Ibn 'Idhari

Ibn 'Idhari
Born	Late 13th century Marrakech, Morocco
Died	After 1312 CE
Occupation(s)	Historian, Qāʾid (commander)
Academic work
Era	Medieval Islamic period
Main interests	History of the Maghreb and Al-Andalus
Notable works	Al-Bayan al-Mughrib

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, an important medieval history of the Maghreb (Morocco, North Africa) and Al-Andalus (now the Iberian Peninsula) written in 1312.

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. 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. 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.

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.