Ismāʿīl bin ʿAlī bin Maḥmūd bin Muḥammad bin ʿUmar bin Shāhanshāh bin Ayyūb bin Shādī bin Marwān (), better known as Abū al-Fidāʾ or Abulfeda (; November 127327 October 1331), was a Mamluk-era Kurdish

geographer A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society, including how society and nature interacts. The Greek prefix "geo" means "earth" a ...

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the ...

, Ayyubid

prince A prince is a male ruler (ranked below a king, grand prince, and grand duke) or a male member of a monarch's or former monarch's family. ''Prince'' is also a title of nobility (often highest), often hereditary, in some European states. The ...

and local

governor A governor is an politician, administrative leader and head of a polity or Region#Political regions, political region, in some cases, such as governor-general, governors-general, as the head of a state's official representative. Depending on the ...

of Hama.

Life

Abu'l-Fida was born in

Damascus Damascus ( , ; ) is the capital and List of largest cities in the Levant region by population, largest city of Syria. It is the oldest capital in the world and, according to some, the fourth Holiest sites in Islam, holiest city in Islam. Kno ...

, where his father Malik ul-Afdal, brother of Emir Al-Mansur Muhammad II of Hama, had fled from the

Mongols Mongols are an East Asian ethnic group native to Mongolia, China ( Inner Mongolia and other 11 autonomous territories), as well as the republics of Buryatia and Kalmykia in Russia. The Mongols are the principal member of the large family o ...

. Abu'l-Fida was an Ayyubid prince of Kurdish origin. In his boyhood he devoted himself to the study of the

Qur'an The Quran, also romanized Qur'an or Koran, is the central religious text of Islam, believed by Muslims to be a revelation directly from God ('' Allāh''). It is organized in 114 chapters (, ) which consist of individual verses ('). Besides ...

and the sciences, but from his twelfth year onward, he was almost constantly engaged in military expeditions, chiefly against the

Crusaders The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and at times directed by the Papacy during the Middle Ages. The most prominent of these were the campaigns to the Holy Land aimed at reclaiming Jerusalem and its surrounding ...

. In 1285 he was present at the attack on a stronghold of the Knights of St. John, and took part in the sieges of Tripoli,

Acre The acre ( ) is a Unit of measurement, unit of land area used in the Imperial units, British imperial and the United States customary units#Area, United States customary systems. It is traditionally defined as the area of one Chain (unit), ch ...

and Qal'at ar-Rum. In 1298 he entered the service of the Mamluk

sultan Sultan (; ', ) is a position with several historical meanings. Originally, it was an Arabic abstract noun meaning "strength", "authority", "rulership", derived from the verbal noun ', meaning "authority" or "power". Later, it came to be use ...

Malik al-Nasir and after twelve years was invested by him with the governorship of Hama. In 1312 he became prince with the title Malik us-Salhn, and in 1320 received the hereditary rank of sultan with the title Malik ul-Mu'ayyad. He died in 1331.

Works

Geography

''Taqwim al-Buldan'' ("A Sketch of the Countries") is, like much of the history, founded on the works of his predecessors, including the works of

Ptolemy Claudius Ptolemy (; , ; ; – 160s/170s AD) was a Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were important to later Byzantine science, Byzant ...

and Muhammad al-Idrisi. A long introduction on various geographical matters is followed by twenty-eight sections dealing in tabular form with the chief towns of the world. After each name are given the longitude, latitude, climate, spelling, and then observations generally taken from earlier authors. Parts of the work were published and translated as early as 1650 in

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

. In his works Abu'l-Fida correctly mentions the latitude and longitude of the city of

Quanzhou Quanzhou is a prefecture-level city, prefecture-level port city on the north bank of the Jin River, beside the Taiwan Strait in southern Fujian, China, People's Republic of China. It is Fujian's largest most populous metropolitan region, wi ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

. The book also contains the first known explanation of the circumnavigator's paradox. Abu'l-Fida wrote that a person who completed a westward

circumnavigation Circumnavigation is the complete navigation around an entire island, continent, or astronomical object, astronomical body (e.g. a planet or natural satellite, moon). This article focuses on the circumnavigation of Earth. The first circumnaviga ...

of the world would count one fewer day than a stationary observer, since he was traveling in the same direction as the apparent motion of the sun in the sky. A person traveling eastward would count one more day than a stationary observer. This phenomenon was confirmed two centuries later, when the Magellan–Elcano expedition (1519–1522) completed the first circumnavigation. After sailing westward around the world from Spain, the expedition called at

Cape Verde Cape Verde or Cabo Verde, officially the Republic of Cabo Verde, is an island country and archipelagic state of West Africa in the central Atlantic Ocean, consisting of ten volcanic islands with a combined land area of about . These islands ...

for supplies on Wednesday, 9 July 1522 (ship's time). However, the locals told them that it was actually Thursday, 10 July 1522.

History

His ''Concise History of Humanity'' ( ''Tarikh al-Mukhtasar fi Akhbar al-Bashar'', also ''An Abridgment of the History at the Human Race'', or ''History of Abu al-Fida'' تاريخ أبى الفداء) was written between 1315 and 1329 as a continuation of '' The Complete History'' by Ali ibn al-Athir (c. 1231). It is in the form of

annals Annals (, from , "year") are a concise history, historical record in which events are arranged chronology, chronologically, year by year, although the term is also used loosely for any historical record. Scope The nature of the distinction betw ...

extending from the creation of the world to the year 1329. It is divided into two parts, one covering the history of

pre-Islamic Arabia Pre-Islamic Arabia is the Arabian Peninsula and its northern extension in the Syrian Desert before the rise of Islam. This is consistent with how contemporaries used the term ''Arabia'' or where they said Arabs lived, which was not limited to the ...

and the other the

history of Islam The history of Islam is believed, by most historians, to have originated with Muhammad's mission in Mecca and Medina at the start of the 7th century CE, although Muslims regard this time as a return to the original faith passed down by the Abr ...

until 1329. It was kept up to date by other Arab historians, by Ibn al-Wardi until 1348, and by Ibn al-Shihna until 1403. It was translated into

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

,Henricus Orthobius Fleischer, ''Abulfedae historia anteislamica, arabice: E duobus codicibus bibliothecae regiae Parisiensis, 101 et 615'', F.C.W. Vogel (1831). French and English and was the main work of Muslim historiography used by 18th-century orientalists including Jean Gagnier (1670–1740) and Johann Jakob Reiske (1754).

References

Citations

General and cited references

* * ''Studies on Abul-Fida' al-Ḥamawi (1273–1331 A.D.)'' by Farid Ibn Faghül, Carl Ehrig-Eggert, E. Neubauer. Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science (Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften) at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 1992. * ''Encyclopedie de l'Islam'' , 2nd ed. E.J. Brill, Leiden and G.P. Maisonneuve, Paris, 1960.

External links

*
Abulfedae tabulae quaedam geographicae, nunc primum Arab. ed., Lat. vertit, notis illustr. H.F ... (1835)

Abul Fida Ismail Ibn Hamwi
at the Salaam Biographical Dictionary

The Scholars of Hama
{{Authority control 1273 births 1331 deaths 13th-century Kurdish people 14th-century Kurdish people 14th-century Arabic-language writers 14th-century geographers 14th-century Ayyubid rulers 14th-century Syrian historians Ayyubid emirs of Hama Geographers of the medieval Islamic world Kurdish scientists Kurdish historians Kurdish geographers Kurdish scholars Historians from the Mamluk Sultanate Writers from Damascus