Rustamid Imamate

An elected imamate

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

The Rustamids were Ibadis — a surviving moderate branch of the Kharijite movement, which held that the leader of the community should be the most qualified Muslim regardless of descent, and could be deposed if he failed. It is the doctrine that had put the Kharijites in permanent opposition to both the Umayyads and the Alids, and at Tahert it produced a state.

Abd al-Rahman ibn Rustam, a Persian, was elected imam around 776. The imamate that followed lasted a century and a third, elective in principle and in practice dynastic within his family — a contradiction the Ibadi scholars of the town argued about openly, which is itself the point. Tahert was a place where the legitimacy of the ruler was a live question rather than a settled one, and it attracted Ibadis, Mu'tazilites and Christians accordingly.

Its wealth came from the trans-Saharan trade, running gold north from the Sudan and sending Ibadi merchants south along routes that carried the doctrine with them. That commerce is why Ibadi communities exist today in the Mzab, on Jerba and in Oman.

The Fatimids destroyed Tahert in 909 on their way to Ifriqiya.

A town for people who had lost

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

Tahert was founded in 761 by people who had just been beaten, and it filled up with other people who had just been beaten.

The Kharijite risings of the 740s had taken most of the Maghreb out of Umayyad and then Abbasid control, and had then been put down, piece by piece, by armies sent from the east. What survived was scattered: Ibadi communities in Tripolitania and the Nafusa mountains, Sufris in the far west, and a great many people with a doctrine and nowhere to hold it.

Abd al-Rahman ibn Rustam had been the Ibadi governor of Kairouan and had lost it. He withdrew west onto the high plateau, to a site with water and a defensible position and nothing else recommending it, and was elected imam there.

Who came

Everybody with the same problem.

Ibadis from Tripolitania and the Jebel Nafusa. Persians — Ibn Rustam's own family were of Persian descent, and the connection to the Ibadi scholars of Basra who had sent him west in the first place stayed live for generations. Berbers of several confederations. And, in numbers the sources notice, refugees from Kairouan and Ifriqiya who were not Ibadi at all: Christians, Jews and Sunnis who found a town on the plateau where nobody was going to ask.

That last is the thing worth stopping on. A sectarian state founded by a persecuted minority turned out to be the most religiously mixed town in the central Maghreb, and the reason is not tolerance in the modern sense. It is that a community which has just been hunted knows exactly what hunting costs, and that a town on a plateau with no natural wealth needs people.

What it lived on

The road, and the fact that it was neutral.

Tahert sat where the routes from the Saharan oases to the Mediterranean crossed the routes running east and west along the plateau, and it had no interest in anybody's war. It could not have won one. What it could do was be the place where Ibadi traders from Tripolitania, Sunni merchants from Ifriqiya and caravans from the desert all did business without the local authority caring which of them was which.

By the ninth century it was known well enough that Arabic writers call it the Iraq of the Maghreb — a compliment about its learning and its markets, from people who did not share its confession.

And the argument that came with them

The other thing the refugees brought was the habit of arguing.

An Ibadi community is constituted by an election, and an election can be disputed. A town made of people who had left everywhere else rather than accept an illegitimate authority was never going to be quiet about the legitimacy of its own.

An argument that stayed open

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

The Rustamid imamate was elective in principle and dynastic in practice, and the Ibadi scholars of Tahert argued about the contradiction openly. That argument is the most unusual thing this small state produced, and none of the ordinary measures of a polity — its territory, its revenue, its army — registers it at all.

Ibadi doctrine holds that the imam is the most qualified Muslim, chosen by the community's learned men, and removable by them if he fails. It is not a formality. The Ibadi tradition distinguishes conditions under which an imamate may exist at all — open rule, defence, concealment, self-sacrifice — and it holds that a community with no qualified candidate should have no imam rather than an unqualified one. The same doctrine produced the same institution at the other end of the Islamic world: the Ibadi imamate of Oman, three thousand miles east, elected its imams on the same principles for the same reasons and went on doing so into the twentieth century.

What happened at Tahert is what happens when a doctrine of that kind meets a successful family. Abd al-Rahman ibn Rustam was elected. His son Abd al-Wahhab was elected too, in the sense that the community accepted him — and a faction refused, on the grounds that the choice had been made by too narrow a circle and that hereditary succession was precisely what the doctrine existed to prevent. Those who broke away are called the Nukkar, the deniers, and the split is permanent: Ibadism has been divided along that line ever since.

