Sahaba el-Rehmania

Sahaba el-Rehmania (; ) was the wife of the Saadi Sultan Mohammed al-Shaykh and the mother of Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik. Gifted in diplomacy, she held a leading political role throughout her life. She was ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the court of Sultan Murad III.

Biography Sahaba comes from the Rahamna tribe, a Ḥassān tribe. Her tribe was allied with the Saadians and, in 1525, they participated in the attack on the Portuguese fortress of Santa Cruz, in Agadir. She married Mohammed al-Shaykh around 1528.

In 1557, upon the accession to the throne of Abdallah al-Ghalib, part of his family including his brothers from his two step-mothers Sahaba and Lalla Masuda went into exile, fearing for their lives. This exile lasted eighteen years. During their exile in several cities of the Ottoman Empire, Sahaba el-Rehmania ensured that the two brothers Abd al-Malik, barely fifteen years old, and Ahmad, his younger half-brother, completed their education. to address the Ottoman sultan, Mourad III the widow of Selim II and the mother of Sultan Murad III. Abdelmalik strongly insisted on this sovereign to obtain that he put at his disposal a Turkish army with which he would go to Morocco to strip his nephew of the crown. Murad III received this proposal with anger and refused to favor such a design. The two Saadian brothers Abdelmalik and Ahmad also decided to participate in the sultan's defensive operation by leading one of the ships leaving Algiers.

The sultan having granted this request, Sahaba and her son Abdelmalik, went back to Algiers where his son gave the inhabitants of this city the letter in which the sultan ordered them to leave with him, and help him reconquer the throne. The Algerians asked Abdelmalik to pay them their balance, born 1537. She is buried at the Saadian Tombs in Marrakesh; Sultan Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik; he married Zahara bint Agi Morato the daughter of Haci Murad the Ottoman governor of Médéa. After the death of her husband during the Battle of Alcácer Quibir, Zahara remarried Hassan Pasha, governor general of Algeria and then Kapudan Pasha.