Articulating and Contesting Power in the Maghrib

Abstract

This paper will explore narratives and counter-narratives of righteousness in the twelfth-century Islamic west. Between 1100 and 1250, much of the Maghrib and the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula came under the control of a revolutionary religio-political regime, the Almohad (Arabic: al-muwaḥḥidūn) caliphate. This movement was predicted on belief that Ibn Tūmart, a Maṣmūda Berber tribesman from the area below the High Atlas mountains was the mahdī, an eschatological Muslim figure similar to a messiah, who would restore and renew true monotheism with the aid of the indigenous Berbers of the Maghrib. Ibn Tūmart’s first successor or caliph, ʿAbd al-Muʾmin, constructed the Almohad empire and promulgated its radical message which made large swathes of the population ‘deviant’ from the religious perspective and, when they rebelled, ‘criminal’ as well. However, a fascinating counter-narrative can also be traced in the claims of religio-political opponents of the Almohads, and the first generation of indigenous hagiographies, collected by Ibn al-Zayyāt al-Tādilī, where community appeals to ‘holy men’ served as a source of Divine legitimation for violent responses to the Almohad state and its claims.