Yusuf Ibn Tashfin - Legacy

Legacy

His son and successor, Ali ibn Yusuf, was viewed as just as devout a Muslim as his father. Córdoba, in about 1119, served as the launch pad for Andalusian insurrection. Christians on the northern frontier gained momentum shortly after his father's death, and the Almohads, beginning about 1120, were to engulf the southern frontier. This ultimately led to the disintegration of Yusef's hard-gained territories by the time of Ibrahim ibn Tashfin (1146) and Ishaq ibn Ali (1146–1147), the last of the Almoravid dynasty.

While Yusef was the most honorable of Muslim rulers, he spoke Arabic poorly. Ali ibn Yusef in 1135 exercised good stewardship by attending to the University of Al-Karaouine and ordering the extension of the mosque from 18 to 21 aisles, expanding the structure to more than 3,000 square meters. Some accounts suggest that to carry out this work Ali ibn Yusef hired two Andalusian architects, who also built the central aisle of the Great Mosque of Tlemcen, Algeria, in 1136.

According to Richard Fletcher's Moorish Spain:

The Almoravids had never been liked in al-Andalus outside the limited circles of the rigorist critics of the taifa rulers. They had come as deliverers but they behaved like conquerors. The leadership may have been sincerely devout but the rank and file were not. Almoravid rule has been described by a modern authority as "an extended looting expedition" ... To the end of the Almoravid regime there was not a single traceable Berber among its civil servants: instead, Andalusi clerks were shipped over to Morocco. The Almoravids indulged in all the luxuries and delights of al-Andalus but failed to do the job they had been called in to do: the lost territories in the Tagus and Ebro valleys remained in Christian hands.