Writing Egypt: Al-Maqrizi and His Historical Project

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.