Writing Egypt: Al-Maqrizi and his Historical Project

• Offers the most complete, probing and layered biography of al-Maqrizi
• Interprets al-Maqrizi’s historical output as a long-term scholarly project revolving around his famous Khitat to capture the entire history of Egypt
• Analyses al-Maqrizi’s approach and methodologies in light of his beliefs, ethics, feelings, education, social standing, world views, politics and personal circumstances
• Distills from al-Maqrizi’s massive textual output insights into his theorising, conception of history and the influence of his teacher Ibn Khaldun
• Restores him to the pinnacle of Mamluk historiographical tradition as an unusually outspoken critic who was animated by his moral rectitude

Although al-Maqrizi is recognised as the most influential historian of pre-modern Egypt, he has never received the probing historical treatment warranted by his standing and scholarly output. This book fills that gap. Arranged in three sections, it tells al-Maqrizi’s life story in the first, weaves it with historiographical, textual and methodological analysis of his oeuvre in the second, and reconstructs the afterlife of the author and his work down to the present in the third part.

al-Maqrizi is presented both as a man of his age who forged a distinct and unique scholarly persona and a historian with a structured and principled project aiming to reconstruct the history of Islamic Egypt in all its facets. His, however, was a critical stance with moral overtones, conceived from within the epistemological framework of a medieval Muslim thinker, which ensured not only his reputation in his own historiographical tradition, but also his reclamation in the modern Egyptian consciousness as one of the most original voices of Egypt.