Almohad Caliphate

The mahdi of the Atlas

Drafted from Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (2016)formation

Ibn Tumart was a Masmuda Berber from the Anti-Atlas who studied in the east, returned around 1120 preaching an uncompromising doctrine of divine unity — tawhid, from which his followers took the name al-Muwahhidun, the Almohads — and denounced the Almoravids as anthropomorphists and therefore unbelievers. Around 1121 he was proclaimed the mahdi, the rightly guided one, by his followers at Tinmal in the High Atlas.

That claim is the difference between this movement and the one it replaced. The Almoravids were enforcers of Maliki law who never denied the caliphate's existence. The Almohads declared their founder infallible, restructured Berber tribal society into a graded hierarchy of the movement, and after Ibn Tumart's death his successor Abd al-Mu'min took the title of caliph outright. The Maghreb had produced its own caliphate, on doctrine rather than descent.

They took Marrakesh in 1147, then Ifriqiya, then al-Andalus, and for the first and only time the whole Islamic west was one polity. Its high point, under al-Mansur, included a victory over Castile at Alarcos in 1195; its break came at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, after which al-Andalus was progressively lost and the Maghreb split into the three successor states that shaped North Africa afterwards.

The whole west, once

Drafted from Khaldun, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l'Afrique septentrionale (1852)expansion

Abd al-Mu'min took Marrakesh in 1147 and spent the next sixteen years doing something no ruler in the Islamic west had done before or would do again: he held the whole of it. Morocco, the central Maghreb, Ifriqiya, and al-Andalus, under one man, from one capital.

Ibn Khaldun's account of how the last of that was got is worth following, because the sequence in it is the sequence of the whole reign — the caliph setting out for one war and being turned by news of another.

Mahdia

In 1158 he came to Salé meaning to cross into Spain and fight the Christians; his son had just been beaten under the walls of Seville and a number of Almohad shaykhs and doctors had been killed there. Then word came that the kingdom of Ifriqiya had collapsed and that Christians were holding Mahdia. Sicily had taken the Tunisian coast a decade earlier from the last of the Zirids.

He turned the army round at Salé, appointed the shaykh Abu Hafs his lieutenant in the Maghreb and a governor at Fez, and marched east very fast. He besieged the Sicilians in Mahdia and made them capitulate, and took Sfax, Tripoli and the rest of the coastal towns after it. While the siege was still going on he had sent his son against Gabès, which had fallen to an Arab family; the young man took Gabès, then Gafsa from one clan, Zaghouan from another, Sicca Veneria from a third, Tobourba from a man who had helped himself to it, Laribus from the Arabs. Ifriqiya had come apart into a dozen private holdings, and he collected them one at a time.

Setting out for Marrakesh again in 1161, he learned the Arabs of Ifriqiya had gone back into revolt, and sent a detachment back to Kairouan to kill their chief.

And then Spain

He was still settling Ifriqiya when he heard that Ibn Mardanish, who ruled independently at Murcia, had besieged Jaén and forced its governor to acknowledge him, had surprised Carmona, and had destroyed an Almohad army outside Cordoba and killed its general.

So he wrote to his governors in Spain announcing the triumph of his arms in Ifriqiya and his intention to come, landed at Gibraltar, gathered the Andalusi population and the Almohad troops he had already sent over, sent the whole army against the Christians, and went home to Marrakesh. Granada was lost by surprise in the night and retaken. Carmona was taken. His two sons beat Ibn Mardanish and his Christian auxiliaries in the plain outside Granada so badly that Ibn Mardanish went straight back to his own territory.

Then the caliph set out for one more holy war, reached Salé, and died there.

What it cost to be that big

Read forward from a map of 1163 and the Almohad empire looks like a settled fact. Read the campaigns and it is a man with one army going wherever the last courier came from, and an empire whose furthest provinces were held by the credible threat that he would arrive personally. Ifriqiya went back into revolt before he was out of it. Al-Andalus needed the caliph in person twice in five years. No later Almohad could be in four places, and the empire lasted about as long as the reputation of the man who could.

