THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES the rise of the Almohads, a radical religious movement that arose in the 1100s, but had an impact that resonated down through the ensuing centuries. By looking at North Africa (the Maghrib) and Islamic Iberia (al-Andalus), it provides a medieval Muslim case study showing how one regime defined religious deviance, the political implications of that, and its contestation by other social actors who inverted the narrative in sometimes radical ways. The Almohad definition of a true Muslim and a just religio-political order resonated widely through twelfth-century Maghribī society but like any such discourse it could be appropriated and modified, particularly by other claimants to religious authority and charisma appearing at the time. The competition between monarchs and holy men to control narratives of righteousness versus deviance, and determine what was or was not criminal, initiated in this crucial phase was to become a long-standing feature of religio-political life in the western Maghrib.

It is important to recognize at the outset that the developmental trajectory of Islam very quickly became imperial and, therefore, differed significantly from the early Christian experience. The Prophet Muḥammad formed a new social and political as well as religious community and early Muslims set about founding an empire before the religious and legal edifice of Islam was fully formed. As Aziz Al-Azmeh has shown, Islamic ideas about the imbrication of the religious and the political were deeply rooted in a variety of models of Near Eastern kingship which infused the monarch with a divine aura and entwined religion and politics in a manner that shared much with the Byzantine vision.

For this reason it can be difficult to disentangle religious and political ideologies in the Islamic context and we often speak of the “religio-political” because religious reform or new interpretations of Islam tended to dovetail with the formation of new political structures in keeping with the paradigm laid down by Muḥammad. This generated contested categories with new movements claiming religious rectitude while their opponents perceived their position as heterodox and deviant. If they had the military might, however, such minority movements could become ruling powers, able to impose their political will upon the territories they acquired.