Frédéric Bauden

Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Maqrīzī

Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad b. ʿAlī b. ʿAbd al-Qādir b. Muḥammad b. Ibrāhīm al-Maqrīzī or Ibn al-Maqrīzī, the hadith scholar and historian, was born in Cairo in 766/1364-65 into a family of Ḥanbalī scholars originally from Baalbek. In the initial years of his studies, al-Maqrīzī had devoted himself to the prophetic tradition (hadith): the first attestation of his lectures appears in a work devoted to traditionists who were considered unreliable, of which he made a precis (dated 795/1393). His interest in such material never dissipated, as evidenced by other summaries and autograph copies of works of the same genre which can be dated to the beginning of the ninth/fifteenth century. The first work which he seems to have written that may be dated with certainty is a small socio-economic tract entitled Ighāthat al-umma bi-kashf alghumma . Keywords: Baalbek; Cairo; Ighāthat al-umma bi-kashf alghumma ; Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī al-Maqrīzī