Author: Maribel Fierro
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351219480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 527
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Book Description
The studies in this collection comprise a series of explorations into the revolutionary character of the Almohad movement in medieval North Africa and Spain and how it was expressed, including through compelling visual and auditory means. Almohad silver coins were minted square instead of round, and they carried no date, as if to indicate that a new era had begun. The new age was symbolized in the texts appearing on the coins, reminding Muslims that 'God is our Lord, Muhammad is our Prophet, the Mahdi is our imam', and that a new caliphate had begun. Almoravid mosques were purified and attempts were made to correct their orientation (qibla). Also, both non-Almohad Muslims and non-Muslims were obliged to learn the Almohad profession of faith, in what was in fact a forced conversion to the Almohad understanding of true religion. New scholarly elites - entrusted with the propagation and maintenance of Almohad beliefs and practices - were created by the Almohad caliphs. Philosophy flourished with Ibn Tufayl and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) serving the new rulers. These articles by Professor Fierro are an attempt at explaining what put in motion such a revolution, how it developed and changed, and the influences it had both in the Islamic and non Islamic worlds. Eight of the studies have been translated into English, from Spanish and French, specially for publication here.
Author: Allen J. Fromherz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857712071
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
How did an obscure Islamic visionary found an empire? The Almohad Empire at its zenith in the 12th century was the major power in Mediterranean and North Africa, ruling a huge and disparate region from the Atlas Mountains to Tunisia, Morocco and Andalusia. Allen Fromherz, drawing on medieval Arabic and Berber sources, analyses the history and myths surrounding the rise of the Almohads. He shows how Muhammad Ibn Tumart, the son of an obscure Berber tribal chief, founded his mission to reform Islam - then at a low point in its history, battered by the crusades, having lost Jerusalem and been undermined by weak spiritual and political leadership. Ibn Tumart was proclaimed Mahdi by the Berber tribes, as one who heralded the golden age of Islam. He provided charismatic leadership, and a message of unswerving adherence to absolute monotheism and fundamental Islam, to be enforced by jihad - holy war. He died in 1130, before his dream could be accomplished but his successors quickly built on his foundation, conquering Marrakech - the door to the Sahara gold trade and the greatest city of commerce and trade in North Africa. Ibn Tumart and his legacy were to prove the launch-pad for empire, leading to Almohad domination of the Western Mediterranean from Tunisia to Morocco and Andalusia. It became the seat of a brilliant civilisation, the seed-bed of a 12th-century renaissance and flowering of scholarship which reached far into the Middle East and Europe. Fromherz shows how Tumart formed the sinews of empire - by charismatic leadership, a reformed and powerful Islam, unity based on the closely-knit traditions of the Berber tribes, military power and sound administration. This is the first account of the Almohads in English and will be essential for all who are interested in Islam, the Almohad Empire, North Africa and Middle East, and the lasting cultural effect on the region and on Europe.
Author: Simon Barton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521894067
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 394
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Book Description
An examination of the nature and role of the aristocracy in twelfth-century Spain.
Author: Amira K. Bennison
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748646825
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
A comprehensive account of two of the most important empires in medieval North AfricaThis is the first book in English to provide a comprehensive account of the rise and fall of the Almoravids and the Almohads, the two most important Berber dynasties of the medieval Islamic west, an area that encompassed southern Spain and Portugal, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The a'anhAja Almoravids emerged from the Sahara in the 1050s to conquer vast territories and halt the Christian advance in Iberia. They were replaced a century later by their rivals, the Almohads, supported by the Maa'GBPmAda Berbers of the High Atlas. Although both have often been seen as uncouth, religiously intolerant tribesmen who undermined the high culture of al-Andalus, this book argues that the eleventh to thirteenth centuries were crucial to the Islamisation of the Maghrib, its integration into the Islamic cultural sphere, and its emergence as a key player in the western Mediterranean, and that much of this was due to these oft-neglected Berber empires.Key featuresThe first work in English to give a full account of the Almoravids and AlmohadsFeatures numerous translated quotes and anecdotes from Arabic primary sourcesProvides an intimate portrait of the daily lives and material culture of people living within the empires, as well as delivering a clear dynastic historyUses maps, genealogical tables, illustrations and a chronology
Author: Amar S. Baadj
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004298576
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262
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Book Description
In Saladin, the Almohads and the Banū Ghāniya, Amar Baadj gives us the first comprehensive, modern study of a fascinating but little-known episode in the history of the medieval Mediterranean. This is the story of the long struggle between the Almohad caliphs of the Maghrib, the Banū Ghāniya of Majorca, and the Ayyubids for dominance of North Africa. The author makes use of important textual sources that have been ignored as well as new archaeological evidence to challenge some of the basic assumptions about the events in question. He also successfully places these events in their wider temporal and geographical context for the first time.
