#ribat

Monastir (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) by Panegyrics of Granovetter

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Monastir.

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The word ribat lives on, though few recognize its etymology.  For example, Rabat, the capital of Morocco, is so named because in origin it was a ribat, whence centuries of Barbary/pirate raids on the Christian Mediterranean were launched.  Similarly, Almoravids—the name of a notorious eleventh century North African based jihadi group—is simply a transliteration of the Arabic al-murabitun, which means they who fight along the ribat (not unlike al-mujahidun, they who wage jihad).  In 1086 these “Almoravids” invaded Spain and crushed the Castilians at the battle of Sagrajas; afterward they erected a mountain consisting of 2,400 Christian heads to triumphant cries of “Allahu Akbar.”

Spain actually offers numerous examples of the ribat or border phenomenon—most notoriously, the one that formed along the Duero River, separating the Christian north from the Islamic south.  For centuries, it too became “a territory where one fights for the faith and a permanent place of the ribat.”  As in other borders where Muslims abutted against non-Muslims, a scorched no-man’s land policy prevailed. Ibn Hudayl of Granada (d.812) explained the logic:

It is permissible to set fire to the lands of the enemy, his stores of grain, his beasts of burden—if it is not possible for the Muslims to take possession of them—as well as to cut down his trees, to raze his cities, in a word, to do everything that might ruin and discourage him, provided that the imam deems these measures appropriate, suited to hastening the Islamization of that enemy or to weakening him. Indeed, all this contributes to a military triumph over him or to forcing him to capitulate.

French historian Louis Bertrand (b. 1866) elaborates:

To keep the Christians [of northern Spain] in their place it did not suffice to surround them with a zone of famine and destruction. It was necessary also to go and sow terror and massacre among them. . . . If one bears in mind that this brigandage was almost continual, and that this fury of destruction and extermination was regarded as a work of piety—it was a holy war [jihad] against infidels—it is not surprising that whole regions of Spain should have been made irremediably sterile.

Ribat (Castle / fortification), Sousse, Sousse, Tunisia.

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