Listening for Silences in Almoravid History: Another Reading of “The Conquest That Never Was”

Abstract

Telling the Almoravid story asks much of the imagination, as a stark paucity of documentary evidence continues to shadow much of this dynasty's character, parameters, and early development. Revisionist readings have become commonplace, particularly following the recovery of lost portions of Ibn Idhārīsal-Bayan al-Mughrib. Comparisons of this chronicle with those of Ibn Abī Zar and Ibn Khaldūn brought scholars to revise chronologies and rescript the roles played by the movement's first leaders. Although Almoravid historiography continues to rely primarily on medieval Arabic chronicles and geographies for a synthetic interpretation of how events unfolded, numismatic and archeological studies have brought perspectives of their own to this period. Consequent hypotheses reveal the wide play afforded interpretive assumptions in various attempts to integrate the diverse, and often contradictory, data. And where this is true for the Almoravids in the Maghrib, the synthetic role of hypotheses finds even greater play in attempts to understand the history of the Almoravids to the south. For here textual sources are meager indeed, allowing for the turn of a phrase to reconfigure decades of history.