 Along with his other brothers, Abdallah served as an Almohad governor in al-Andalus.Following the premature death of his nephew, the young Caliph Yusuf II al-Mustansir, without heirs, in January 1224, the Marrakesh palace bureaucrats, led by the vizier Abu Sa'id Uthman ibn Jami'i and the regional Masmuda tribal sheikhs, engineered the election of his elderly grand-uncle as the new caliph Abd al-Wahid I, and presented it to the remaining Almohad family members as a "fait accompli".Abdallah, then governing in Murcia, and his brothers, Abu al-'Ala Idris (governing in Córdoba), Abu Musa (in Málaga) and Abu al-Hassan (in Granada), who formed a powerful clique in Almohad hierarchy, were upset at the hastiness and the probable unconstitutionality of the Marrakesh proceedings.