Kitāb al-bayān al-mughrib fī ākhbār mulūk al-andalus wa'l-maghrib (Book of the Amazing Story of the History of the Kings of al-Andalus and Maghreb)[1][2] by Ibn Idhāri (var. Ibn Athari) of Marrakech in the Maghreb (now Morocco); an important medieval Arabic history of the Maghreb and Iberia, written at Marrakech ca. 1312 / 712 AH . Generally known by its shorter title al-Bayān al-Mughrib (The Amazing Story; البيان المغرب), or even just as the Bayān, it is valued by modern researchers as a unique source of information, and for its preservation of excerpts from lost works.
Ibn Idhāri divides the work into three parts:
- History of the Maghreb from the coming of Islam to the twelfth century
- History of Al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) over the same period
- History of the Almoravids and Almohads
The Arabic text of the first two parts was first published in a Latin edition by Reinhart Dozy (1848-52); a second corrected edition of these two parts was published in 1948 by Colin and Levi-Provençal.
Several Spanish translations include a notable version by Ambrosio Huici Miranda, who originally published a part of the text as an anonymous work based on manuscripts from Madrid and Copenhagen and later the full text under Ibn Idhāri's name. A French translation by Fagnan (1901) based on Dozy's edition, received unfavourable reviews. However to date few translations of this work have been published.
Portions of the incomplete and insect-damaged manuscript of the third part were discovered in the 20th century. Despite lacking the beginning and end and several folios,[3] the preserved MS fragments importantly provide for the correction of many of errors and information omitted by the more widely known Rawd al-Qirtas. An Arabic edition published by Ihsan Abbas (Beirut, 1983) includes the incomplete Part 3.
Notes
[edit]- ^ "Source Details". Online Medieval Sources Bibliography. Retrieved November 20, 2015.
- ^ Ibn Athari, Abu al-Abbas (2013). Kitāb al-bayān al-mughrib fī akhbār al-Andalus wa-al-Maghrib (in Arabic). Vol. 4. Tunis: Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī.
- ^ The various discoveries of Part 3 are detailed in Huici Miranda's introduction to the Spanish translation.
References
[edit]- Spanish Translation of Parts 1 and 2: A. Huici Miranda, Colección de crónicas árabes de la Reconquista vols. 2 and 3, Tetuan, 1953-4.
- Spanish Translation of Part 3: A. Huici Miranda, Al-Bayán al-Mugrib. Nuevos fragmentos almorávides y almohades. Anubar Ediciones, Valencia, 1963.
- 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). English translation of extracts dealing with the Almoravids.
- Comparative notes (in English) on sources of Moroccan history during the Almoravid period by French historian Lagadère
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