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- The Almohad Dynasty is a Berber and Muslim dynasty who comes from a movement of religion reformation

- that ruled over the Maghreb and the Iberian Peninsula from the 12th to the 13th centuries.

- From Tinmel, the cradle of the dynasty where the imposing original mosque remains, the Almohads will build the great Iberian-Maghrebi empire

- that, at its climax, will spread all over Northern Africa and up to Andalusia.

- During a century, that dynasty turned Morocco into a powerful and prosperous empire.

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- Gabriel Martinez-Gros, who are the Almohads and who was their leader, that is to say the founder, just like all the dynasties that ruled over Maghreb?

- First of all, it may be the main dynasty of medieval Maghreb, the only one that united the entire Maghreb, up to Tunis, up to Tripoli in Libya

- and that adds, of course, to Andalusia the remains of Muslim origins in Spain.

- Such as the Almoravids, in a way, the Almohads are, how to call it, a sect of other times or other places,

- that is to say it is a religious movement, first a reformation movement,

- such as the name of the Almohads does not refer to any special people if even, of course, there is a Berber people,

- the Masmouda people, who was rather well rooted in the mountains of the High Atlas who underwent this Almohad uprising.

- But the Almohads are a reformation movement, a movement of religious reformation founded by Ibn Tumart, a Berber himself,

- he came from this Masmouda people of the Atlas, from Tinmel area as we said, straight in the south of Marrakech, and he was mainly worth for been as student in the East,

- he studied for many years, it was even said that he studied with the famous Ghazali, the restorer of Eastern Sunnism

- and when he came back, the Almoravids ruled over the Maghreb, over Morocco, over Marrakech,

- he gets in conflict pretty fast with the Almoravid rule, quite simply very brutally because he wants to lead a sort of reformation of the attitudes,

- the banning of music or the buckling of women, to whom the Almravid leaders are not sensitive or that worries them

- as every reformation movement worries the power in the Muslim world of that time.

- Every reformation movement may shake the plebs and the shaking of the plebs is one of the things most feared by the rulers.