From one peninsula to the other: Cordova, ‘Uthmān (644-656) and the Arabs during the Almohad period (12th-13th centuries)

Abstract

In Islam, most political and religious reform movements invoke a return to the Tradition supposedly initiated by Muhammad in the seventh century. The Almohads were no exception to this rule, but they went even further: under them, the Muslim West actually freed itself from the Eastern model of Islam. In order to legitimise his self-referential sovereign power, ‘Abd al-Mu’min, the first Caliph of the Almohad Berber dynasty, deployed all the material, ideological and symbolic resources at his disposal, regardless of mutual contradictions. He recovered the tradition of the Umayyad Caliphate by transferring the administrative capital of al-Andalus from Seville to Cordova; he ascribed to the “unruly” Arab tribes their original mission of propagating Islam; and, most importantly of all, he invented a religious relic, a copy of the Qur’ān attributed to ‘Uthmān b. ‘Affān, the third “well guided” Caliph of Islam and “writer” of the definitive Revelation text, and ordered a true cult to be rendered to it that was crucial to the ideology of power that he had instigated. Henceforth, in an eschatological context, the entire Muslim West, centered on the Almohad dynasty, was to become the new cradle of the Divine Word.