Idrisid Dynasty

A fugitive founds a city

formationDrafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)

Idris ibn Abd Allah was a great-great-grandson of Ali who survived the massacre of an Alid rising at Fakhkh near Mecca in 786 and fled west, as far west as it was possible to go. Berber tribes of the Awraba around Volubilis accepted him as imam in 788, which gave them a leader with unimpeachable descent and no local ties, and gave him a following.

Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987) · Pilecka · CC BY-SA 3.0

He was poisoned within three years, on Abbasid initiative according to the sources. His son Idris II founded Fez, which drew Arab settlers from Ifriqiya and Andalusi refugees from Cordoba and became the first substantial Islamic city of the far Maghreb.

The Idrisids matter less for what they ruled — the dynasty fragmented among Idris II's many sons almost immediately — than for what they demonstrated. Within forty years of the Abbasid revolution, a descendant of Ali could establish an independent state on the edge of the Islamic world and be accepted as its legitimate ruler on grounds the caliphate could not contest without conceding the argument. The far Maghreb never returned to Abbasid authority.

Two banks of a river

expansionDrafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)

Idris II founded Fez on the river of the same name in the first decade of the ninth century, and what made it a city rather than a fort was that it was settled twice, by two groups of refugees, on opposite banks.

Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987) · Jerzystrzelecki · CC BY 3.0

In 818 a rising in the suburb of Córdoba was crushed by the Umayyad amir al-Hakam I, and the survivors were expelled. Some went to Alexandria and eventually took Crete; several thousand came west to Fez and settled the right bank, which is still called the Andalusi quarter. In 824, refugees from unrest at Kairouan, the Aghlabid capital, settled the left bank, which is called the Qarawiyyin quarter — the quarter of the people of Kairouan.

That is the city's whole character in its street plan. Two populations of displaced urban Arabs, arriving within six years of each other from the two established centres of the Islamic west, in a Berber country that had no substantial city, under a dynasty whose claim was descent from Ali. Fez became the first real Islamic city of the far Maghreb because two other places produced refugees at the right moment.

The two quarters each built a congregational mosque. The one on the left bank, the Qarawiyyin, was founded in 859, and the tradition attributes its foundation and endowment to Fatima al-Fihri, a woman of a family that had come from Kairouan and who is said to have spent her inheritance on it. It became the principal centre of learning in the western Islamic world — teaching circles, a library, a scholarly establishment that ran continuously and is running now, which is why it is frequently described as the oldest continuously operating institution of higher learning anywhere.

She held no office of any kind. She was a merchant's daughter with an inheritance, in a quarter of refugees, and what she did with the money was endow a mosque that became a teaching institution and is still one.

Every state that has governed Fez since — Idrisid, Zanata, Almoravid, Almohad, Marinid, Wattasid, Saadi, Alaouite, French, Moroccan — has come and gone around it. An endowment made by a private woman in 859 has outlasted eleven sovereignties, which is a better record than any of them managed.

Descent, used as a claim

peakDrafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)

The Idrisids were the first dynasty anywhere to make descent from Ali the working basis of a state, and the distinction between having such a descent and using it is the whole of what they were.

Being descended from Ali is a genealogical fact and by itself confers nothing. It becomes a political instrument only when somebody invokes it publicly as the ground of a right to rule and people accept the invocation. The Idrisids invoked it constantly: it was the entire argument for why Berber tribes with no prior attachment to the family should accept an outsider as imam, and it is why the Abbasids regarded a fugitive in Morocco as worth poisoning.

Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987) · Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

The dynasty itself fragmented almost immediately. Idris II divided his territory among his sons and the Idrisid lands became a set of small principalities, absorbed piecemeal in the tenth century as the Fatimids and the Cordoban Umayyads fought their proxy war across the Maghreb.

The claim outlived the state by a thousand years.

A mosque and a market

peakDrafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)

Idris II died in 828, and what he left was not really a state. It was a city, and the city turned out to be the durable part.

Fez in 828 was two settlements facing each other across a river: the Andalusi quarter on the right bank, settled by refugees expelled from Córdoba in 818, and the Qarawiyyin quarter on the left, settled by refugees from Kairouan in 824. Two walled towns, two Friday mosques, two populations who had arrived from opposite ends of the Islamic west within six years of each other and who did not merge for three hundred years.

Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987) · Robert Prazeres · CC BY-SA 4.0

Why that produced a capital

Because both halves brought something the far Maghreb did not have.

The Andalusis brought the craft and commercial practice of a Umayyad city: tanning, metalwork, textiles, and the habits of a place that had been a Mediterranean market for a century. The Kairouanis brought the law. Kairouan was the great centre of Maliki jurisprudence in North Africa, and the people who left it in 824 included jurists and their libraries.

