Book Title | Bibliotheca Maqriziana |
Book Author | Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila |
Total Pages | 522 |
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Language | English |
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Bibliotheca Maqriziana – Al-Maqrīzī’s al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar Vol. v, – Persia and Its Kings, Part I – Edited and translated by Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila
BIBLIOTHECA MAQRIZIANA
Book’s foreword
The aim of Bibliotheca Maqriziana is to publish critical editions of al-Maqrīzī’s works based on the author’s holographs, whenever these are preserved. The critical editions are accompanied by annotated translations and introductions.
The series is divided into two categories: the first, Opera minora (three volumes have been published thus far), includes al-Maqrīzī’s minor works; and the second, Opera maiora, is devoted to his major, often multivolume, works.
The present volume is the first of the Opera maiora. It contains one section of one of al-Maqrīzī’s major works and, more importantly, one of the least known: al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar (‘The History of Mankind’).
Al-Maqrīzī divided it into six volumes and several sections. This original division will be respected. Each section will be edited and translated by a specialist on the subject; the title page of each volume will indicate the volume and section number according to al-Maqrīzī’s divisions.
For reasons of space, some sections have been divided into several parts, as in the present case: The history of the Persians corresponds to the fourth section of volume 5 of al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar and will be published in two tomes, this one being the first.
With al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar, al-Maqrīzī brought his historical panorama to an end. It was his last major opus, composed at the end of his life, and he conceived it as an introduction to his biography of the Prophet (Imtāʿ al-asmāʿ bi-mā li-l-rasūl min al-anbāʾ wa-l-aḥwāl wa-l-ḥafada wa-l-matāʿ), a work that preceded his trilogy on the history of Egypt under Muslim rule (ʿIqd ǧawāhir al-asfāṭ min aḫbār madīnat al-Fusṭāṭ; Ittiʿāẓ al-ḥunafāʾ bi-aḫbār al-ḫulafāʾ; and al-Sulūk li-maʿrifat duwal al-mulūk).
With this last evidence of his output as one of the most significant historians of Islam, al-Maqrīzī’s goal was to stress the central position of the Arabs in the history of the world, as the group elected by God to receive His last message.
Though the content of al-Ḫabar also deals with the history of other peoples (Jews, Persians, Greeks, Romans, etc.), its main focus is undoubtedly on the history of the Arabs before the appearance of Islam: no fewer than four of the six volumes are entirely devoted to them.
The present volume, which deals with the history of the Persians, will be followed by others, already in preparation and scheduled for publication in the near future. We hope that the full publication of this significant, largely unknown, work will contribute to a better understanding of al-Maqrīzī as a historian and a scholar.
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