Abu'l-Fida was a Kurdish astronomer, geographer, biologist, philosopher, and historian. He is noted for his service as a local governor of Hama, who administered Hama in Syria during the Ayyubid Dynasty in the 14th century.
Background
Abu'l-Fida was born on November 1273 in Damascus, where his father Malik ul-Afdal, brother of Emir Al-Mansur Muhammad II of Hama, had fled from the Mongols. Abū al-Fidāʾ was a descendant of Ayyūb, the father of Saladin, founder of the Ayyūbid dynasty that had been supplanted by the Mamlūks in Egypt and elsewhere before his birth. In 1285 he accompanied his father and his cousin (prince of Ḥamāh and a Mamlūk client) to Mamlūk sieges of Crusader strongholds.
Education
In his boyhood Abul Fida devoted himself to the study of the Qur'an and the sciences, but from his twelfth year onward, he was almost constantly engaged in military expeditions, chiefly against the crusaders.
Career
Abū al-Fidā was a patron of scholars and a scholar himself. His two major works were a history, Mukhtaṣar tāʾrīkh al-bashar (“Brief History of Man”), spanning pre-Islāmic and Islāmic periods to 1329; and a geography, Taqwīm al-buldān (1321; “Locating the Lands”). Both works were compilations of other authors, arranged and added to by Abū al-Fidāʾ, rather than original treatises. Popular in their day in the Middle East, they were much used by 18th- and 19th-century European Orientalists before earlier sources became available.
Biographical dictionaries have preserved information on a number of Abu’l-Fida`s historical-literary and scientific works. Among the most distinguished of the former is the Mukhtasar ta’rlkh al-bashar. It is a historical treatise that begins with pre-Islamic Arabia and becomes most interesting when it deals with happenings during the author’s lifetime. Written in 1315, it was continued by Abu’l-Fida himself until 1329 and was the object of attention of a number of fourteenth-century Arabic historians, who kept it up-to-date until 1403 (among them Ibn al-Wardî until 1348, and Ibn al-Shihna al-Halabl until the beginning of the fifteenth century). This work was translated into Western languages and became the basis for several historical syntheses by eighteenth- century Orientalists, which explains the strong influence it exerted on nineteenth-century Western historiography.
Abu’l-Fidâ`s outstanding scientific work is the Taqwïm al-buldàn (“A Sketch of the Countries”), written between 1316 and 1321. This is a general geography of twenty-eight chapters of varying lengths, with a prologue containing interesting observations: the gain or loss of a day according to the direction in which one goes around the earth, and the assertion that three-fourths of the earth’s surface is covered with water. The descriptions of rivers, lakes, oceans, and mountains are interesting and instructive. The text contains some tables—suggested to Abu’l-Fida’ by his reading of the TaqwTm al-abdan (“The Cure of Bodies”) of Ibn Jazla—that recapitulate the written variants for each place name, its geographical coordinates, the sources utilized, the climate or zone to which it belongs, and the natural region in which it is located. The order followed in the presentation has often been argued.
The sources of the work are the Arabic translation of Ptolemy and the works of IdrlsI, Ibn Hawqal, Istakhri, al-Blruni, and above all the Geography or Kitab Bast al-ard fi’l-tul wa’l-card of Ibn Sa'Td al-Magribl. The latter book is frequently quoted, and Abu’l-Fida3 took from it the information about the trip of one Ibn Fatima (very possibly a Berber from the Sahara), who explored in detail the Atlantic and western Mediterranean coasts of Africa. The longitudes recorded in the TaqwTm al-bulddn often contain obvious errors that are a result of their having been taken from sources that did not adopt the same prime meridian (some used the western coast of Africa, others the Canary Islands); poor conversion of the distance between extreme points on an itinerary into degrees and minutes of latitude and longitude; and faulty reading of the canvas maps in use in the Near East.
The TaqwTm al-bulddn underwent a number of critical abridgments, among which that in Turkish by Muhammad ibn ‘All Sipahlzade (d. 1589) should be noted.
Religion
In his religious affiliation Abu al-Fida belonged to an Islamic tradition. He fought against the Christians in the last period of the Crusades.