Image: Catalan Atlas, attr. Cresques Abraham, Majorca, 1375. Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Espagnol 30.
The city of Marrakesh was founded in the 1060s by the Almoravids, a reformist Amazigh movement that emerged from the Sanhaja confederation of the western Sahara. Known in Arabic as al-murabitun, those who gather at the ribat, they had consolidated their authority across the western Maghreb before establishing a permanent base at the edge of the Haouz plain. That base became one of the great capitals of the medieval world, recognised by UNESCO since 1985 for its decisive role in medieval Islamic urban development.
What they built there bore the ambitions of a dynasty that thought in enduring terms. The Ksar el-Hajjar, the original fortress of stone built by Abu Bakr ibn Umar to house the treasury, marked the first permanent structure of the city near the site where the Koutoubia mosque would later rise. The ramparts of compacted pisé earth, constructed in 1126 under Ali ibn Yusuf and still largely intact around the medina, extended that founding logic to the full city that had grown within them. Beneath the surface, the Almoravids established the khettara system of underground galleries drawing on the deep groundwater of the Haouz, without which the plain could not have sustained a city of this scale. The fortress, the wall, and the water were conceived as the structural conditions of a permanent capital.
Behind that project stood a court of considerable political sophistication. At its centre, Yusuf ibn Tashfin led a dynasty that extended from the western Sahara to al-Andalus, governing territories whose diversity required sustained administrative intelligence. The chronicles record that he did not govern alone in any simple sense. Zaynab al-Nafzawiyya, his wife, is credited in the major chronicles of the period with the political counsel that shaped the consolidation of Almoravid power. Several historians describe her as the architect of Yusuf’s success, a woman of strategic acuity whose understanding of the political landscape of Aghmat and the wider Maghreb proved essential to the dynasty’s expansion. Her counsel reached into the questions on which the early empire turned, from the calibration of alliances with the jurists who lent the dynasty its religious legitimacy to the expansion that carried Almoravid authority into al-Andalus.
The court she helped to shape outlived its own dynasty in the city that had grown around it. The Almoravid project lasted less than a century; by 1147 the Almohad movement had taken Marrakesh, rebuilding and enlarging much of what the Almoravids had established. Yet the founding logic persisted. The orientation of the medina, the course of the ramparts, the underground water system, and the position of the principal congregational mosque on the site of the former Almoravid kasbah: these remained Almoravid in conception long after the dynasty itself had passed. What they laid down in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries continued to organise the city that grew over it.
For the collection, the skirt that carries Zaynab’s name draws on what the research surfaced about her court. The cloth is a deep green silk, gathered at the waist, with vertical stripes in red, black, purple, and gold running the full length of the skirt. The stripes keep their line through the gathered fall of the silk, holding a fixed order within the movement of the cloth, of the kind Zaynab held within the affairs of a court that governed half the western Islamic world.
The Zaynab Skirt
Selected Reading
- Bennison, Amira K. The Almoravid and Almohad Empires. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
- Bloom, Jonathan M. Architecture of the Islamic West: North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1800. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.
- Austen, Ralph A. Trans-Saharan Africa in World History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.