Aghlabid dynasty

It was, by the early ninth century, one of the preeminent centers of Islamic scholarship in the western reaches of the Muslim world, home to a school of jurisprudence that would come to be known as the Maliki School, after the great jurist Malik ibn Anas of Medina, whose teachings had crossed the Mediterranean and taken firm root in North African soil.

The city's great mosque, rebuilt and expanded only a few decades before Fatima's birth under the governance of the Aghlabid emir, stood as both a place of worship and a place of instruction.

Its courtyard filled on any given day with students seated in loose circles around teachers who recited, explained, debated, and corrected.

The sound of that recitation, the rhythmic rising and falling cadence of memorized text, was quite literally part of the soundscape of the city.

Fatima, dressed perhaps in a new garment sewn specially for the occasion, for merchant families of means, marked such days with small luxuries, new fabric, particular foods prepared only once or twice a year, would have stood among the crowd of worshipers, small enough still that the adults around her would have seemed to her like a forest she could not see over, catching only fragments of the sermon delivered from the mosque's pulpit, understanding perhaps less of its content than its atmosphere, the collective hush of thousands of people, turned toward the same words, the same direction, the same God.

These were the years, too, in which the world beyond Kairouan's walls began to make itself known to her, not through direct experience, but through the stories carried into the household by her father's associates, by travelers who stopped in the city on their way elsewhere, by the general traffic of news that moved along trade routes as surely as goods did.

Ifriqiya, in these years, existed under the rule of the Aghlabid dynasty, which had been granted governance of the province by the distant Abbasid caliph in Baghdad only a few years before Fatima's birth, in exchange for tribute and nominal loyalty.

This arrangement gave the Aghlabid emirs, first Ibrahim I, and then, during much of Fatima's childhood, his son Abdallah I and successors, a considerable degree of practical independence, and under their rule, Kairouan flourished as a center of both commerce and scholarship, even as political currents shifted and occasionally roiled beneath the surface of daily life.

From that time forward, the Mohammedan rulers of the Barbary Coast were never long without ships of some sort.

The Aghlabi princes sailed forth from Tunis and took Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica.

The Fatimi Caliphs waged war with the navies of Abd al-Rahman, the great Caliph of Cordoba, at a strength of 200 vessels aside.

The Almohades possessed a large and capacious fleet in which they transported their armies to Spain, and their successors in North Africa, though less powerful, were generally able to keep up a number of vessels for offensive as well as commercial purposes.

Now, the earliest record of the principle behind the whoopee cushion dates back to the 10th century.

Apparently, an, an emir of the Aghlabid Empire named Ziyadat Allah III was in the habit of inflating animal bladders and then placing them under the cushions of his palace to embarrass unsuspecting guests.

Okay [laughs].

A, a claim that, by the way, basically has a red flashing this is almost certainly bullshit tag on Wikipedia-