[1] He undertook diplomatic missions to the Ottoman court and engineered government attempts to bring tribes under central authority.
[2] Az-Zayyani has left his genealogy which, according to his grandfather, goes back to Sanhaj, the ancestor of the Sanhaja tribes, by Zayyan, the eponymous ancestor of the tribe itself, by Amalu, father of Zayyan and by al-yasa', who would have converted to Islam in the reign of the Umayyad Caliph abd al-Malik ibn Marwan (eighth century AD).
[3] On his return from the journey he made among the Zayyans in 1689, the Alaouite Sultan Isma'il brought back to Meknes az-Zayyani's grandfather, who became his Imam and died in this city the same year as him 1727.
[7] During the reign of Sultan 'Abd Allah, the year in which his studies ended, az-Zayyani accompanied his father and mother, who had resolved to accomplish the pilgrimage; He was their only son and they wanted to settle with him definitively in Medina.
They first went to Cairo to join the caravan of the Egyptian pilgrims; But instead of gaining the Hijaz by land, they preferred to embark on the sea for Arabia by renting a boat.
Arrived in view of yanbu', the ship that carried pilgrims traffickers broke on the reefs, and the cargo was lost: passengers and crew escaped death.
Fortunately, az-Zayyani's mother had sewed three hundred pieces of gold in her belt to counteract a misadventure that was always possible in such a distant journey.
After having bought, with the sum which remained to them, some provisions of road, they returned slowly to Egypt, by land route, with the caravan of the pilgrims of this country.
[10] Instead of attending, during this time, the many schools of Cairo, where Islamic studies were taught, az-Zayyani found nothing better than "to learn alchemy and divination and to search for the peculiarities of metals and stones".
They arrived in this city and stayed there for four months waiting for a new opportunity to leave, and, despairing of finding one, they finally decided to return to Morocco by land, to the Straits of Gibraltar, along the Mediterranean coasts of France and Spain.
Ez-Zayyani, who, in this milieu, almost arrived as an intruder, after a long stay abroad, with new acquaintances and an open mind, was skilful enough to keep himself in place and to make his qualities recognised soon.