Ibn Tumart

Ibn Tumart came from the Hargha, a Masmuda group in the Sous on the Atlantic side of the Anti-Atlas, and the movement he built was made out of the Masmuda tribes of the High Atlas. That matters for how his teaching is described. He preached in Tamazight, his creed was put into Tamazight for his followers, and the call to prayer and the basic instruction of the movement were given in it. The surviving Book of Ibn Tumart is in Arabic, but it records a teaching that reached most of its audience in another language.

His theology was a hard reading of tawhid, the unity of God. He attacked the Almoravid religious establishment for what he regarded as anthropomorphism, for reading the divine attributes in the Quran as though God had a hand or a face or a location, and for a jurisprudence that worked from the manuals of the Maliki school rather than from the Quran and the prophetic reports directly. He also enforced the duty of commanding right and forbidding wrong with a literalism that made him unwelcome in several cities before he had any following.

Reducing this to an Arab reform arriving among Berbers gets it backwards. The Almoravids were themselves a Berber dynasty, of the Sanhaja; the Almohad movement was a Masmuda one; and the argument between them was conducted inside Amazigh North Africa, in Amazigh languages, about what Islam required.

Around 1121, at Tinmel in the High Atlas, Ibn Tumart was acclaimed as the Mahdi, the rightly guided one whose coming was expected. The claim was not vague. His followers held that he was preserved from error, that his teaching settled disputes, and that obedience to him was owed, and the movement's genealogists supplied a descent from the Prophet.

Around that claim he built an organisation. The sources describe ranked councils, an inner group of ten and a wider council of fifty, a body of instructors, a graded curriculum with memorised texts, and a discipline enforced by inspection and by purge. It is closer to the structure of a state than to that of a preaching mission, and it was in place before the movement had a capital or a territory worth the name.

He died at Tinmel in 1130 after a defeat outside Marrakesh, and the sources say his death was concealed for some time while the succession was arranged. Abd al-Mumin, a Zenata Berber from what is now western Algeria who had joined him early, took over and within twenty years held Morocco, then Ifriqiya and al-Andalus. The Almohad caliphate that resulted was the only power ever to rule the whole Maghreb and Muslim Spain together, and its official doctrine remained the one Ibn Tumart had taught in the mountains.