Author: Bruce Maddy-Weitzman
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292745052
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
Like many indigenous groups that have endured centuries of subordination, the Berber/Amazigh peoples of North Africa are demanding linguistic and cultural recognition and the redressing of injustices. Indeed, the movement seeks nothing less than a refashioning of the identity of North African states, a rewriting of their history, and a fundamental change in the basis of collective life. In so doing, it poses a challenge to the existing political and sociocultural orders in Morocco and Algeria, while serving as an important counterpoint to the oppositionist Islamist current. This is the first book-length study to analyze the rise of the modern ethnocultural Berber/Amazigh movement in North Africa and the Berber diaspora. Bruce Maddy-Weitzman begins by tracing North African history from the perspective of its indigenous Berber inhabitants and their interactions with more powerful societies, from Hellenic and Roman times, through a millennium of Islam, to the era of Western colonialism. He then concentrates on the marginalization and eventual reemergence of the Berber question in independent Algeria and Morocco, against a background of the growing crisis of regime legitimacy in each country. His investigation illuminates many issues, including the fashioning of official national narratives and policies aimed at subordinating Berbers in an Arab nationalist and Islamic-centered universe; the emergence of a counter-movement promoting an expansive Berber "imagining" that emphasizes the rights of minority groups and indigenous peoples; and the international aspects of modern Berberism.
Author:
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754669517
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 460
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Book Description
The Chronicle of Ibn al-Athir (1160-1233 AD), entitled al-Kamil fi'l-Ta'rikh, is one of the outstanding sources for the history of the mediaeval world. It covers the whole sweep of Islamic history almost up to the death of its author. The years in this part are dominated by the careers of Nur al-Din and Saladin, the champions of the Jihad, sometimes called the 'counter-crusade'.
Author: Wilyam Shar?f
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1445278251
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 177
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Book Description
The book tells the story of Ibn Tumart who founded a religious movement that imposed its version of Islam, founded the Almohad state, and put an end to the Almoravid state, which ruled many parts of North Africa and Spain in the 11th and 12th centuries.
Author: Ramzi Rouighi
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 081220462X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
The thirteenth century marks a turning point in the history of the western Mediterranean. The armies of Castile and Aragon won significant and decisive victories over Muslims in Iberia and took over a number of important cities including Cordoba, Seville, Jaen, and Murcia. Chased out of their native cities, a large number of Andalusis migrated to Ifrīqiyā in northern Africa. There, a newly founded Hafsid dynasty (1229-1574) welcomed members of the Andalusi elite and showered them with honors and high positions at court. While historians have tended to conceive of Ifrīqiyā as a region ruled by the Hafsids, Ramzi Rouighi argues in The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate that the Andalusis who joined the Hafsid court supported economic arrangements and political relationships that effectively prevented regional integration from taking place during this period. Rouighi examines an array of documentary, literary, and legal sources to argue that Ifrīqiyā was integrated neither politically nor economically and that, consequently, it was not a region in a meaningful sense. Through a close reading of narrative sources, especially historical chronicles, Rouighi further argues that the emergence in the late fourteenth century of the political ideology of Emirism accounts for the representation of the rule of the Hafsid dynasty over cities as its rule over the whole of Ifrīqiyā. Setting the activities of Andalusis such as the celebrated historian Ibn Khaldūn (1332-1406) in relation to specific political, economic, and intellectual developments in Ifrīqiyā, The Making of a Mediterranean Emirate proposes a counter to the dynastic-centric view of the period that pervades medieval sources and continues to inform most modern generalizations about the Maghrib and the Mediterranean.
Author: Jane S. Gerber
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004058200
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230
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Book Description
