Ibn 'Idhari

Abū al-ʽAbbās Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn ʽIḏārī al-Marrākushī (Arabic: أبو العباس أحمد ابن عذاري المراكشي) was a Maghrebi historian of the late-13th/early-14th century, and author of the famous Al-Bayan al-Mughrib,[1] an important medieval history of the Maghreb (Morocco, North Africa) and Al-Andalus (now the Iberian Peninsula) written in 1312.[2]

Ibn Idhāri was born and lived in Marrakech (present-day Morocco), and was a qāʾid ('commander') of Fez. Little is known of his life. His only surviving work, Al-Bayan al-Mughrib, is a history of North Africa from the conquest of Miṣr in 640/1 AD to the Almohad conquests in 1205/6 AD.[3] Its value to modern scholarship lies in its extracts from older works, now lost, and in its material not found elsewhere, including reports of the first Viking raids on Al-Andalus in the ninth century.[4] He mentions another biographic work on the caliphs, imāms and amīrs from across the Islamic world, which has not survived. He died after 1312 / 712 AH.

Notes
  1. Ibn Athari, Abu al-Abbas (2013). Kitāb al-bayān al-mughrib fī akhbār al-Andalus wa-al-Maghrib (in Arabic). Vol. 4. Tunis: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī.
  2. This is the form of the name given by Dozy, Colin and Levi-Provençal, editors of the Arabic text of the Bayān, but Siraj (work cited below) gives his kunya and ism as Abū Abd Allah Muhammad
  3. Bosch-Vilá, J (1979) [1971]. "Ibn 'Idhari". Encyclopedia of Islam. Leiden: E. J. Brill. ISBN 90-04-08118-6.
  4. Christys, Ann (2015). Vikings in the South. Bloomsbury. p. 2. ISBN 9781474213752.

References
  • Ahmed Siraj: L'Image de la Tingitane. L'historiographie arabe médiévale et l'Antiquité nord-africaine. École Française de Rome, 1995. ISBN 2-7283-0317-7. Short biographical note.
  • N. Levtzion & J.F.P. Hopkins, Corpus of early Arabic sources for West African history, Cambridge University Press, 1981, ISBN 0-521-22422-5 (reprint: Markus Wiener, Princeton, 2000, ISBN 1-55876-241-8). Short biographical note and English translation of extracts from Al-Bayan al-Mughrib.
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