieval Maghribi historians such as Ibn ‘Idh?ri, al-Raq?q al-Qayraw?ni, and al-Nuwayri took for granted that their readers understood the connections between the many names sprinkled throughout their narratives. Although they gave the governors centers stage in their narratives, they carefully related the deeds of baladi men such as ‘Abd al-Ra?m?n b. ?ab?b. ‘Abd al-Ra?m?n was a scion of the Ifr?qi Qurayshi Fihri family, the descendants of the great conqueror and later saint ‘Uqba b N?fi‘ (d. 63/683). The Fihrid family remained prominent in the West long after ‘Uqba was killed. They Fihrids had a bloody rivalry with M?s? b. Nu?ayr and his descendants. That rivalry played itself out from al-Andalus to Damascus until the last of the Musa's sons and maw?l? had been killed, absorbed by other factions, or gone over to Kharijism. More often than not the Fihrids made common cause with the caliphs and the agents. The Berber Revolt of 740-743 CE, however, spoiled the relationship between the baladiyy?n and the centrally-appointed governors. Although cooperation between the two groups eventually brought the Berber Revolt to a standstill, tensions remained. One baladi family, the Fihrids, tried to exploit this tension to establish a greater degree of autonomy from the caliphs. From 126/744 until the restoration of caliphal authority (this time Abbasid authority) in 138/755, members of the Fihrid family governed Ifr?qiya with nearly as much autonomy as the Aghlabids enjoyed a half-century later.