2.2.21.5 - His Uncle Yahya Ibn Yughan, the King of Tlemcen

As for his other maternal uncle Yahya Ibn Yughan, he was the king of Tlemcen in Tunisia (now Algeria), but he left his reign and money and resort to asceticism. This happened due to the influential words of one Tunisian Shaykh, as Shaykh Muhyiddin narrated in the Meccan Revelations [Futuhat: II.18] (and also in Presenting the Righteous [v. 2, p. 114]) when he was talking about ascetics:

One of my uncles was from them ... he had been king of the city of Tlemcen, and he was called Yahya Ibn Yughan. There was one devotee man in his time from the people of Tunisia, called Abu Abdullah al-Tunisi. He used to worship in a place outside Tlemcen called al-Ubbad (the Worshipers), and now his tomb there is still visited by many people. It happened that when the king was riding with his convoy and servants between the city of Tlemcen and Akadbar, he met this man and he was told that he is Abu Abdullah al-Tunisi, the famous ascetic and devotee of his time. The king them held the bridle of his horse and saluted the shaykh, who replied. Then the king who had been wearing his luxurious clothes asked him: O Shaykh, these clothes that I wear; may I pray in them? The Shaykh laughed, so the king said to him: “What are you laughing at?” He said:

“I am laughing of the absurdity of your mind and your ignorance of yourself. I find nothing likened to you than the dog wallowing in the blood of carcasses and eating it with its filth, then he raises his leg when urinating so that the urine will not touch him. You are a container full of haram and still asking about the clothes, while the injustices of people are surrounding your neck!”

At that, the king wept hardly and immediately left his horse and all his reign, to serve the Shaykh. The Shaykh then kept him for three days (the traditional time for hospitality), and after that he brought to him a rope and said to him: O king, the days of hospitality are finished. Go and get some firewood. So he was bringing the firewood on his back to the market, while people are looking at him and weeping. He then used to sell and take his need and give the rest as charity. He remained like that in his country until he died, and he was buried outside the city, where people are still visiting his grave.

After that incident, when some people come to Shaykh Abu Abdullah al-Tunisi asking him for prayers, he used to send them to Yahya, saying that he is an ascetic king, and if I was given his properties I may have not been able to become ascetic.

[???].

Yahya Ibn Yughan died about a quarter of a century before the birth of Ibn al-Arabi, who will be visiting him when he goes to Tunisia, in 590 and 598, where his grave is still there outside Tlemcen (until this date).

If Yahya Ibn Yughan is a Berber, and there is no close lineage between him and his other uncle Abu Muslim al-Khawlani, it is possible that Ibn al-Arabi’s father, or grandfather, may had been married with a Berber woman, so he is his uncle due to his mother-in-law and not his direct mother who is from al-Ansar as we saw above. The other possibility is that there is a close relationship between Yahya Ibn Yughan, albeit being a Berber, and his uncle, Abu Muslim, because the conquest of Maghreb and Tunisia took place at an early stage in Islamic history and the links between Berbers and Arabs crossed and genealogies overlapped.