Abū al-ʽAbbās Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn ʽIḏārī al-Marrākushī () was a Maghrebi historian of the late-13th/early-14th century, and author of the famous '' Al-Bayan al-Mughrib'', an important medieval history of the

Maghreb The Maghreb (; ), also known as the Arab Maghreb () and Northwest Africa, is the western part of the Arab world. The region comprises western and central North Africa, including Algeria, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. The Maghreb al ...

(

Morocco Morocco, officially the Kingdom of Morocco, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. It has coastlines on the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and has land borders with Algeria to Algeria–Morocc ...

North Africa North Africa (sometimes Northern Africa) is a region encompassing the northern portion of the African continent. There is no singularly accepted scope for the region. However, it is sometimes defined as stretching from the Atlantic shores of t ...

) and

Al-Andalus Al-Andalus () was the Muslim-ruled area of the Iberian Peninsula. The name refers to the different Muslim states that controlled these territories at various times between 711 and 1492. At its greatest geographical extent, it occupied most o ...

(now the

Iberian Peninsula The Iberian Peninsula ( ), also known as Iberia, is a peninsula in south-western Europe. Mostly separated from the rest of the European landmass by the Pyrenees, it includes the territories of peninsular Spain and Continental Portugal, comprisin ...

) written in 1312. Ibn Idhāri was born and lived in

Marrakech Marrakesh or Marrakech (; , ) is the fourth-largest city in Morocco. It is one of the four imperial cities of Morocco and is the capital of the Marrakesh–Safi Regions of Morocco, region. The city lies west of the foothills of the Atlas Mounta ...

(present-day

), and was a ''

qāʾid Qaid ( ', "commander"; pl. ', or '), also spelled kaid or caïd, is a word meaning "commander" or "leader." It was a title in the Norman kingdom of Sicily, applied to palatine officials and members of the ''curia'', usually to those who wer ...

'' ('commander') of Fez. Little is known of his life. His only surviving work, ''Al-Bayan al-Mughrib'', is a history of

from the conquest of Miṣr in 640/1 AD to the

Almohad The Almohad Caliphate (; or or from ) or Almohad Empire was a North African Berber Muslim empire founded in the 12th century. At its height, it controlled much of the Iberian Peninsula (Al-Andalus) and North Africa (the Maghreb). The Almohad ...

conquests in 1205/6 AD. 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 Vikings were seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded, and settled throughout parts of Europe.Roesdahl, pp. 9� ...

raids on

in the ninth century. He mentions another biographic work on the

caliphs A caliphate ( ) is an institution or public office under the leadership of an Islamic steward with the title of caliph (; , ), a person considered a political–religious successor to the Islamic prophet Muhammad and a leader of the enti ...

, 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. . Short biographical note. * N. Levtzion & J.F.P. Hopkins, ''Corpus of early Arabic sources for West African history'', Cambridge University Press, 1981, (reprint: Markus Wiener, Princeton, 2000, ). Short biographical note and English translation of extracts from '' Al-Bayan al-Mughrib''. {{DEFAULTSORT:Ibn Idhari 13th-century Arabic-language writers 14th-century Arabic-language writers 13th-century Moroccan historians 14th-century Moroccan historians People from Marrakesh Historians from the Marinid Sultanate