The first known Cherif, Idris I, was the great-grandson of Ali ibn Abi Talib and Fatima Zahra, the daughter of Muhammad and his first wife Khadijah. Idris I and his people fled from Syria to Morocco in 786 from the Abbasids after losing to them in the Battle of Fakhkh near Mecca in which his family was massacred. In 788, he was greeted by the Amazigh people of Volubilis, a Roman city near Meknes.