Mohamed Ben Ali — in the Arabic sources Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn al-Hajj al-Ishbili — was born in Seville and died at Fes in 1314. He is one of the very few pre-modern Maghrebi builders named in the record at all, rather than dissolved into the guild that raised the work. After a Castilian fleet sacked Salé in 1260, the Marinid sultan Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Abd al-Haqq set out to rebuild the town as the chief shipyard of the kingdom of Fes, and called on Ben Ali. French and Arabic accounts credit him with the arsenal and both of its monumental ashlar gates, citing Henri Terrasse’s 1922 study of them; the attestation is firmest at Bab el-Mrissa, vaulted over a canal so that galleys could pass inside the walls. Nothing else of his life is documented.
