Nothing for the year itself: al-Baydhaq's memoir ends in Abd al-Mu'min's early reign. It matters for 1200 because it is the Almohad movement's own account of its founder and its constitution: the Mahdi's doctrine, the council of ten and the council of fifty, the ranking of the Masmuda tribes (Hintata, Tinmal, Hargha, Gadmiwa, Ganfisa) and the purges that fixed the hierarchy under which al-Nasir still ruled. The same manuscript volume holds the Kitab al-ansab on the Almohad tribes and early chancery documents. Read it for how the Almohad state was built, not for events.
About this source
- Title
- Akhbar al-Mahdi Ibn Tumart wa-ibtida dawlat al-Muwahhidin
- Author
- Abu Bakr ibn Ali al-Sanhaji, called al-Baydhaq
- Author's dates
- died after 1164
- Written
- about 1150 to 1165
- Language
- Arabic
- Covers
- about 1106 to about 1150
- Kind
- Biography
Lévi-Provençal's 1928 volume is still the only edition with a translation and is not freely online (the editor died in 1956). The text survives in a single Escorial manuscript. The author's name and dates are known only from the memoir itself.
Where to read it
Editions
- E. Lévi-Provençal (ed. and tr.), Documents inédits d'histoire almohade: fragments manuscrits du legajo 1919 du fonds arabe de l'Escurial (Paris, 1928), Arabic text with French translation (not freely online)
- Akhbar al-Mahdi Ibn Tumart wa-bidayat dawlat al-Muwahhidin (Rabat, 1971; Algiers, 1982), Arabic reprints (not freely online)
Translations
- French translation in Lévi-Provençal, Documents inédits (1928), see editions (not freely online)