The Almoravid Empire

In Our Time: History

BBC

History

4.5 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2018

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Berber people who grew to dominate the western Maghreb, founded Marrakesh and took control of Al-Andalus. They were desert people, wearing veils over their faces to keep out the sand, and they wanted a simpler form of Islam. They called themselves the Murabitun, the people who gathered together to fight the holy war, and they were tough fighters; the Spanish knight El Cid fought them and lost, and the legend that built around him said the Almoravids were terrible and had to be resisted. They kept back the Christians of northern Spain, so helping extend Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula, before they themselves were destroyed and replaced by their rivals, the Almohads, from the Atlas Mountains.

The image above shows the interior of the cupola, Almoravid Koubba, Marrakesh (C11th)

With

Amira K Bennison Professor in the History and Culture of the Maghreb at the University of Cambridge

Nicola Clarke Lecturer in the History of the Islamic World at Newcastle University

And

Hugh Kennedy Professor of Arabic at SOAS, University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is the BBC.
1:00.0	The word Al Moravid actually comes to us from Spanish.
1:21.0	It's a name of a group.
1:24.0	It's about people.
1:26.0	It relates to the Arabic root, Robata, which is to Thai.
1:31.0	It is a sense of people who are either tied to God in the sense of being particularly committed to a particular religious message.
1:39.0	It's often attributed in later sources to being given to the group at a particular moment of time by their leader, Ibn Yer Sin,
1:50.0	when they had had a particularly bad battle, many had died, and he encouraged them and galvanised them by saying,
1:58.0	you are in Arabic, Al Moravid, the ones who are tied to God, and your commitment will be rewarded.
2:05.0	In terms of the people who they actually were from another perspective, they were predominantly St. Harja Burbas from the Saharan desert.
2:14.0	So, did they come together with people, whether people before they started on the track to the road to conquest, or were they individual tribes,
2:25.0	and how related were they in the sense of a cohesive force?
2:30.0	The Saharan are a tribal people.
2:33.0	Many different tribes made up the confederation.
2:36.0	They were sometimes hostile to each other, and it is really the religious message preached to them by Ibn Yer Sin, which gradually unites more and more tribes.
2:48.0	However, that process of unification was not simply a matter of persuasion to follow a particular form of Islam, but it also could be coercive in the sense of tribes fighting each other, and the defeated party joining the movement.
3:02.0	So, the Saharan, a number of different tribes scattered throughout the Sahara, who become gradually united into a single group, the Al Moravids, who then go on to create an empire.
3:14.0	The Sahara is so big. Can you give us any idea of the size of the army that men came together?
3:22.0	It is very difficult to say for the 11th century, we don't really have any statistics, so I would hesitate to put numbers on this.
3:33.0	The sources don't routinely talk about numbers, but I don't think we are not talking about massive armies by any means.
3:41.0	We are not talking about 20,000 people.
3:44.0	In terms of the entire confederation, one might be, and I suppose the point to make here is that tribesmen are generally not civilians and soldiers.
	...

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