Idris ibn Abdallah, known as Idris I or Mawlay Idris, was the founder of the Idrisid dynasty and the figure conventionally treated as the founder of the first independent Muslim state in what is now Morocco. He was a Hashemite descendant of the Prophet Muhammad through Hasan ibn Ali, and fled the Abbasid east in 786 after the Battle of Fakhkh, in which his brother Husayn was killed in an Alid revolt at Mecca.
Idris reached Walila — the Berber-Roman site of Volubilis on the northern Moroccan plain — in 786 or 787 and was sheltered by the Awraba Berber tribe under their chief Ishaq ibn Muhammad. The Awraba acclaimed him imam in 788, and within three years he had consolidated authority across the western and central Maghreb, founded a new capital site at Fez in 789, and begun the construction of an Idrisid administration combining the Sharifian religious legitimacy of his lineage with the demographic and military weight of the Berber confederations.
Idris was assassinated in 791 — by poison sent from Baghdad on the orders of the caliph Harun al-Rashid, according to the conventional account. His son Idris II, born posthumously a few months later, succeeded him in 803 on reaching adulthood and consolidated the dynasty that would rule the western Maghreb until 974.
Idris I's tomb at Moulay Idriss Zerhoun, on the slopes overlooking Volubilis, remains one of the principal pilgrimage centres of Morocco; he is widely held to be the patron saint of the country, and his foundation of Fez is among the constitutive moments of the Moroccan national narrative.