Ibrahim II of Ifriqiya - Raqqada and Other Works

Raqqada and Other Works

Although Ibrahim II inherited a kingdom depopulated by the plague of 874, his reign was economically prosperous. He revived the religious police and is said to have rid the roads of banditry and secured the safety of commerce. A coinage reform he undertook in 888-89 provoked riots in Kairouan which had to be suppressed, but it also resulted in an influx of precious metal from the eastern caliphate. He sought to develop agriculture by building up the irrigation system.

Among his public works, Ibrahim completed the Zaytuna mosque of Tunis, enlarged the Uqba mosque of Kairouan, built a vast new water reservoir for the city, erected the walls of Sousse, and established a line of new naval signal towers along the Ifriqiyan coast (it reportedly took one night to dispatch a message from Ceuta in Morocco to Alexandria in Egypt).

In 876, Ibrahim erected a new palace-city, Raqqada ("the Somnolent") just a few miles southwest of Kairouan. It replaced the nearby palace-city of al-Abbasiya used by previous Aghlabid emirs. Raqqada was built on a grandiose scale. According to al-Bakri, its walls were ten kilometers long and encompassed a land area as large as Kairouan itself. Its skyline was marked by a great tower, called the Abu al-Feth ("Father of Victory"). It had multiple palaces and barracks, influenced primarily by Umayyad designs, with vast gardens, pools and hydraulic systems. The city was divided into two roughly equal-sized districts, one dedicated to the emir alone, the other a densely packed quarter for his noble retinue, which also contained the facilities for regular urban life — a congregational mosque, souks, public baths, etc. The separation emphasized the royal majesty of the Aghlabid Emir and his independence from the aristocracy. According to al-Bakri, the Fatimid leader, Abdullah al Mahdi, upon entering the conquered city in 909, was astonished at the Aghlabid constructions, and singled out the waterworks of Tunis and the palaces of Raqqada as two things in the Maghreb which had no parallel back in the East.