Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-mzp66 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-12T04:18:26.113Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Zughba at Tripoli, 429H (1037–8 A.D.)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2015

Michael Brett
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Speaking of Tripoli, the fourteenth-century writer al-Tijāni says: ‘when the Zughba killed Sacīd ibn Khazrūn in the year 429’. Sacīd was the Zanāta lord of the city, and al-Tijānī is explaining that the venerable faqīh Ibn Munammar was driven into exile because, when Sacīd was killed, he opened the gates to a cousin of the dead man who was promptly expelled by a brother. The reference to the Zughba is thus contained within an account of the dynasty of the Banū Khazrūn which is itself contained within a biographical notice of the jurist Ibn Munammar. There is no further explanation of the killing, and no mention of it by any other writer apart from Ibn Khaldūn, who has borrowed the story from Al-Tijānī, and repeats it twice. This presents a problem. The Zughba were Arabs, a branch of the Banū Hilāl. In that case they should not have been at Tripoli at all, as Ibn Khaldūn observes, because the Banū Hilāl did not enter Ifrīqiya until they were sent from Egypt to punish the Zīrīd sultan al-Mucizz ibn Bādīs for breaking his allegiance to the Fāṭimid caliph in Cairo, and recognising the cAbbāsid caliph in Baghdad. That would have been some time after 1048, more specifically, after 1050, when the man who is usually held responsible for the invasion, al-Yāzūrī, became the Fāṭimid wazīr. The story of the invasion at the behest of al-Yāzūrī is accepted by the principal modern authority, Hady Roger Idris, who tries to explain the reference to the Zughba at Tripoli in 1037–8 by suggesting that a fraction of the tribe may have accompanied their relatives the Banū Qurra, a people settled to the west of Alexandria, when these were sent by Cairo to support an attack upon the Zīrīds of Ifrīqiya by an Ifrīqiyan pretender, Yaḥyā ibn cAlī ibn Hamdūn, in 1001–2. The Banū Qurra had helped Ya…yā to attack Tripoli, but had then returned to Egypt. Idris wonders if this hypothetical fraction of the Zughba had not stayed behind in the neighbourhood of the city.

Type
Research Article
Information
Libyan Studies , Volume 6 , 1974 , pp. 41 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Libyan Studies 1974