A frontier country with no urban tradition of its own acquired, in six years, a population of skilled refugees from the two most sophisticated Muslim cities in the western Mediterranean — because both of those cities had recently expelled people, and there was somewhere for them to go.

What the Idrisids actually did

Very little, and the little was decisive.

They did not build an administration. They collected no systematic taxation anybody has recorded, kept no bureaucracy, minted only intermittently, and never held the country outside the corridor between Fez and the Rif with any consistency. Their army was tribal levies who came when the sharif called and went home afterwards.

What they did was be the reason the city existed and the reason people would come to it. A Berber Morocco with no state tradition, no city and no legal establishment got all three inside a generation because a fugitive from a failed rising near Mecca turned up with the right ancestry and a plausible claim to authority, and everybody who needed somewhere to go went where he was.

The mosque

The Qarawiyyin was founded in 859 as a neighbourhood mosque by Fatima al-Fihri, a merchant's daughter of the Kairouani quarter, out of an inheritance.

Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987) · Amosaad1 · CC BY-SA 4.0

It became the congregational mosque of its half of the city, then a teaching institution, then the intellectual centre of the far Maghreb — a place scholars came to from al-Andalus and from Ifriqiya, with a library and endowments and salaried teachers, running continuously from the ninth century to the present.

That is the Idrisid peak, properly understood. Not a territorial extent, which was never much and never stable, but a city with a law school in it, founded by refugees and endowed by a private woman, which every subsequent dynasty in Morocco needed to hold and none of them built.

What happened to the pieces

contractionDrafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)

Idris II died in 828 and divided his territory among his sons, and the Idrisid state effectively ended there — a century and a half before the last of its princes was removed.

What followed is not a dynasty in decline so much as a family scattered across a country. Idrisid princes held Fez, the Rif, the Atlantic plain and towns in the north, quarrelled, subdivided further, and were still doing it a hundred years later. Dividing a realm among sons is the standard practice of a great many dynasties — the Seljuks did it, the Mongols did it, the Ghurids and the Buyids did it — and it usually takes two or three generations to destroy them. Here it happened immediately and completely, at the first succession, with nothing in place to arrest it.

British Museum, London · Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987) · PHGCOM · Public domain

Then the tenth century arrived and the far Maghreb became somebody else's battlefield. The Fatimids, established in Ifriqiya from 909 and needing the western routes, pushed west; the Umayyads of Córdoba, who declared a caliphate of their own in 929 largely in answer to the Fatimid one, pushed south across the strait. Neither wanted to occupy Morocco. Both wanted the other not to have it, and both worked through Berber clients — Miknasa, Zanata, Sanhaja — who changed sides as the subsidies changed.

The Idrisid principalities were the ground that war was fought over. They were taken, restored, taken again by whichever side was paying that decade, and by 974 the last of them had been removed. No single power destroyed the Idrisids. Two powers fighting each other did it between them, over sixty years, without either of them particularly intending to.

The city they founded did not much notice. Fez went on, was ruled by Zanata clients and then by the Almoravids and the Almohads and the dynasties after them, and remained the intellectual centre of the far Maghreb throughout. The Qarawiyyin has been teaching continuously since 859, under something like a dozen sovereignties.

The claim the dynasty left behind outlasted the state by a thousand years.

974

endDrafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)

The last Idrisid principality was removed in 974, and by then there had not been an Idrisid state for a hundred and forty years.

What ended in 974 was the last of the fragments — a family holding a town or a stretch of the Rif, taken by whichever Berber client of whichever caliphate was being paid that year. There is no battle worth the name, no last ruler anybody remembers, and no account written by anybody on the Idrisid side.

An ending by other people's war

The Idrisids were not conquered. They were used up.

For most of the tenth century the far Maghreb was the ground on which the Fatimids in Ifriqiya and the Umayyads in Córdoba fought a war neither of them could win, because neither could occupy Morocco and both could afford to pay Berbers to. Miknasa, Zanata and Sanhaja chiefs took subsidies, changed sides when the subsidies changed, and fought each other with two caliphates' money.

The Idrisid principalities were not participants in that war so much as terrain. They were taken and restored and taken again as the payments shifted; a family with an impeccable pedigree and no army is a useful thing to install and a cheap thing to remove.

By 974 there was nothing left to install.

What was actually lost

Not much, which is the honest assessment, and it is worth separating from what survived.

