What I'd previously read about the Almoravids and the Almohads - and I expect I'm typical of Western readers here - was mostly through a Reconquista lens: the successive Berber empires cross the Straits and hold the Christian advance back for a while. I picked up this book in the hope of an account that puts the Berber dynasties themselves centre stage.

Bennison delivers on that front; while their Andalusian involvement is given prominent place, as is indeed appropriate, their Maghribi heartlands are given centre stage. Unfortunately, the Almoravids' Saharan and Sahelian domains receive little attention, but our author cannot be faulted for that, being at the mercy of sources that lose interest in southern affairs after the early years of the Almoravids.

Organizationally, the book devotes a chapter each to a narrative history of each empire, focusing on the politcal scene, followed by thematic chapters about society, economy, religion and ideology, and art and architecture. It was a pleasure to read.

If Bennison has a thesis, it's that the Almoravids and Almohads weren't simply puritanical fanatics from the tribal fringe; while indeed coming from the fringe, they absorbed and adapted cultural and political forms from the past and created new syntheses, integrating the western Maghrib into the Islamic mainstream in the process.

The book is claimed to be the first comprehensive history of these short-lived, Berber states. The clear prose and the useful chronology added to the book present this period of the history of the Western Islamic world in a useful format. The Almoravids are presented as a group of frontiersmen dedicated to the completion of the area as a member of the Islamic world following the practice of the central body of Islam, freed of some of their local eccentricities. The succeeding Almohads went all the way to attempting to impose the teachings of a local Mahdi claimant, Mohammed ibn Tumart on the whole of Islam.
The effects of this period on the historical theories of ibn Khaldhun, and on the fabric of Sufi philosophy are explored in considerable detail, as well as the function of these states in opposing the Spanish Reconquista. A useful book. ( )