The Toothpick

Idris ibn Abdallah was running for his life. This is how Morocco begins.

It was 788 CE. At Fakhkh, near Mecca, a pro-Shi'a rebellion against the Abbasid caliphate had been crushed. The surviving rebels scattered. Idris — a great-great-grandson of the Prophet Muhammad — fled west with a single servant, a man named Rashid al-Urbi. They crossed Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria. They stopped when they reached Volubilis, the old Roman city the Berbers called Oualili, because there was nowhere further west to go except the ocean.

The Awraba tribe welcomed him. They had recently converted to Islam but owed nothing to Baghdad. In 789, they proclaimed Idris their leader. He married Kenza al-Awrabiya, a Berber noblewoman. He founded a city called Medinat Fas — the city of Fes. He spread Islam among the Berber tribes of the north. He conquered Tlemcen. For three years, he built the foundations of a new state: the first Islamic kingdom in Morocco, independent of both the Abbasids in Baghdad and the Umayyads in Córdoba. An empire founded by a fugitive with nothing but his name and a servant who didn't leave him.

Then, in 791, a stranger arrived. The sources describe him as a scholar or doctor, sent from Baghdad with gifts. He brought the imam a scented toothpick — or, in some versions, perfume, or a piece of cloth. Whatever it was, it was poisoned. Idris used it and died. The assassination was ordered by Harun al-Rashid, the Abbasid caliph — the same Harun al-Rashid who appears in the Thousand and One Nights as a wise and generous ruler. In reality, he was eliminating a rival claimant to Islamic legitimacy with the quiet efficiency of a man who understood that empires survive not by winning battles but by preventing them.

But the assassination failed in the way that matters most. Idris was dead. His servant Rashid was dead — also killed. But Kenza was pregnant. Idris II was born after his father's murder. The Awraba raised him. At eleven, he was proclaimed ruler. At twenty, he expanded Fes into one of the great cities of the Islamic world.

The Abbasids sent a toothpick. Morocco sent back a dynasty. The Idrisids established the principle that Morocco would be governed by its own rulers — Sharifian, independent, answering to nobody across the water. Every dynasty since has claimed descent from the Prophet through the line that Idris carried across a continent with a servant and a prayer. The kingdom that a toothpick was supposed to end has lasted twelve centuries and shows no sign of ending.