D'une Péninsule à L'autre: Cordoue,'Uṯmān (644-656) et les Arabes à l'époque almohade (XIIe-XIIIe siècle) (original) (raw)

In Islam, most political and religious reform movements invoke a return to the Tradition supposedly initiated by Muḥammad in the Seventh Century. The Almohads are no exception to the rule, but they go further still: the Muslim West frees itself from the Eastern model of Islam. Legitimising his autoreferential sovereign power, ʿAbd al-Mu’min, the first Caliph of the Almohad Berber dynasty, deploys all the resources available to him: material, ideological and symbolic, regardless of mutual contradictions. Remaining faithful to the Omeyyad Caliphate tradition, he transfers the administrative capital of al-Andalus from Seville to Cordoba; he ascribes to the “unruly” Arab tribes their original mission: propagating Islam; and, most importantly, he invents a religious relic, a copy of the Qur’ān, attributed to ʿUṯmān b. ʿAffān, the third “well guided” Caliph of Islam and “writer” of the definitive Revelation text, a relic to which he reserves a genuine cult, crucial to the ideology of power which he is instigating. Henceforth, in an eschatological context, the entire Muslim West, centered on the Almohad dynasty, becomes the new cradle of the Divine Word.