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

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.