Abd al-Mu'min

By Kaveh Hosseini

The Almohad empire was preached by Ibn Tumart, but it was built by Abd al-Mu'min — the administrator who turned a mountain sect into the largest empire the Islamic West ever knew, and the first Moroccan caliph.

Abd al-Mu'min was a Zenata Berber from the Nedroma region, near Tlemcen. As a young student he attached himself to Ibn Tumart, the Mahdi of the Atlas, and became his indispensable lieutenant — the organizer to the prophet's fire. When Ibn Tumart died in 1130, concealing his death for years, it was Abd al-Mu'min who held the movement together, was proclaimed caliph, and converted a religious following into a conquering state.

His achievement was organizational before it was military. Abd al-Mu'min created the Almohad makhzen: a hierarchy of councils — the Council of Ten, the Council of Fifty — a hereditary dynasty grafted onto a theocratic movement, a standing army with a corps of archers and a fleet, and a chancery that administered in Arabic across Berber lands. He made the Almohad doctrine, the tawhid of Ibn Tumart, the official creed of an empire, and he made Marrakech — stormed and taken in 1147 — its capital.

Then came the conquests, executed with a method that recalls Rome. Between 1145 and 1160 he reduced al-Andalus city by city, making Seville the empire's European capital. Then he turned east: in 1159–1160 he marched the length of North Africa, taking Tunis and Tripoli, extinguishing the last Norman footholds and the petty dynasties of Ifriqiya. At his death in 1163, a single Moroccan dynasty ruled from the Atlantic Ocean to the borders of Egypt — from al-Andalus to Libya — the greatest North African empire since antiquity.

Abd al-Mu'min was also a builder of the permanent. He founded Rabat — Ribat al-Fath, "fortress of victory" — as the staging port for the Andalusi campaigns, laying the first stones of the city that is Morocco's capital today. He commissioned the great mosques, organized the first Almohad census of the empire's tribes, and patronized the scholars who would make the Almohad century a golden age.

He died in 1163, succeeded by his son Abu Yaqub Yusuf, the caliphate he founded now hereditary. The chroniclers, even hostile ones, concede his stature: a man who took a mountain preaching and made it a world empire in thirty years. The centralized state he designed — caliph, makhzen, standing army, imperial capital — became the permanent template of Moroccan government. Every Moroccan sultan after him, to the present Alaouite king, governs in the institutional frame Abd al-Mu'min built.

The eastern campaign of 1159–1160 deserves its full weight: Abd al-Mu'min's march to Ifriqiya extinguished the Norman "Kingdom of Africa" — Roger II of Sicily's coastal empire, which had seized Tripoli, Sfax, and Tunis — restoring the entire North African littoral to Muslim rule in a single campaign. It was the only time in the Middle Ages that one power held the whole coast from the Atlantic to Libya, and it made the Almohad caliph the arbiter of the central Mediterranean. At home, the caliph institutionalized the Mahdi's doctrine with a permanence his successors could not undo: Ibn Tumart's books became state scripture, memorized in the talaba schools, and the Almohad creed — strict tawhid, rejection of anthropomorphism — was imposed on the ulama of every city. Tinmel, the mountain village where the movement began, became a pilgrimage city; its great mosque, austere and immense, still stands in the High Atlas as the Westminster Abbey of the Almohad revolution — the dynasty's origin made stone. Abd al-Mu'min died in 1163 at Salé, preparing another Andalusi campaign; he was buried at Tinmel beside the Mahdi, the organizer beside the prophet, as if the empire itself acknowledged that it took both.

Impact on civilization