Tiaret Province
Capital of the Rustamid Ibadi state (776-909 AD)—unusually tolerant for its era. French colonists added Arabian horse breeding. Both legacies persist.
Tiaret means "Lioness" in Berber—the Barbary lions that once prowled here are gone, but the name persists. More consequential: from 776 to 909 AD, this was Tahert, capital of the Rustamid dynasty and the Ibadi Islamic world.
Abd al-Rahman ibn Rustam, a Persian theologian, founded the city and was proclaimed imam by the Ibadi tribes. Tiaret occupied a strategic mountain pass at 1,083 meters—key to dominating the central Maghreb and a terminus of the West African slave trade. What made Tahert unusual was its tolerance: contemporaries described it as "relatively free-thinking and democratic," a center for scholarship that permitted diverse sects including the Mu'tazila rationalists. When the Fatimids conquered in 909, the Ibadis fled to Ouargla and eventually to M'zab, where their descendants still live.
The French found another use for Tiaret: horses. The National Stud Farm of Chaouchaoua became home to foundational mares of Algerian Arabian breeding. Names like Olympe, Primevere, and Cherifa entered pedigrees that now spread across France, Poland, and the world. Tiaret's gift to history: an experiment in Islamic pluralism, and bloodlines that still run in modern Arabian horses.