Ribat

A fortified frontier monastery, typical of the early Islamic Maghreb (eighth to twelfth centuries), serving as a base for spiritual retreat, military training, and frontier defence. The ribat form combined a defensive enclosure, prayer hall, and cells for residents, and the institution gave its name to the city of Rabat and to numerous smaller foundations along the Atlantic, Saharan, and pre-Saharan frontiers. The ribat is mainly outside the chronological scope of the principal southern Moroccan kasbah corpus (largely seventeenth to early twentieth century) but appears in the regional background as a precursor of later fortified religious foundations.