Tinmel

Anyone who has taken the A10 road from Marrakesh to Taroudant—and many tourists and Peace Corps volunteers have made this journey—has passed the Almohad mosque at Tinmel.

Filled with religious passion, the Berber tribes of this region swept out of their mountain fastness in the twelfth century and quickly conquered the empire of their predecessors, the Almoravids, extending their own control to most of Muslim Spain. Ibn Tumart, the dynasty’s founder, has been compared to St Bernard, founder of the Cistercian order of Catholicism. Puritanical, the Almohads ruled strictly, but as they settled down into urban centers, their own dynasty slowly was transformed by the cyclical process described by Ibn Khaldun, whose writings are precursors to modern historical and sociological inquiry.

During the time of their rule, the Almohads built three great minarets, the Koutoubia in Marrakesh, the Tour Hassan in Rabat, and the Giralda in Sevilla. These structures manifest grandeur, not only by their size, but by their simple but harmonious decoration.

The Almohads have left many monuments across North Africa and Spain, but the one that spoke to me most eloquently was the mosque at Tinmel. Human in scale, simple yet elegant in decoration, the mosque overlooked the birthplace of the dynasty, and was in the distant past a place of pilgrimage.

Although both the French and the Moroccans put some effort into its restoration, the mosque at Tinmel, just 6 kilometers from the epicenter of Morocco’s recent earthquake, did not survive. A thousand years of art and history perished in a moment.

Still, bemoaning the loss of this monument should not obscure the human loss of the most recent tragedy to befall Morocco. There was a village at Tinmel and my deepest sympathy goes out to the villagers of Tinmel as well as all the others of the region.

I have written elsewhere in this blog, and at more length, about Almohad monuments, and I beg the reader’s indulgence for the brief repetition. Morocco has a special place in my heart and the recent tragedy is truly heartfelt.

If you would like to know more about Tinmel, here is a link to a recent article from The Conversation, and an article from the New Yotk Times on the Tizi n’Test road.