al-Abbasiyya (near Kairouan)

Al-Abbasiyya was a town three miles south-east of Kairouan, also called Qasr al-Aghaliba and al-Qasr al-Qadim. Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab built it in 184/800, the year he was appointed amir of Ifriqiya, and named it after the Abbasids. ¹

It had baths, inns, markets and a Friday mosque with a cylindrical brick minaret. The town had several gates, a hippodrome called al-Maydan for reviews, and a palace called al-Rusafa, named after the palaces of Damascus and Baghdad. Ibrahim received there the ambassadors of Charlemagne, who asked for relics of St Cyprian. A ten-year truce with Constantine, patrician of Sicily, was agreed there in 189/805. The town had a mint and a workshop for the robes of honour. Abu Ibrahim Ahmad built a large reservoir there. ¹

Ibrahim II founded Raqqada in 264/877, a few miles further south, and it replaced al-Abbasiyya as the residence. Al-Abbasiyya sank to a township of mawali and tradesmen and disappeared for good in the middle of the fifth/eleventh century. A small excavation in 1923 found Aghlabid potsherds. The historian Abu l-Arab Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Tamim (d. 333/945) was born there. ¹

This is not the same town as place/al-abbasiyya, al-Baladhuri's city in the far Berber lands, which Umar ibn Hafs al-Ataki built. The two records share a name and are kept apart.