Abu Ishaq Ibrahim II ibn Ahmad (Arabic: أبو اسحاق ابراهيم الثاني) (27 June 850 – 23 October 902) was the Emir of Ifriqiya. He ruled from 875 until his abdication in 902. After the demise of his brother, Ibrahim was endorsed as emir where he took steps to improve safety in his domain and secured the development of commercial activities. He improved public works, such as building a vast reservoir, erecting walls as well as the development of mosques and his Raqqada palace.
A centralizing ruler, Ibrahim mistrusted the old Arab high aristocracy of Ifriqiya. He was involved in conflicts with the ambitious Tulunids, who after seizing Egypt (868), Syria and the Hejaz (878), decided to attack him. When Egypt fell into chaos in 896, Ibrahim led a campaign to recover his eastern borders against the Tulunids in 896–897.
Despite having a fierce reputation as an oppressor, he was an efficient and fair ruler, treating reports of mistreatment of a commoner by a noble as lèse-majesté. However, it was also reported that he took great pleasure in cruelty and killing. Ibn al-Athir and Ibn Khaldun summarized Ibrahim's emirate as seven good years, before he became unhinged by "melancholia" (malihulia). Citing mistreatment of his subjects, Abbasid Caliph al-Mu'tadid dispatched a messenger to Tunis in 901/902 where he demanded Ibrahim to Baghdad and deprived him of the governorship of Ifriqiya. Later, he began his advertised march to Baghdad by way of Europe and his plans to conquer Constantinople for Islam. He advanced through Sicily, and after laying siege to Taormina, he marched to Messina in 902 and ferried his army across the straits to Calabria. Ibrahim, however, got bogged down laying siege to Cosenza, and took ill with dysentery and died.
Abu Ishaq Ibrahim was the son of the Aghlabid emir Ahmad of Ifriqiya. After his father's death in 863, the emirate of Ifriqiya passed to his father's brother Ziyadat Allah II, but he died shortly after, and the succession passed back to the main line, to Ibrahim's brother Abu 'l-Gharaniq Muhammad II.
Muhammad II was a frivolous and pleasure-loving ruler. During his brother's emirate, Ibrahim was assigned the governorship of Kairouan, an office he executed with exemplary efficiency and seriousness, which earned him much admiration. Hopes were high when the dissolute Muhammad II died prematurely in February 875. The emirate passed to Ibrahim II, his candidacy pushed forward by popular crowds and endorsed by the jurists of Kairouan, who set aside the claims of his young nephew, the son of Muhammad II.
Although Ibrahim II inherited a kingdom depopulated by the plague of 874, his reign was economically prosperous. He revived the religious police and is said to have rid the roads of banditry and secured the safety of commerce. A coinage reform he undertook in 888–889 provoked riots in Kairouan, which had to be suppressed, but it also resulted in an influx of precious metal from the eastern caliphate. He sought to develop agriculture by building up the irrigation system.
Among his public works, Ibrahim completed the Zaytuna mosque of Tunis, enlarged the Uqba mosque of Kairouan, built a vast new water reservoir for the city, erected the walls of Sousse, and established a line of new naval signal towers along the Ifriqiyan coast (it reportedly took one night to dispatch a message from Ceuta in Morocco to Alexandria in Egypt).
In 876, Ibrahim erected a new palace-city, called Raqqada ("the Somnolent"), just a few kilometres southwest of Kairouan. It replaced the nearby palace-city of al-Abbasiya used by previous Aghlabid emirs. Raqqada was built on a grandiose scale; according to al-Bakri, its walls were ten kilometers long and encompassed a land area as large as Kairouan itself. Its skyline was marked by a great tower, called the Abu al-Feth ("Father of Victory"). It had multiple palaces and barracks, influenced primarily by Umayyad designs, with vast gardens, pools and hydraulic systems. The city was divided into two roughly equal-sized districts, one dedicated to the emir alone, the other a densely packed quarter for his noble retinue, which also contained the facilities for regular urban life – a congregational mosque, souks, public baths, etc. The separation emphasized the royal majesty of the Aghlabid Emir and his independence from the aristocracy. According to al-Bakri, the Fatimid leader, Abdullah al Mahdi, upon entering the conquered city in 909, was astonished at the Aghlabid constructions, and singled out the waterworks of Tunis and the palaces of Raqqada as two things in the Maghreb that had no parallel back in the East.