A movement with ranks

Drafted from Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (2016)peak

No other state in the medieval Maghreb was organised as thoroughly as this one, and the organisation is what let a mountain movement govern from the Atlantic to Tripoli.

Ibn Tumart did not simply preach. He built an institution, and the shape of it is unusual enough to set out. At the top was the Council of Ten, his earliest companions; below that a council of fifty representing the tribes that had joined; below that ranked grades of adherents — the talaba, students of the doctrine who were also administrators and political officers, and the huffaz, those who had memorised his teaching. Tribes were enrolled into the movement collectively and given a place in the order. There were formal purges — the tamyiz, the sorting — in which the doubtful were identified and killed.

What that produced is a state whose administrative class was a religious cadre, recruited by examination in the founder's doctrine and posted where it was needed. The talaba went out as provincial officials, army chaplains and inspectors, and the doctrine was taught to the troops in Berber as well as Arabic. Nizam al-Mulk had endowed madrasas in the east a lifetime earlier to produce a scholarly class the Seljuk state could rely on; the Almohads went further and made the doctrine itself the qualification for office.

The building programme is the same argument in stone, and it is the most visible thing they left. The Koutoubia at Marrakesh, the Giralda at Seville, the unfinished Hassan tower at Rabat, the mosque at Tinmal over Ibn Tumart's tomb: all within about forty years, all in the same austere idiom of enormous plain surfaces and geometric brick and stone, all deliberately unlike the ornamented work of the dynasty they had replaced. The square minaret they used is the form the Aghlabids had built at Kairouan four centuries before.

The cost of building a state on one man's infallibility came due later. A doctrine that qualifies men for office can also disqualify them, and a caliphate that rests on the mahdi being right cannot easily survive his being seen to be wrong.

My answer you shall see

Drafted from Khallikan, Biographical Dictionary (1842)peak

The Almohad caliphate's best day was at Alarcos in 1195, when Ya'qub al-Mansur beat Alfonso VIII of Castile badly enough to win a truce and a surname. The story that attached itself to the battle is an exchange of letters, and Ibn Khallikan preserves both the story and the evidence that it is not true.

What he had

He tells you where he got it, which is the habit that makes him worth reading.

Towards the end of 1270, in Damascus, he saw a notebook in the handwriting of a scholar who had been chief of the professors there and had travelled in Spain, writing down notes on the Almohad administration while he lived in it. Ibn Khallikan copies a chapter of it whole.

According to that notebook: the truce between Ya'qub and Alfonso ran out; Ya'qub resolved to cross; he summoned his governors and troops to Salé and then fell seriously ill, the physicians gave him up, the muster collapsed and he was carried back to Marrakesh. The nomad tribes, encouraged, spread ruin through the country; Alfonso did the same in Muslim Spain; and the Almohad army had to be broken up into detachments and sent east and west to put down the resulting disorder.

It was at that point — with the caliph dying and his army dispersed — that Alfonso sent an ambassador to demand the surrender of a frontier fortress, with a letter drafted in Arabic by a Christian secretary of his named Ibn al-Fakhkhar.

The letter

It opens with a Christian basmala: In thy name, O God, creator of the heavens and of the earth! His blessings be upon the Lord Messiah, the Spirit of God, his word and his eloquent messenger. Then it gets to business, and the business is an argument between two commanders of the faithful about which of them is protecting the Muslims of Spain.

It cannot escape the attention of whoever is gifted with a penetrating intellect that you are the emir of the Hanifite community as I am that of the Christian one. You well know how the chiefs of the Spanish Muslims have abandoned and deserted each other, how they neglect the care of their subjects and how greatly they are inclined to enjoy repose. You know that I make them undergo the law of the strongest, expelling them from their abodes, carrying their children into captivity and making an example of their men. You have at present no excuse to offer for not coming to their assistance.

