The Ribat at Monastir Tunisia.

A ribat (From the Arabic رباط ribāʈ, hospice, hostel.) is an Arabic term for a small fortification as built along a frontier during the first years of the Muslim conquest of North Africa to house military volunteers, called the murabitun. These fortifications later served to protect commercial routes, and as centers for isolated Muslim communities.

In time, ribats became hostels for voyagers on major trade routes (Caravanserai) and refuges for mystics. In this last sense, the ribat tradition was perhaps one of the early sources of the Sufi mystic brotherhoods, and a type of the later zaouia or Sufi lodge, which spread into North Africa and from there across the Sahara to West Africa. Here the homes of marabouts (religious teachers, usually Sufi) are termed ribats. Such places of spiritual reteat were termed Khanqah in Persian.

[edit] References

• Cache of The Ribat by Hajj Ahmad Thomson, 23 06 2007.
• "The Ribats in Morocco and their influence in the spread of knowledge and tasawwuf" from: al-Imra'a al-Maghribiyya wa't-Tasawwuf (The Moroccan Woman and Tasawwuf in the Eleventh Century) by Mustafa 'Abdu's-Salam al-Mahmah)
• Ribat of Soussa, Muslim invention of rib vaulting? on muslimheritage.com, dated 23 February 2003.
• Majid Khadduri. War And Peace in the Law of Islam. Johns Hopkins Press, (1955) ISBN 1584776951. p.81.
• Hassan S. Khalilieh. The Ribat System and Its Role in Coastal Navigation. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 42, No. 2 (1999), pp. 212-225 (Focusing on a coastal ribat system on the eastern Mediterranean and Indian Ocean which provided refuge for traders from pirates and hostile fleets).