14

The Almoravids or al-Murābiṭūn

454–541/1062–1147

North-west Africa and Spain

The Almoravids arose from one of the waves of spiritual exaltation which have from time to time in the history of the Maghrib come over the Berber peoples there. In the early part of the eleventh century, the Ṣanhāja chief Yaḥyā b. Ibrāhīm of the Gudāla tribe, whose territories extended over parts of what became in modern times the Spanish Sahara and Mauritania, made the Pilgrimage to Mecca. Fired with enthusiasm, he came back to his own people with a Moroccan scholar, ‘Abdallāh b. Yāsīn, with the intention of propagating a strict form of Mālikī Sunnism. The militant and expansionist ideology which ‘Abdallāh b. Yāsīn now brought into being was, according to later local historians, given impetus by the community of murābiṭūn, dwellers in a ribāṭ or hermitage situated near the mouth of the Senegal River or along the Mauritanian coast; but if this dār al-murābiṭīn did in fact exist, its importance may well have been exaggerated. At all events, the term for these warriors, murābiṭūn ‘those dwelling in a hermitage or frontier fortress’, was to yield the Spanish form Almorávides by which the subsequent dynasty was to be called, and also the French word marabout ‘holy man, saint’, a figure especially characteristic of North African Muslim piety. These Berber warriors of the Sahara wore veils over their faces against the sand and wind (as do their modern descendants the Tuaregs), hence were also known as al-mutalaththimūn ‘the veiled ones’.

Led by the Lamtunā chiefs Yaḥyā and Abū Bakr and then by the latter’s lieutenant Yūsuf b. Tāshufīn, the Almoravids moved northwards against Morocco and conquered North Africa as far as the central part of what is now Algeria. With Abū Bakr now deflected southwards into the western Sahara, Yūsuf founded Marrakech (Marrākush) as his capital in 454/1062; from this event may be dated the formal beginning of the Almoravid dynasty in Morocco, explicitly designated on some coins, after Yūsuf’s death, as the Banū Tāshufīn. The Almoravids recognised the ‘Abbāsid caliphs as spiritual heads of Islam and followed the conservative Mālikī law school, dominant in Spain and North Africa after the virtual demise of Khārijism.

Muslim Spain was at this time in the fragmented condition of the age of the Mulūk al-Tawā’if (see above, no. 5), and, now that the Christian Reconquista was gathering momentum, it became clear that only the rising power and enthusiasm of the Almoravids could save the divided and squabbling princelings there. Yūsuf b. Tāshufīn crossed over from Africa in 479/1086 and won a great victory over Alfonso VI of Léon and Castile at Zallāqa near Badajoz. Much Muslim territory was recovered or made secure in the western marches, although the recently-lost city of Toledo remained in Christian hands. Over the next few years, Yūsuf suppressed almost all the Taifas, only the Hūdids being allowed to remain in Saragossa (see above, no. 5, Taifa no. 17), and a fierce form of puritanical Islam, in which the works of the great theologian of eastern Islam, al-Ghazālī, were publicly burned, was introduced into Spain.

But in the early years of the twelfth century, the Almoravid position in the Maghrib was threatened by the rise there of a fresh religio-political movement, that of the Almohads and their Masmūda supporters in southern Morocco (see below, no. 15). It was because of this pressure in their rear that the Almoravids were unable to save Saragossa from the Christians in 512/1118. In 541/1147, the last Almoravid ruler in Marrakech, Isḥāq b. ‘Alī, was killed by ‘Abd al-Mu’min’s troops, and the Almohads now began crossing into Spain. When the last Almoravid governor there, Yaḥyā b. Ghāniya al-Massūfī, whose family was related by marriage to the Almoravid ruling house, died in 543/1148, Almoravid power was ended. However, the post-Almoravid line of this Berber family, the Banū Ghāniya, continued, and held power in the Balearic Islands until the beginning of the thirteenth century (see above, no. 6).

The Almoravids of Morocco, and the Maghrib in general, rapidly assimilated Andalusian culture at this time. Abu Bakr b. ‘Umar and Yūsuf b. Tāshufīn came to disclaim their Berber origins and instead pretended to a Qaḥṭānī, South Arabian, royal pedigree. The dominance of Mālikism in North Africa was given a great fillip by their patronage, and the study of Mālikn legal manuals was exalted above that of the Qur’ān and Hadīth, while kalām, scholastic theology, was regarded as positively inimical to the faith. Perhaps the most lasting legacy, however, of the Almoravid movement was the impetus which it gave to the spread of Islam, and of Almoravid religious doctrines in particular, southwards across the Sahara to the Sāḥil and Savannah zones of West Africa, namely to modern Senegal, Niger, Mali and northern Nigeria.

Lane-Poole, 41–4; Zambaur, 73–4; Album, 16.

EI² ‘al-Murābiṭūn’ (H. T. Norris and P. Chalmeta).

H. Terrasse, Histoire du Maroc, I, 211–60.

J. Bosch Vilá, Los Almorávides, Instituto General Franco de Estudios y investigación hispano-árabe, Historia de Marruecos, Tetouan 1950.

H. W. Hazard, The Numismatic History of Late Medieval North Africa, 59–64, 95–143, 236–63, 282–3.