There was no Idrisid administration to dismantle, no fiscal system, no army, no body of law issued in the dynasty's name, and no territory it had held continuously for a century. Politically the dynasty was a hundred and seventy years of ambition mostly unrealised, undone by a single division among sons and finished off by other people's proxies.

What survived was the city and the claim, and neither of them needed the dynasty to be in power. Fez went on and got larger. Sharifian descent went on being the most valuable political credential in Morocco, and went on being so for the next thousand years, in the hands of families who were not Idrisids and did not need to be.

Dar Batha Museum, Fez · Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987) · R Prazeres · CC BY-SA 4.0

The tomb

afterlifeDrafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)

In 1437 somebody digging in Fez found a body, uncorrupted, which was identified as Idris II.

Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987) · Oumaima Loudini · CC BY-SA 4.0

The dynasty had been extinct for four hundred and sixty-three years. The discovery came at a convenient moment for the Marinid sultans, who were losing their grip on the country and needed a legitimating asset, and the tomb was promptly built up into a shrine — the zawiya of Moulay Idris — at the centre of Fez, with a sanctuary boundary around it inside which no Jew or Christian could enter, no armed man could pass, and any fugitive was safe from arrest.

It is still there and still working.

Why a corpse mattered

Because sharifian descent had become the only reliable political currency in Morocco, and a physical shrine is a considerably better asset than a genealogy.

The Idrisids had established the principle: that descent from the Prophet through Ali and Fatima was the ground of a right to rule in the far Maghreb. What followed them proved it. The Almoravids and the Almohads had ruled on doctrine rather than descent and both fell. The Marinids ruled on neither and were always vulnerable to the argument that they were only Zanata chiefs who had got lucky.

By the fifteenth century every serious claimant in Morocco either had a sharifian pedigree or acquired one. The Saadis, who took the country in the sixteenth century, were sharifs. The Alaouites, who took it in the seventeenth, were sharifs, and their descendant is on the throne today. Both dynasties trace to the Prophet, neither traces to Idris, and both of them needed the principle he had established.

That is the Idrisid inheritance, and it is not a small one. Very few dynasties determine the terms on which every subsequent dynasty in their country has to argue for itself.

The city

The other inheritance is Fez, which had a better run than the dynasty by an order of magnitude.

The two refugee quarters merged eventually. The Qarawiyyin went on teaching. The city was the capital of the Almoravids' Moroccan territory, then the Almohads', then the Marinids' — who built a whole new administrative city beside it rather than move — then the Wattasids', then a Saadi and Alaouite capital in alternation with Marrakesh and Meknes.

It has been continuously inhabited since 789 and its medieval core is largely intact, which very few cities of that age anywhere can say.

What the founder would have made of it

Idris I was a fugitive from a failed Alid rising near Mecca, who arrived in a country he had never seen with no army, no money and nothing but a name, and was accepted by Berber tribes who had no previous reason to care about the family of the Prophet. He was poisoned, on the usual account by an Abbasid agent, about four years later.

Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987) · Zaineb Hachami · CC BY-SA 4.0

Twelve hundred years afterwards the country he arrived in is ruled by a sharif, the city his son built is one of the oldest continuously inhabited in the world, the university endowed there is still teaching, and his own tomb is a sanctuary in the middle of it that armed men may not enter.

Almost none of that is a consequence of anything he did as a ruler, because he barely was one.

The caliphs at Córdoba

afterlifeDrafted from al-Makkari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain (1843)

The Idrisid principalities were ground up in the tenth century between the Fatimids and the Umayyads of Córdoba. What is less often said is where the family went, and what one branch of it did afterwards, which is take the Umayyad caliphate.

The Andalusi historians followed all of this closely, because it happened to them. Al-Maqqari, compiling in the seventeenth century out of Ibn Hayyan and others, gives the sequence.

Losing Fez

In 917 the Fatimid general Masala ibn Habus was sent against Yahya ibn Idris, sultan of Fez, defeated him and besieged him in his capital; he could not take it then, came back in 921, took it, and put Yahya to death. A kinsman recovered the city and seated himself, as al-Maqqari puts it, on the throne of his ancestors, and was killed by a Fatimid governor two years later. In 952 the family got back a good part of its old dominions, minus Fez.

Then the other caliphate arrived with an offer. Abu'l-Aysh Ahmad, an Idrisid prince with the Fatimids in his territory, swore vassalage to the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Rahman III and asked for troops. Abd al-Rahman would send none unless he was given Tangier and Ceuta as hostages. Abu'l-Aysh refused; a Córdoban fleet ravaged his coast until he accepted; and with those two ports in hand the caliph extended his authority across the whole of the far Maghreb, until — in al-Maqqari's summary — he was obeyed from Tahert to Sijilmasa.

