Muḥammad ibn al-Qāsim al-Nuwayrī al-Iskandarānī al-Mālikī[1] (fl. 1365–1373) was a Muslim historian and native of Alexandria in the tradition of secular local historiography.[2] He wrote a three-volume history ostensibly of the Cypriot-led crusade that sacked his city in October 1365, to which he was an eyewitness.[3] In fact, as his contemporary Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsḳalānī noted, the Kitāb al-Ilmām fīmā jarat bihi ʾl-aḥkām al-maḳḍiyya fī wāḳiʿat al-Iskandariyya mostly meanders through the earlier history of the city, leaving little room for the crusade with which he begins.[4] It includes the story of Alexander the Great and Aristotle, and even many events unrelated to the city.[5] It was written between AH 767 (AD 1365–66) and 775 (1373–74).[3] The dates of al-Nuwayrī's birth and death are unknown.[6] There is a manuscript copy of al-Masʿūdī's Murūj in al-Nuwayrī's handwriting.[7]
The Kitāb al-Ilmām was edited in six volumes by Aziz Atiya between 1968 and 1973.[3] Atiya regards al-Nuwayrī as the most important historian for the crusade of 1365 from the Egyptian perspective.[8]
Notes
^For the spelling, see Bosworth 1995; Rosenthal 1968, pp. 458–59, uses Muḥammad ibn Qāsim ibn Muḥammad an-Nuwayrī as-Sikandarī al-Mālikī.
Atiya, Aziz Suryal (1977). A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedist from Alexandria: A Critical and Analytical Study of al-Nuwairy al-Iskandarāni's "Kitāb al-Ilmām". Middle East Center, University of Utah.