Then the taunt about the law of retaliation — that God has excused the Muslims from killing ten Christians for every Muslim slain, because he knew that you have among you many men so weak and feeble that they could not manage it. Then the accusation: you procrastinate, year after year, making one step forward and the other backward. I know not whether you be detained by cowardice or by the intention of belying the promises made by thy Lord.

And then the offer, which is the part that makes the letter famous. Since the sultan apparently cannot find a way across the sea, Alfonso proposes to come to him: send ships, galleys and transports, and I may pass over to you with my bands and fight with you in the place which you like best. If the sultan wins, he will have been handed a magnificent present. If Alfonso wins, he will deserve to be the emir of the two communities and the sovereign of the two continents.

Ya'qub tore the letter up, wrote on the back of one of the pieces —

Return to them; for we shall certainly go unto them with troops which they shall not be able to withstand, and we will expel them from their possessions, humbled and despicable. My answer you shall see, not hear!

— and added a line of al-Mutanabbi under it: He has no letters to send but swords; no other ambassadors than the fivefold host. He pitched his tents outside the town that same day, crossed the strait, met the enemy assembled and prepared, and, in the notebook's words, made them suffer a most disgraceful defeat.

The problem

Having given all that, Ibn Khallikan keeps reading, and then reports what he found.

He came across another book, by an Andalusi author, containing the same letter — attributed to a different Alfonso, addressed to a different sovereign, the Almoravid Yusuf ibn Tashufin, a full century earlier. The reply given there is in the same terms as the one he has just quoted. And that author seems to have taken it from a document in the hand of an Egyptian official who lived long before Ya'qub was born, which means the message cannot have been sent to Ya'qub at all.

His comment on the contradiction is four words: God knows where the truth lies!

He then adds that he met a number of learned Maghribis who thought the date he had been given was wrong, and sets out their version as well.

What that is worth

A splendid set piece survives in two versions a hundred years apart, fitted to whichever Muslim ruler the story needed, and the man transmitting it says so himself instead of choosing.

The Almohads were the most ideologically explicit regime the Islamic west produced: a caliphate founded on a doctrine, run by a hierarchy, with the caliph's authority resting on a claim about right belief. A letter in which a Christian king addresses the caliph as one commander of the faithful to another and accuses him of neglecting his own community is exactly the letter that regime's supporters would have wanted to exist, and exactly the letter its enemies would have enjoyed inventing.

Alarcos happened. The victory was real, the truce that followed it was real, and seventeen years later the same coalition of Christian kingdoms destroyed the Almohad army at Las Navas de Tolosa. What the letters are evidence of is not the battle but the argument about it, which went on being rewritten for as long as anybody in either language needed a use for it.

Two things at once

Drafted from Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (2016)aside?What aside means

The Almohad court commissioned the commentaries on Aristotle that carried Greek philosophy into Latin Europe. The Almohad state abolished the legal status of Jews and Christians in its territory and forced them to convert or leave. Both of those are true of the same regime in the same decades, and a page that reports one without the other is not describing the polity.

The philosophy first. Abu Ya'qub Yusuf, the second Almohad caliph, was seriously educated and interested in philosophy; Ibn Tufayl, his physician, introduced Ibn Rushd to him, and — the story is Ibn Rushd's own — the caliph asked him what the philosophers held about whether the heavens were eternal or created, and he was too frightened to answer until the caliph began answering it himself. He was commissioned to write commentaries on Aristotle that would make him intelligible. He produced them over about twenty-five years, alongside a career as a qadi in Seville and Cordoba, and they were translated into Latin and Hebrew within two generations. Latin Christendom called him the Commentator, and the thirteenth-century argument about Aristotle in the universities of Paris and Oxford is conducted substantially through his readings.

Now the other thing. The Almohads held that the dhimma — the arrangement under which Jews and Christians paid a tax and were left to their own law, which had been the settled practice of Muslim states from Spain to Khurasan for five hundred years — was not valid. Communities that had been in Morocco and al-Andalus since before the conquest were required to convert. Synagogues and churches were closed. Families converted publicly and kept their practice privately, and were subjected to discriminatory dress and surveillance because the regime did not believe them. Many left: for Christian Spain, for Egypt, for Provence. Among them was a Cordoban family whose son, Moses ben Maimon, ended as court physician in Cairo and wrote the Guide of the Perplexed — a work in Arabic, by a man the Almohads had driven out, arguing with the same Aristotle their caliph was commissioning commentaries on.