An Idrisid asked one caliphate for protection against the other and paid for it with the two harbours that let the protector take his country.

Córdoba

So the family went to Córdoba, and al-Maqqari records the arrivals like a court register.

In 943 the Idrisite chief judge of Fez came over to join the war against the Christians and was hospitably entertained. In May 945 two more members of the royal house entered the city, were received kindly, and went home in the autumn loaded with presents. Then Ibn Hayyan, quoted directly:

On Saturday the 9th of Rejeb of the year 341 … Hasan, son of Ahmed Al-fildhel … and Mohammed, son of ’Isa … both descendants of ’Ali Ibn Abi Talib, arrived in Cordova; and on Wednesday, the 26th of Rabi’-l-akhar of the ensuing year, ’Isa, Abu-l-’aysh, Yahya Ibn Hasan, and Hasan Ibn Mohammed, also belonging to the royal family of Idris. They fixed their dwelling in Cordova, and left a numerous posterity.

Two of them died there within a decade and were buried in the suburb cemetery, with the chief qadi of the capital reading the funeral service over them by the caliph's own command. Abu'l-Aysh, it is well known, was killed fighting the Christians of the north.

That is a defeated dynasty being pensioned. It is also, on the evidence of the next sixty years, a dynasty being kept.

1016

Among the Berber commanders in the Umayyad armies at the end of the tenth century were two brothers, Ali and al-Qasim ibn Hammud, and al-Maqqari sets out their descent at length for a reason: back through Hammud and Maymun and Ahmad and Ali and Ubaydallah to Umar ibn Idris, son of Idris, son of Abdallah, son of Hasan, son of Husayn, son of Ali ibn Abi Talib.

Their ancestor was that same Idris who, in order to escape the vengeance of Harun Ar-rashid, the ’Abbasside, had fled from the East and taken refuge among the Berbers of Africa.

They rose in the Cordoban service, took a leading part in the civil war that destroyed the Amirid regime, and were rewarded with the government of Tangier and the north African coast. Then the whole structure came apart, and in 1016 Ali crossed the strait — announcing that he came to avenge the murdered caliph Hisham — beat the reigning claimant at Italica outside Seville, beheaded him, and entered Córdoba.

He took the title al-Nasir li-Din Allah, defender of the faith. Two hundred and twenty-eight years after a fugitive with no army was accepted by Berber tribes in Morocco because of his descent, his descendant sat in Córdoba as commander of the faithful.

Eighteen months

Al-Maqqari's account of the reign is the reason to include it, because it does not flatter.

Ali's first act was to discipline the Berber soldiery who had been plundering Córdoba with impunity, and he did it by sitting at his palace gate on fixed days to hear complaints and beheading the convicted in front of their own tribesmen. A writer who saw it records the case of a Berber met at the gate of Amir with a load of grapes on his saddle-bow; asked where he had got them, the man answered I seized them like a man, and Ali had him beheaded on the spot and his head paraded through the streets on the horse's back on top of the grapes.

For eighteen consecutive months, al-Maqqari writes, he persevered in the right path. Then he learned that the Andalusians, who could not tolerate his rule, had raised an Umayyad claimant in the east, and he changed his conduct entirely: he let the Berbers go back to what they had been doing, the great houses of the Umayyads were gutted, the rich were dispossessed and the learned insulted, and the ruin of the city went on as fast as in its worst years.

While he was preparing to march against the rising, three Slav pages of the old Umayyad household assassinated him in his bath and hid in a part of the palace only they knew. That was in 1017. One historian who checked put the reign at twenty-one months and six days. When the death became public, al-Maqqari writes, the people of Córdoba were highly rejoiced.

His brother and then his son held the caliphal title after him, and the family ended as one of the small kingdoms of a broken al-Andalus, with its seat at Málaga.

al-Makkari, The History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain (1843) · Elazharhamza · CC BY-SA 4.0

What the poet said

Al-Maqqari, who is never far from a verse, closes the reign with the court poets, and one of them supplies the sentence the whole chapter is about. Ubada ibn Ma' al-Sama — a Shi'i, which he notes — wrote in praise of Ali:

Your ancestor 'Ali began in the East what another 'Ali has accomplished in the West. Let then all invoke the favours of God on him, and salute him; for his is the empire by right divine.

That is the Idrisid claim, made in Córdoba, about a man who had just been stabbed by his own palace servants. It is also, for the two hundred and twenty-eight years between the fugitive and the caliph, an accurate description of what the family had been trading on the whole time.

The political afterlife was short and unhappy. The other one — a tomb in Fez and a principle about descent — outlasted it by a thousand years.