The Zughba at Tripoli, 429H (1037–8 A.D.)

Abstract

Speaking of Tripoli, the fourteenth-century writer al-Tijāni says: ‘when the Zughba killed Sacīd ibn Khazrūn in the year 429’. Sacīd was the Zanāta lord of the city, and al-Tijānī is explaining that the venerable faqīh Ibn Munammar was driven into exile because, when Sacīd was killed, he opened the gates to a cousin of the dead man who was promptly expelled by a brother. The reference to the Zughba is thus contained within an account of the dynasty of the Banū Khazrūn which is itself contained within a biographical notice of the jurist Ibn Munammar. There is no further explanation of the killing, and no mention of it by any other writer apart from Ibn Khaldūn, who has borrowed the story from Al-Tijānī, and repeats it twice. This presents a problem. The Zughba were Arabs, a branch of the Banū Hilāl. In that case they should not have been at Tripoli at all, as Ibn Khaldūn observes, because the Banū Hilāl did not enter Ifrīqiya until they were sent from Egypt to punish the Zīrīd sultan al-Mucizz ibn Bādīs for breaking his allegiance to the Fāṭimid caliph in Cairo, and recognising the cAbbāsid caliph in Baghdad. That would have been some time after 1048, more specifically, after 1050, when the man who is usually held responsible for the invasion, al-Yāzūrī, became the Fāṭimid wazīr. The story of the invasion at the behest of al-Yāzūrī is accepted by the principal modern authority, Hady Roger Idris, who tries to explain the reference to the Zughba at Tripoli in 1037–8 by suggesting that a fraction of the tribe may have accompanied their relatives the Banū Qurra, a people settled to the west of Alexandria, when these were sent by Cairo to support an attack upon the Zīrīds of Ifrīqiya by an Ifrīqiyan pretender, Yaḥyā ibn cAlī ibn Hamdūn, in 1001–2. The Banū Qurra had helped Ya…yā to attack Tripoli, but had then returned to Egypt. Idris wonders if this hypothetical fraction of the Zughba had not stayed behind in the neighbourhood of the city.

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