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1.Al-Tijānī, , Riḥlat al-Tijānī, Tunis, 1958, 267.Google Scholar
2.Khaldūn, Ibn, Kitāb al-cIbar, 7 vol., Būlāq, 1284H, VII, 43; VI, 40. The second reference is less precise, introduced into a story borrowed from Ibn al-Athīr. Cf. French trans, de Slane, Histoire des Berbères, 2nd ed., P. Casanova and H. Pérès, 4 vols, Paris, 1925–34, 1956, III, 266–8, 1, 86.Google Scholar
3.Idris, Hady Roger, La Berbèrie orientale sous les Zīrīdes, Paris, 1962, 164.Google Scholar
4. Cf. Brett, M., ‘The Military Interest of the Battle of Ḥaydarān’, War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, ed. Parry, V. J. and Yapp, M. E., London, New York and Toronto, 1975, 78–88.Google Scholar
5.Sijillāt Mustanṣirīya, MS., Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, catalogue no. 27155, no.5, fo.15r–17v.Google Scholar
6.Ḥayyūs, Ibn, Dīwān, ed. Bey, Mardam, Damascus, 1951, 486–94, 618–26.Google Scholar
7.al-Athīr, Ibn, Al-Kitāb al-Kāmil fī 'l-ta' rīkh, 14 vols., Cairo, 1301H, IX, 237; French trans. E. Fagnan, Annales du Maghreb et de l'Espagne, Algiers, 1898, 459; Ibn cIdhārī, Al-Bāyan al-Mughrib, ed. G. S. Colin and E. Lévi-Provençal, 2 vols., Leiden, 1948–51, I, 293; French trans. E. Fagnan, Al-Bayano 'l-Mogrib, 2 vols., Algiers, 1901, I, from imperfect ms., does not refer; Ibn Khaldūn, cIbar, VI, 166; Berbères, II, 35; Al-Tijānī, Riḥla, 96–7.Google Scholar
8.al-Ṣayrafī, Ibn, Al-Ishāra ilā man nāla al-wizāra, (Bulletin de l'Institut français d'Archéologie orientale, XXV), Cairo, 1924, 42.Google Scholar
9.Idhārī, Ibn, Bayān, I, 290.Google Scholar
10.al-Ṣayrafī, Ibn, loc. cit.; Ibn Muyassar, Annales d'Egypte (Les Khalifes Fatimides), ed. Massé, Cairo, 1919, 6, 9.Google Scholar
11. This subject is treated more fully in a paper presented to the Premier Congrès d'Histoire et de Civilisation du Maghreb, held at Tunis in 12 1974, entitled ‘Sijill al-Mustanṣir’, to be published in the Actes du Congrès.Google Scholar
12.Ḥawqal, Ibn, Ḥūrat al-Arḍ, ed. Kramers, J. H., Leiden, 1938–1939, 155; French trans. J. H. Kramers and G. Wiet, Configuration de la terre, Paris, 1964, 153.Google Scholar
13.Al-Bakrī, , Description de l'Afrique septentrionale, ed. and French trans, de Slane, , 2nd ed., Algiers, 1911–1913, reprinted Paris, 1965.Google Scholar
14.Al-Bakrī, , Description, 15–16, trans. 38–40.Google Scholar
15.Khaldūn, Ibn, cIbar, VI, 15–19; Berbères, I, 37–44.Google Scholar
16. The legends have been studied by Mukhlis, F. A., ‘Studies and Comparison of the Cycles of the Banū Hilāl Romance’, Ph.D., London, 1964.Google Scholar
17. Cf. Norris, H. T., Saharan Myth and Saga, Oxford, 1972, 1, et passim, esp.78.Google Scholar
18.Ibid., passim.Google Scholar
19.Al-Tijānī, , Riḥla, 16–21, quoting the twelfth century Andalusian anthologist Ibn Bassām, does indeed give the credit for the invasion to al-Jarjarā'ī, a predecessor of al-Yāzūrī who died in 1045, but this is a simple transference of the story by an author in the Maghribī tradition, not a distinct possibility.Google Scholar
20.Evans-Pritchard, E. E., The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Oxford, 1949; Emrys Peters, ‘The Proliferation of Segments in the Lineage of the Bedouin of Cyrenaica’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, XC (1960), 29–53, inter alia.Google Scholar
21.Ḥasan, Yūsuf Faḍl, The Arabs and the Sudan, Edinburgh, 1967, 95, 103, 113, 137, 143, 154, 159, 165, 169–71; the previous work of H. A. MacMichael, A History of the Arabs in the Sudan, 2 vols., Cambridge, 1922, is almost a companion to Georges Marçais, Les Arabes en Berbèrie, Paris and Constantine, 1913.Google Scholar
22. Cf. Mukhlis, , n. 16 above.Google Scholar
23.Berque, Jacques, ‘Du nouveau sur les Banī Hilāl?’, Studia Islamica, XXXVI (1972), 99–111.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
24. Cf. Julien, Charles-André, Histoire de l'Afrique du Nord, 2nd edn., 2 vols., Paris, 1951–1952, II, 74, 160–1.Google Scholar
25.Brett, Michael, ‘Ifriqiya as a Market for Saharan Trade’, Journal of African History, X, 3 (1969), 347–64.Google Scholar
26.Goitein, S. D., A Mediterranean Society, vol. I, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967, 32.Google Scholar
27.Idris, , La Berbèrie orientale, 52.Google Scholar
28. Best described by Beshir, Beshir K., ‘The Fāṭimid Caliphate’, Ph.D., London, 1970.Google Scholar
29. Cf. Idris, , La Berbèrie orientale, 99–105, 159–65.Google Scholar
30.Goitein, , loc. cit.Google Scholar
31.Idris, , La Berbèrie orientale, 165–7.Google Scholar
32.Idhārī, Ibn, Bayān, I, 289.Google Scholar
33.Ibid., 290–1.Google Scholar
34. Cf. Brett, , ‘Military Interest’, loc. cit.Google Scholar
35.Bashkuwāl, Ibn, Kitāb al. Ṣila, ed. Codera, , Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana, I–II, Madrid, 1883, II, 545–6, no.1208; cf. also ibid., ed. Istanbul, 1955, I, 129–30, no.298.Google Scholar
36.Nājī, Ibn, Macālim al īmān, Tunis, 1320H, III, 236–8.Google Scholar
37.Idris, , La Berbèrie orientale, 200.Google Scholar
38.Ḥawqal, Ibn, Ṣūrat al-Arḍ, 70, trans. 66–7.Google Scholar
39. Cf. Idris, , La Berbèrie orientale, 165–6.Google Scholar
40.'Idhārī, Ibn, Bayān, I, 276; the Lawāta in question were most probably located in the Jabal Dammar (Demmer): cf. R. Brunschvig, La Berbèrie orientale sous les Hafsides, 2 vols., Paris, 1940, 1947, I, 323; Idris, op. cit., 460.Google Scholar
41.Idhārī, Ibn, Bayān, I, 297; cf. Ibn al-Athīr, Kāmil, X, 6.Google Scholar
42.Khaldūn, Ibn, cIbar, VI, 14.Google Scholar
43.Idhārī, Ibn, Bayān, I, 288.Google Scholar
44.Muyassar, Ibn, Annates, 6.Google Scholar
45.Beshir, , ‘The Fāṭimid Caliphate’, 234; the date of 446/1054–5, which Beshir considers probable, is unlikely for the reason given above.Google Scholar
46. Cf. Idris, , La Berbérie orientale, 232–6, 296–7 ff.Google Scholar