Ya’qubi

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Ya'qubi bigraphy, stories - early Muslim scholar

Ya’qubi : biography

– 897/898

Ahmad ibn Abu Ya’qub ibn Ja’far ibn Wahb Ibn Wadih al-Ya’qubi (died 897/8), known as Ahmad al-Ya’qubi, or Ya’qubi, was a Muslim geographer and perhaps the first historian of world culture in medieval Islam.

Biography

He was a great-grandson of Wadih, the freedman of the caliph Mansur. Until 873 he lived in Armenia and Khorasan, working under the patronage of the Iranian dynasty of the Tahirids; then he traveled to India, Egypt and the Maghreb, where he died in Egypt. He died in AH 284 (897/8).

Ya’qubi was a Great Sunni scholar,But his Shia sympathies are found throughout his works.

Works

  • Ta’rikh ibn Wadih (Chronicle of Ibn Wadih)
  • Kitab al-Buldan (Book of the Countries) – geography, contains a description of the Maghreb, with a full account of the larger cities and much topographical and political information (ed. M. de Goeje, Leiden, 1892).