That is a schism about a procedure rather than about a person or a doctrine, and it is worth registering how rare that is. The Sunni-Shi'i division is about who should have succeeded the Prophet. The Isma'ili splits are about which designated son was the true imam. The Nukkar dispute is about whether an election was properly conducted, which is the kind of thing that divides a parliament rather than a religion.

The Rustamids went on being elected and went on being Rustamids for a hundred and thirty years. Tahert accordingly was a town where the legitimacy of the government was a subject of open scholarly disagreement conducted in public by people the government could not silence — which attracted Ibadi jurists, Mu'tazilites, and, the sources say, Christians, and which is the reason a small Berber city on the central Maghrebi plateau produced a legal literature that is still in use.

Doctrine along the caravan routes

Drafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)aside?What aside means

Tahert sat where the routes from the Sudan met the routes to Ifriqiya and al-Andalus, and the Ibadi communities that ran its commerce carried their doctrine with their goods.

It is worth being careful about who was doing the carrying. Ibadism travelled south along the caravan routes with Ibadi traders, and Ibadi communities appear at the Saharan termini and beyond — but that is merchants propagating a confession they happened to share with their ruler, which is a different thing from a state exporting one. Nobody in the sources describes the imams at Tahert sending missions, endowing anything abroad, or converting anybody by policy.

The distinction matters because it is the whole character of this state. Tahert did not project. It hosted.

What is not in doubt is the outcome. Ibadi communities exist today in the Mzab valley of Algeria, on Jerba, in the Nafusa mountains of Libya and in Oman, and the West African connections established in this period are why Ibadi jurists appear in the trans-Saharan record for centuries afterwards.

Tahert itself was destroyed by the Fatimid advance in 909, and the surviving Ibadi leadership withdrew south into the desert at Sedrata and then to the Mzab, where they built five walled towns and a scholarly tradition that outlasted every polity that had tried to end them.

909

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

The Fatimid army that had just destroyed the Aghlabids at Raqqada came west and took Tahert in 909, and the imamate ended in a sack.

It is worth noticing how quickly. The Kutama campaign of 909 finished two states in the same year — the Aghlabid emirate at Kairouan and this one on the plateau — and then went on across the Maghreb to Sijilmasa to collect the imprisoned man in whose name the whole thing had been done. Three of the four polities of the central and western Maghreb were removed by one army in one season.

Why Tahert could not survive it

Because the thing that had kept it alive for a hundred and thirty years was nobody wanting it enough.

Tahert had no gold, no great agricultural surplus and no strategic position worth an expedition. It sat on a crossroads and taxed the traffic, and every power that might have taken it had better uses for an army. What changed in 909 was that a movement arrived whose objective was not any particular town but the whole Maghreb, and to which the crossroads of the central plateau was simply on the way.

There is also the doctrinal side, and it is not incidental. The Fatimids were Isma'ili Shi'a claiming the imamate by descent from Ali and Fatima. The Rustamids were Ibadi Kharijites holding that the imamate belongs to whichever qualified Muslim the community elects, and that descent confers nothing at all. Those are not two positions that can share a country.

What was destroyed

The library, mostly, and this is the loss the Ibadi tradition itself dwells on.

Tahert had accumulated a century and a half of Ibadi scholarship — legal opinions, correspondence with Basra, the records of the community's own disputes about its own elections. Much of it went in 909. What survives of early Ibadi law and history survives largely because copies had gone out to the Nafusa mountains and to Jerba and to Oman, which is what a network of that kind is for and is the reason the tradition did not end with the state.

And then they left

The surviving leadership and a substantial part of the community did not submit and did not disperse. They went south, out of the plateau and into the pre-Saharan steppe, and started again in a worse place on purpose, which is the most interesting decision anybody in this history made.

Into the desert

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

What the Ibadis did next is the reason the ending is worth a chapter rather than a sentence.

