Aghmat

Aghmat: a town in the Far Maghrib. Al-Idrisi says that its merchants travel the desert road with Sijilmasa and Draa to the land of Ghana. ²

Aghmat is a small town in southern Morocco, about 25 km south of Marrakesh, on the Wadi Orika at the edge of the Great Atlas, the Daran of the Middle Ages. From the 5th/11th century the name covered two settlements about 2.5 km apart: Aghmat Awlan, named after a Berber tribe (Arabic Haylana), and Aghmat Orika, whose site is now the small town of Orika. Al-Bakri and al-Idrisi describe a flourishing town with well-watered gardens and an industrious population. ³

Before Marrakesh was founded, Aghmat was the chief urban centre of southern Morocco, and some biographical dictionaries show it as an active cultural centre. In the 25 years before Yusuf b. Tashfin came to power, many scholars came to Aghmat from Cordova and al-Qayrawan, and many of them were exiles from the disturbances in Ifriqiya. At that time Aghmat was the capital of a small Berber state under the Maghrawa chief Lakkut b. Yusuf, whose wife Zaynab al-Nafzawiyya gathered a literary circle there. Zaynab later married the Lamtuna chief Abu Bakr, and then his lieutenant and successor Yusuf b. Tashfin, and she introduced the Lamtuna chiefs to a more cultured way of life. ³

When Marrakesh became the Almoravid capital, many members of this circle moved there, and that began Aghmat's decline, which was completed only much later. The Almoravids kept two deposed rulers of Spain at Aghmat: 'Abd Allah b. Buluggin, the Zirid ruler of Granada, and the famous al-Mu'tamid of Seville. Aghmat was also the last stage of the Mahdi Ibn Tumart's journey back from the East, before his rising in the Great Atlas Mountains. By the time of Leo Africanus the old city was in complete decline. ³