The two facts are not in tension in the way a modern reader expects. The Almohad position was that truth was single and demonstrable, that the learned should reason their way to it, and that those who would not accept it had no standing. Philosophical seriousness and the abolition of religious pluralism came out of the same conviction.

The usual way of summarising a state — how far it reached, how long it lasted, what it passed on — has no column for a court that did both of these things, and no way at all to say that the two came out of the same conviction.

The edict

Drafted from Khaldun, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l'Afrique septentrionale (1852)contraction

In 1229 the Almohad caliph al-Ma'mun crossed from Spain to Morocco to take a throne that several relatives were also claiming, and to get there he made a bargain and then issued an order. Between them they finished the thing his great-grandfather's teacher had founded, and he did it deliberately.

The bargain

The Christian king put twelve thousand cavalry at his disposal. Ibn Khaldun's translator sets out the terms in a footnote, from the sources: in return the king received ten Muslim frontier fortresses, which he named himself; the sultan undertook to build a church in Marrakesh for the troops, in which they were to be allowed to ring bells at the hours of prayer; if one of those soldiers wished to embrace Islam the sultan was obliged to refuse him and send him back to his corps to be judged; and if a Muslim became a Christian he was not to be punished in any way.

That is the caliph of the Almohads — the office founded on the proposition that the ruler of the Almoravids was an unbeliever for a mistake about the divine attributes — contracting to prevent conversions to Islam in his own capital.

He landed, destroyed the army of a rival who came out to meet him, and went up to Marrakesh.

The shaykhs

There he called the Almohad shaykhs together, recited to them the offences they had committed, arrested about a hundred of the principal ones and had them put to death. The author of the Rawd al-Qirtas, who exaggerates whenever he reports numbers, says four thousand six hundred Almohads were executed on that occasion, that their heads were set on lances around the palace, and that when a courtier complained of the smell the sultan told him the smell of a dead traitor displeases only traitors and is agreeable to loyal subjects. He was, the same author says, a shedder of blood who did not pause at it for the space of a blink; he also knew the Quran perfectly, and the traditions, and the history of the ancient Arabs, and philology, and letters, and wrote Arabic with a rare elegance.

The order

Then he sent an edict to every city of the empire. The name of the Mahdi was to be struck off the coinage and out of the Friday prayer. The part of the call to prayer that was in Berber, which carried a pious remembrance of him, was to be suppressed. The words inserted into the dawn call — arise, and praise be to God — were to go. The custom of calling Ibn Tumart the impeccable imam was abolished. Other practices introduced by the Mahdi and kept by Abd al-Mu'min and his descendants went with them, and each time the prohibitions were renewed, more were added.

Every Almohad was hearing the same thing from every minaret in the west at once, and what they were hearing was a silence where a name had been.

What was left

A caliphate is an argument for obedience. Ibn Tumart's had been that he was the rightly guided one and that the men descended from his companions carried his authority. In one year the reigning caliph killed the men and cancelled the argument, and put nothing in their place except being the man in Marrakesh with a Castilian bodyguard.

The provinces drew the obvious conclusion. Ifriqiya declined to accept the repudiation and kept the doctrine and the province together. Tlemcen's governor simply stopped being one. In al-Andalus, Seville transferred its allegiance to a rebel the moment al-Ma'mun's ship left, and Ibn al-Ahmar was already at Arjona. Cordoba fell to Castile seven years later.

The empire did not end in 1229. It only stopped being able to say why anyone should mind.

Las Navas de Tolosa

Drafted from Bennison, The Almoravid and Almohad Empires (2016)end

In 1212 a combined army of Castile, Aragon and Navarre, with a papal crusade proclamation behind it, destroyed the Almohad field army at Las Navas de Tolosa in the Sierra Morena.

