Founding of Sijilmasa

According to the 11th-century geographer al-Bakri, Sufri Kharijites who had taken part in the revolts against the Umayyads gathered in the oasis on the Ziz river, and when their number reached about four thousand they laid out the town and elected as their leader Isa ibn Mazid al-Aswad (‘the Black’). After fourteen years they accused him of misconduct and put him to death; the leadership passed to Abu al-Qasim Samgu ibn Wasul, a chief of the Miknasa Berbers, whose family ruled Sijilmasa until the 10th century. The town is said to have been independent of the Abbasids from 771. The dynasty is named after a later ruler, Midrar, and the historian Charles Pellat thought that it may properly have begun only in 823–824.

Irrigated by a large canal system, the oasis produced dates and crops, but Sijilmasa’s wealth came from the trans-Saharan trade. Caravans set out from it across the desert towards Awdaghust and Ghana, exchanging northern goods and Saharan salt for West African gold. In the 10th century the traveller Ibn Hawqal was astonished by a cheque for 42,000 dinars between merchants of Sijilmasa and Awdaghust, and al-Mas'udi noted that gold from the Sudan was minted there. The town welcomed Kharijites and other opponents of the Abbasid caliphs and kept close ties with the Ibadi imams of Tahert; later the future Fatimid caliph Abd Allah al-Mahdi found refuge — and then prison — there (c. 905–909).

The early chronology rests on late and contradictory sources, and little is known of the 8th-century town; from 1988 a Moroccan–American team excavated the ruins, which stretch for kilometres along the Ziz near Rissani. Sijilmasa remained one of the chief trading centres of the Maghreb until the 14th century and was finally destroyed in 1818.