They went south. The surviving leadership and a substantial part of the community withdrew from the plateau into the pre-Saharan steppe and founded Sedrata, near modern Ouargla, and when that failed them they moved again into the Mzab — a rock valley in the northern Sahara with almost no water and no reason for anyone to want it. There, from the eleventh century, they built five walled towns on five hilltops, dug wells and a flood-irrigation system for the palm groves, and organised themselves under a council of religious scholars rather than a ruler.

That arrangement is Ibadi doctrine applied to a community with no state. Ibadi law provides for exactly this: where no imam can be established, the community lives under kitman, concealment, governed by its own learned men. The Mzabi towns did that for eight hundred years. They are still there, still Ibadi, still speaking their own Berber language, and the scholarly tradition has been continuous.

Set that against what the state itself amounted to. Nobody knows how large it was or how many people it held. It lasted a hundred and thirty-three years and ended in a sack, and it is a footnote in most histories of North Africa.

The thing it was carrying is on Jerba, in the Nafusa mountains of Libya, in the Mzab, and in Oman, where an Ibadi imamate was reconstituted again and again for twelve hundred years on the same principles Tahert had elected its imams by.

Measured as a state the Rustamids barely register. Measured by what outlived them, very few polities of any size have done as well.

Six castles

Drafted from Africanus, The History and Description of Africa (1896)afterlife

Six hundred years after Tahert was sacked, a Granadan diplomat who had travelled the Maghreb for the sultan of Fez wrote a description of Africa for an Italian readership, and he passed through the country the Ibadis had withdrawn into.

Leo Africanus is describing the Sahara of the 1510s and 1520s from his own journeys, and what makes his account useful here is not what he says but what he does not. He was a Muslim of the Maliki west writing for Christians, and he had no reason to notice a sect that had spent six centuries taking care not to be noticed.

What he found

Of the Mzab — he calls it Meszab — the entry is four lines long:

This region being situate vpon the Numidian desert, 300. miles eastward from Tegorarin, and 300. miles also from the Mediterran sea, containeth sixe castles, and many villages, the inhabitants being rich, and vsing traffike to the land of Negros. Likewise the Negro-merchants, togither with them of Bugia and Ghir make resort vnto this region.

Six walled towns in a rock valley with no water worth the name, inhabited by rich people, trading south to the Sudan, and drawing merchants from the coast and from the desert to come to them. Tributary, he adds, to the Arabs.

Ouargla, where the refugees from Tahert had first stopped, he gives more room to: an ancient city founded by the Numidians, walled, built very sumptuously, abounding in dates, with castles and a great number of villages attached. The inhabitants are rich because they are near the kingdom of Agadez; merchants of Tunis and Constantine come there to carry the goods of Barbary into the land of the Blacks; flesh and corn being scarce, they live on ostrich and camel. They have a governor whom they reverence as if he were a king, with two thousand horsemen always attending him.

Of the nearby town of Touggourt, where Leo stayed some days with the young prince and liked him, he records the local custom that struck him hardest: they favour strangers exceedingly and send them away without payment, they would rather marry their daughters to strangers than to their own citizens, and their generosity is such that they heap gifts on men they are sure never to see again.

What is not in it

Not one word about religion.

Leo names no sect anywhere in these entries, records no doctrinal peculiarity, and gives no sign of knowing that the towns he is describing were built by people who had walked out of a destroyed imamate rather than accept a ruler they held to be illegitimate. He notes what a traveller notes: the walls, the dates, the caravans, the tribute, the manners.

That is exactly what the Ibadi doctrine of kitman — concealment, the condition under which a community lives when no imam can be established — is designed to produce. A community practising it does not advertise, does not dispute in public with outsiders, and answers a passing geographer's questions about commerce. Leo's silence is not ignorance so much as the successful operation of a six-hundred-year-old policy.

And what is in it

The other thing to take from these four lines is the continuity of the business.

Tahert had been a crossroads town on a plateau with no natural wealth, living on the traffic between the Saharan oases and the Mediterranean and on being a place where people of different confessions could trade without anybody asking. The Mzab in Leo's day is six walled towns in a worse place, living on the traffic between the Sudan and the coast, and rich.

They moved the site twice, lost the state, kept the trade and kept the doctrine, and were still doing all three when a Granadan on a diplomatic circuit rode past and wrote down that the inhabitants were wealthy and used traffic to the land of the Blacks.