The Masmuda were the third of the three great medieval Berber confederations, the sedentary mountain population of the western High Atlas, the Anti-Atlas, and the Atlantic plain south of the Bou Regreg. They are the historical antecedent of the modern Chleuh of southern Morocco.
In contrast to the pastoral Sanhaja and Zenata, the Masmuda were settled agriculturalists organised around fortified villages, terraced cultivation, and collective granaries. Medieval geographers describe a network of tribal sections across what are today the Demnate, Telouet, Toubkal, and Sirwa zones; their territory extended to the Rabat–Salé estuary, the Bregreg basin, and the Atlantic coast.
The defining political achievement of the Masmuda was the Almohad movement, founded by the religious reformer Ibn Tumart at Igiliz in the Anti-Atlas around 1121 and consolidated at Tinmel in the High Atlas. Under his successor Abd al-Mu'min the Almohad caliphate displaced the Almoravids, took Marrakesh in 1147, unified the Maghreb from the Atlantic to Tripolitania, and at its height extended to al-Andalus.
The fall of the Almohad caliphate to the Marinids in the thirteenth century ended Masmuda political pre-eminence. The contemporary Chleuh sphere of the Souss and the Atlas is the cultural and demographic continuation of the Masmuda; the name itself is no longer used as a primary identity.