- Abū Muḥammad ibn ʿIyāḍ, the warrior in the path of Allah, ʿAbd Allāh*—and it is also said: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān—was the foremost horseman and famed champion of al-Andalus, a judgment on which all the people of eastern al-Andalus agree.
ʿAbd al-Wāḥid ibn ʿAlī al-Marrākushī (1) said: “He was among the great righteous men. I have heard from more than one source that his supplication was answered, his tears flowed quickly, and he was tender-hearted. Yet once he mounted a horse no one could stand against him. The Christians reckoned him equal to one hundred horsemen, and through him Allah protected the region for a time, until he died—may Allah have mercy on him. I do not know the exact date of his death.”
Al-Yasaʿ ibn Ḥazm says in Akhbār al-Maghrib: “The prince, the warrior-king in the cause of Allah, Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿIyāḍ—the bravest man ever to ride a horse and the finest cavalryman to make the Romans taste woe—told me:
‘A Frankish force encamped against us. Whenever they shot their arrows, they formed a screen between us and the sun like a swarm of locusts. What we verified was that their cavalry numbered one hundred thousand horsemen and their infantry two hundred thousand or more. Near our wall we counted four hundred brocade tents or the like—this we established with certainty. The siege grew intense, so we sallied out with two hundred horsemen, cut through the Romans, killing among them, and made for the fortress of al-Zaytūnah on our way to Valencia.’”
Al-Yasaʿ continues: “Masʿūd ibn ʿIzz al-Nās told me: ‘I saw Ibn ʿIyāḍ when he was a young man. He had wrestled a Roman who had defeated everyone else in al-Andalus. The Roman approached him, and Ibn ʿIyāḍ thrust him away with such force that I thought the Roman had convulsed…’”