The word is derived from ribat, a fortified frontier station.
Thus ribat came to mean a religious house or hospice (zawiya).
The old town (Medina), the walls of which have in great part disappeared, lies between two suburbs, the Ribat-elSowika on the north and the Ribat Bab-el-Jezira on the south.
His preaching was for long rejected by the Lamtunas, so on the advice of his patron Yahya, who accompanied him, he retired to an island in the Niger, where he founded a ribat or Moslem monastery, from which as a centre his influence spread.
When Ibn Tumart died in 1128 at the monastery or ribat which he had founded in the Atlas at Tinmal, after suffering a severe defeat by the Murabtis, `Abd-el-Mumin kept his death secret for two years, till his own influence was established.