15

The Almohads or al-Muwaḥḥidūn

524–668/1130–1269

North Africa and Spain

The Almohads (an originally Spanish form from al-Muwaḥḥidūn ‘those who proclaim God’s unity’) represented, intellectually and theologically, a protest against the rigidly conservative and legalistic Mālikism prevalent in North Africa and against the social laxity of life under the later Almoravids (see above, no. 14). Their founder, the Maṣmūda Berber Ibn Tūmart, had studied in the East and had acquired ascetic, reformist views. On returning to Morocco, he was in 515/1121 hailed by his followers as the Mahdī or promised charismatic leader who would restore and cause to triumph the true and universal Islam. For his fellow-Berbers of southern Morocco, he made available in their own language Muslim creeds and other theological and legal works, so that one aspect of his mission may have been to express the religious feelings of the mountain Berbers against the essentially urban attitudes of the Mālikī lawyers who were the mainstay of Almoravid religious authority. His lieutenant ‘Abd al-Mu’min assumed leadership of the movement on Ibn Tūmart’s death; he carried on the war against the Almoravids, gradually taking over Morocco from them, and after 542/1147 he made the Almoravid capital of Marrakech his own.

In Spain, there was a vacuum of power after the decline of the Almoravids there, in which some local groups like the Taifas of the previous century reappeared, for example at Valencia, Cordova, Murcia and Mértola (see above, no. 5, Taifas nos 11, 15, 18). Then, in 540/1145, ‘Abd al-Mu’min despatched an army to Spain and soon occupied the greater part of the Muslim-held territory there. A powerful Almohad kingdom, with its capital at Seville, was now constituted on both sides of the Straits of Gibraltar. The countryside of the central and eastern Maghrib had become economically disrupted, and socially and politically disturbed, by influxes of nomadic Arabs from the East, and the coastlands were being harried by Norman Christian raiders. With his highly effective military and naval forces, ‘Abd al-Mu’min conquered as far as Tunis and Tripoli, thus uniting the whole of North Africa under Almohad rule; the Ayyūbid sultan Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn or Saladin (see below, no. 30) sought – in vain, as it proved – Almohad ships for his war against the Frankish Crusaders. The Almohad rulers now assumed the lofty titles of caliph and ‘Commander of the Faithful’.

The structure of the Almohad state reflected the messianic, authoritarian nature of Ibn Tūmart’s original teaching, and was built around a closely-knit hierarchy of the caliphs’ advisers and intimates. Their court was a splendid centre of art and learning, above all, for the last flowering of Islamic philosophy associated with such scholars as Ibn Ṭufayl (Abubacer) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), both of whom acted as court physicians to the Almohad rulers; and the Almohad period saw a remarkable florescence of a simple but monumental style of architecture in North Africa and at Seville. Intellectual speculation was nevertheless confined to the narrow court circles, and elsewhere in the Almohad empire a rigid and repressive orthodoxy prevailed. The Dhimmīs or ‘Protected Peoples’, Jews and Christians, suffered extreme hostility and persecution, seen in the massacres of Jews in Spain and Morocco, which triggered an exodus of Jews to Christian Europe and to the Near East; those to the latter destination included the physician and philosopher Maimonides, who fled from Cordova and settled in Cairo.

Abū Yūsuf Ya‘qūb won a victory over the Christians of Spain at Alarcos (al-Arak) in 591/1195, and his successor freed the eastern Maghrib as far as Libya and the Balearic Islands from the control of the Banū Ghāniya (see above, no. 6). But Muḥammad al-Nāṣir’s catastrophic defeat in 609/1212 at Las Navas de Tolosa (al-‘Iqāb), at the hands of most of the Christian kings of the peninsula, led to a decline of Almohad authority in Spain and Morocco, with internal revolts and dynastic quarrels, and with Idrīs al-Ma’mūn repudiating the Almohad doctrine. Spain was abandoned, to face alone the impetus of the Reconquista, and the Almohad grip on North Africa began also to loosen. In 627/1230, the Ḥafṣid governor of Ifrīqiya proclaimed his independence (see below, no. 18), and a decade later the rising of Yaghmurāsan b. Zayyān or Ziyān in the central Maghrib led to the formation of the ‘Abd al-Wādid kingdom based on Tlemcen (Tilimsān) (see below, no. 17). Within Morocco, the Marīnids (see below, no. 16) began to wear down what remained of Almohad authority, culminating in their capture of Marrākush in 668/1269 and of Tinmallal, cradle of the Almohad movement, eight years later; the capital of Morocco now moved to Fez.

Lane-Poole, 45–7; Zambaur, 73–4; Album, 16–17.

EI² ‘al-Muwahhidūn’ (M. Shatzmiller).

H. Terrasse, Histoire du Maroc, I, 261–367.

H. W. Hazard, The Numismatic History of Late Medieval North Africa, 64–8, 143–58, 262–73, 283.

A. Huici Miranda, Historia politica del imperio Almohade, 2 vols, Instituto General Franco de Estudios y investigación hispano-árabe, Tetouan 1956–7.