The 1465 Moroccan revolution was a popular uprising in the city of Fez, which was the capital of Morocco, against Sultan Abd al-Haqq II, the last ruler of the Marinid dynasty, and his Jewish vizier, Harun ibn Batash.

The theoretical rulers, the Marinids, had little power outside the city of Fez, with large parts of the country in the hands of the Wattasids, a dynasty of viziers.

The renewed focus on inherited sanctity advanced the prestige of the sharifs: descendants of Muhammad by his great-great-great-grandson Idris I, the eighth-century founder of the Moroccan kingdom.

[5] The earliest and most detailed account of the 1465 revolution in Fez, which ended two centuries of Marinid rule, comes from the diary of Abd al-Basit ibn Khalil, an Egyptian merchant who arrived in the Kingdom of Tlemcen in 1464 intending to visit the neighboring Moroccan realm.

[7] But as the Egyptian was not an eyewitness, his account may reflect the official, propagandistic narrative that Muhammad ibn Imran, the new ruler of Fez, desired to portray to his neighbors in Tlemcen.

He then named the Jewish moneylender Harun ibn Batash as the de facto vizier, as Jews did not have independent power bases.

[11] When Abd al-Haqq did arrive at Fez, he was pulled off his horse by a gang of young men and lynched at a slaughterhouse on May 18, 1465, in the holy month of Ramadan.

The surviving Wattasids attempted to return to power in Fez but were rebuffed by Muhammad ibn Imran's new regime, while pogroms of Jews occurred in other cities throughout Morocco as the news spread.

Instead, the sharif is portrayed as leading the mob in both the attack on the Jewish quarter and the killing of Abd al-Haqq, which is not the work of a gang of youth but a public execution officiated by Ibn Imran himself, who strips the sultan of his regalia and puts him on a donkey before the citizens of Fez.

[14] Meanwhile, a number of traditional Moroccan biographies of Sufi saints suggest that there was a group of ulama and other Muslim leaders who opposed the revolution in some capacity.

[15] A seventeenth-century account independent of traditional Moroccan historiography—a polemical tract condemning the Muhajirin, a group of merchants in Fez who were originally Jews but had long ago sincerely converted to Islam—gives a significantly different series of events.

[17] Many of the Jews of Fez appear have temporarily converted to Islam to escape the pogrom before being allowed to return to Judaism by the Wattasids who took power in 1471.

[18] As supporters of the sharifs, the surviving Wattasids may have naturally expected to be restored to power by the revolution, but Muhammad ibn Imran refused to allow them to enter the city.

[19] After a war of several years, the head of the surviving Wattasids, Muhammad al-Sheikh, conquered Fez in 1471 and eliminated the sharif's regime with the support of former Marinid retainers, but at the cost of losing the towns of Asilah, Larache, and Tangiers to the Portuguese.