Idris I founds the Idrisid state

Idris took part, with his brother Yahya, in the Alid rising of al-Husayn ibn Ali in Medina, which the Abbasids crushed at Fakhkh near Mecca on 11 June 786. He escaped among the pilgrims and, helped according to the sources by Wadih, the head of the caliphal postal service in Egypt, made his way to the far Maghreb, which had been outside caliphal control since the Berber revolt. He came first to Tangier and then to Walila, the Roman Volubilis, where the Awraba Berbers under their chief Ishaq ibn Muhammad took him in; a century earlier the Awraba had fought the Arabs under Kusaila, and by now they were Muslims. In 788 or 789 they recognised him as their imam, and he married Kanza, an Awraba woman.

With Awraba support Idris brought much of northern Morocco under his rule, took Tlemcen in 789 and in the same year founded the settlement of Madinat Fas on the Fez river. Excavations by the Moroccan National Institute of Archaeology (INSAP) and University College London have uncovered, outside the walls of Volubilis, a complex that may have been the residence of the first Idrisids. Alarmed by his successes, Harun al-Rashid is said to have sent the agent who poisoned Idris at Walila in 791. His son Idris II was born a few months after his death, was proclaimed imam by the Awraba at the age of eleven and in 808 or 809 moved his seat to al-Aliya, a new settlement across the river from his father’s Fas.

The Idrisids were an Alid dynasty whose power long rested on Berber tribal support; under Idris II, who welcomed Arab settlers from Kairouan and al-Andalus, Fez grew into the political and religious centre of Morocco. After his death in 828 the realm was divided among his sons; the dynasty lost Fez in 927 and was finally overthrown in 974. Idris I is venerated as the founder of the Moroccan state, and his tomb at Moulay Idriss Zerhoun, near Volubilis, remains an important religious site.