The defeat did not end the caliphate immediately — that took another fifty years — but it ended the Almohad ability to hold al-Andalus. Cordoba fell to Castile in 1236, Valencia in 1238, Seville in 1248. By the 1260s Muslim rule in Iberia was reduced to the emirate of Granada, founded by a man who had been proclaimed at Arjona in the wreckage of Almohad al-Andalus and who held on as a Castilian tributary for two and a half centuries.

The wider Almohad collapse was doctrinal as much as military. The whole structure rested on Ibn Tumart's status as the infallible mahdi, and a caliphate founded on a claim of that kind cannot easily survive an obvious divine judgement against it. The later Almohad caliphs quietly abandoned the mahdist doctrine, which removed the argument for their own authority, and the Maghreb divided into the three states that shaped it afterwards: the Hafsids at Tunis, the Zayyanids at Tlemcen and the Marinids at Fez.

That division is the durable result. Ifriqiya, the central Maghreb and Morocco had been one polity for about a century and had never been one before; after 1269 they were three, and the boundaries between them are recognisably the boundaries between three countries today.

What the word was worth afterwards

Drafted from Khaldun, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l'Afrique septentrionale (1852)afterlife

The caliphate ended in Morocco in 1269 when Zenata pastoralists took Marrakesh. The word did not end with it. For most of the following century the strongest state in North Africa still called itself Almohad, still had a body of men in its capital who were the Almohads, and still transacted its politics through the question of who was one.

That state was in Tunis. The family that ran it descended from Abu Hafs Umar, one of the ten companions Ibn Tumart had put at the head of the movement, and it had kept the mahdist doctrine in 1229 when Marrakesh threw it away. So the Almohads outlived the Almohad empire by taking the argument east — which is also how they came to be destroyed by it.

One night in Tunis, 1250

The founder of the Tunis line died in 1249 and was succeeded by his son al-Mustansir, who was about twenty. The vizier, a man of the Hintata — one of the mountain tribes that had sheltered Ibn Tumart in the first place — thought a boy could be steered.

What stood in his way was the sultan's household troops. Ibn Khaldun describes them exactly: a regularly organised corps containing nobody but Christian slaves and Spanish Muslims of good family, who owed their fortunes and their positions to the last sultan, whose numbers overawed the Almohads and whose members were taking the best posts of the empire away from them.

The vizier approached the dead sultan's brothers first and got nothing. Then he approached the son of one of them, swore secret allegiance to him, and on a morning in August went to the palace gate as though to hold his public audience, arrested his colleague, and led the Almohad chiefs to the young man's house to take the oath.

The sultan put his own supporters on horseback and sent his freedman Zafir to attack. The two forces met at the prayer ground outside the walls and the Almohads were routed. The vizier was killed there. Zafir went on to the house of the sultan's uncle, killed him and his son, met the other uncle on the road with his son and killed them both as well, and took the heads to the sultan. The houses of the Almohads were given over to pillage and destroyed to their foundations.

Zafir's enemies then persuaded the sultan that a freedman who had killed his uncles — whose innocence was perfectly well established — had acted with extreme illegality, and Zafir fled to the Arabs and lived as an outlaw.

Fifty-five years after Alarcos, the movement that had made a caliphate out of a doctrine was a faction being cleared out of a capital in a night by a guard of Christian slaves. Ibn Khaldun, who worked for the family that ordered it, tells it without comment as a piece of ordinary court business, which by then it was.

The part that could not be pillaged

The buildings did not care. The Koutoubia at Marrakesh, the Giralda at Seville and the unfinished tower at Rabat were up before any of this, and two of them are still the tallest old things in their cities. So were the commentaries: Ibn Rushd's Aristotle was translated into Latin and Hebrew within two generations of his death and was being argued over in Paris and Oxford while the Almohad shaykhs of Tunis were being run down in the street.

An empire founded on the proposition that its founder could not be wrong left almost nothing that depended on his being right.