At the beginning of his rule, Ibrahim II was well-regarded as a just and enlightened ruler, but this eventually gave way to a more tyrannical and gruesome reputation. A centralizing ruler, Ibrahim mistrusted the old Arab high aristocracy of Ifriqiya, which had often been a thorn in the side of prior Aghlabid emirs. He held open court in Raqqada every week, after Friday prayers, when the common poor people of Ifriqiya were invited to present petitions directly to the emir. Identifying himself with the people, Ibrahim treated any report of mistreatment of a commoner by a noble as a case of lese-majesty, and handed out severe penalties to the offender, even members of his own family.
An absolutist monarch by disposition, ascetic without distractions, Ibrahim seems to have kept counsel with himself, largely immune from the influence of courtiers and bureaucrats. Only a few names appear near the top – his learned and martial son, Abu al-Abbas Abdallah, his chamberlain (hajib) Muhammad ibn Korhob and his successor Hassan ibn Nakib, and two ruthless slave-generals known as Ma'imun and Rashid. Above everybody was his mother, whom the chronicles deferentially refer to merely as the Sayyida ("Supreme Lady") and characterize as the only person whose opinion Ibrahim respected or who had any influence upon him (although he was not above embarrassing her – in a public case over a 600 dinar debt she owed two merchants, he judged against her and forced her to pay up).
Ibrahim sought to undermine the semi-autonomous Arab regiments (junds) which were the basis of the aristocracy's power, by supplanting them with loyal black African slave-soldiers ("Abid" or "Sudan") at the core of the Ifriqiyan army. At the inauguration of Raqqada in 878, Ibrahim had the palace guard of his predecessor massacred at the tower of Abu al-Feth in order to make way for his own new Sudanese guard. Ibrahim expanded the Sudanese regiments (later supplemented by white European Slavs or Saqaliba) to as much as 10,000, much to the chagrin of the Arab jund commanders. The Arab nobility resented not only being eclipsed, but also the hefty taxes and requisitions imposed by Ibrahim to maintain such a large standing army.
In 893, when the Arab jund lords of Belezma (near Batna, in western Ifriqiya) revolted against his military reforms and requisitions, Ibrahim invited them to Raqqada to present their case. The Arab lords and their retinues were received with pomp and banquets. But during the night, while they slept in the Raqqada palaces, the entire Arab party – nearly one thousand people – were set upon and massacred by Ibrahim's guard.
The massacre of the Belezma lords provoked uprisings by other Arab lords, led by the junds of Tunis. The revolts spread throughout Ifriqiya in 893–94, and for a period of time, Ibrahim was practically reduced to his capital, Raqqada. But the revolts were ruthlessly and systematically crushed, with much bloodshed, by Ibrahim's Sudanese regiments.
Conflict with Egypt and Nafusa
Ibrahim II entered into a conflict with the ambitious Turkic dynasty of the Tulunids, who had seized control of Egypt in 868, and Syria and the Hejaz in 878. In 879–880, while the Tulunid emir Ahmad ibn Tulun was away in the east, his hot-headed son Abbas, without his father's permission, decided to invade Ifriqiya and led a large Egyptian army west. Upon reaching Barqa, al-Abbas dispatched a message, falsely claiming that he had credentials from the Abbasid caliph ordering Ibrahim to step down and hand the governorship of Ifriqiya over to him. The Egyptian army reached as far as Tripoli, and defeated the local Aghlabid governor Muhammad ibn Qurhub. But the Egyptian army was defeated in turn in 880 by the Nafusa, a Berber Kharijite (Ibadite) tribe, allied with the Rustamids of Tahert, which had carried on an independent existence in the Djebel Nafusa mountains southwest of Tripoli for over a century. Rushing south from Tunisia, Ibrahim II arrived just in time to seize the Tulunid baggage train and its ample war chest, which proved a fortuitous bolster to the Aghlabid treasury.