Career
After an early training in Tlemcen, al-Maqqari moved to Fes in Morocco and then to Marrakech, following the court of Ahmad al-Mansur, to whom he dedicated his Rawdat al-As (The garden of Myrtle) about the ulemas of Marrakech and Fes. After alMansur"s death in 1603, al-Maqqari established himself in Fes, where he was appointed both as mufti and as the imam of the Qarawiyyin mosque by al-Mansour"s successor Zidan Abu Maali in 1618, but he had to leave Fes in that same year, probably because of the civil war between the Saadian sultans. He then made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
In the following year he settled in Cairo.
In 1620 he visited Jerusalem and Damascus, and during the next six years made the pilgrimage five times. In the same year he returned to Cairo, where he spent a year in writing his history.
He was just making preparations to settle definitely in Damascus when he died. His greatest work, The Breath of Perfume from the Branch of Green Andalusia and Memorials of its Vizier Lisan ud-Din ibn ul-Khattib, consists of two parts.
The second part is a biography of Ibn al-Khatib.
The whole work has been published at Bulaq (1863), Cairo (1885) and Beirut (1968).
