Rustamid imamate

The Rustamid imamate was an Ibāḍī Berber state established on Tāhart in the central Maghreb, founded by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Rustam the Persian on the margin of the great Kharijite revolts in Ifrīqiya; Ibn Khaldun carries its reports inside his chapter on the Berber clans and their states ¹.

Ibn Khaldun narrates the state's background in the Ibāḍī rising: Abū l-Khaṭṭāb ʿAbd al-Aʿlā b. al-Samḥ al-Maʿāfirī took the Ibāḍī imamate, and his followers won Tripoli and then Qayrawān ². In the same chapter ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Rustam appears as "master of Tāhart," allied by marriage to the Banū Midrār of Sijilmāsa, who married him to his daughter Urwā, grandmother of their princes ³. Tāhart recurs in his chapter as the seat of the state and the focus of the Berber crises around it ¹.

• Text from the harvested Ibar of Ibn Khaldun (Heliopolis 1957): the Berber clans and Maghreb states chapter, pp. 1609–1615 and following. Pagination here weaves the news of more than one dynasty; reports on the Banū Rustam at Tāhart are scattered among the clans of Maṭghara and Nafūsa, so only the explicit mentions of "b. Rustam" and "Tāhart" were used, without completing their story from marginal notes.