Muḥammad al-Idrīsī

Muḥammad al-Idrīsī (born 1100, Sabtah, Morocco (now Ceuta, Spanish North Africa)—died 1165/66, Sicily or Sabtah) was an Arab geographer and adviser to Roger II, the Norman king of Sicily. He wrote one of the greatest works of medieval geography, Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq (“The Pleasure Excursion of One Who Is Eager to Traverse the Regions of the World”).

Al-Idrīsī traced his descent through a long line of princes, caliphs, and holy men to the Prophet Muhammad. His immediate forebears, the Ḥammūdids of the short-lived caliphate (1016–58) in Spain and North Africa, were an offshoot of the Idrīsids of Morocco (789–985), a dynasty descended from Muhammad’s eldest grandson, al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī.

Few facts are known about al-Idrīsī’s life. He was born in Sabtah (now Ceuta, a Spanish exclave in Morocco), where his Ḥammūdī ancestors had fled after the fall of Málaga, their last foothold in Spain, in 1057. He spent much of his early life traveling in North Africa and Spain and seems to have acquired detailed and accurate information on both regions. He is known to have studied in Córdoba for a number of years and also to have lived in Marrakesh, Morocco, and Qusṭanṭinah (Constantine), Algeria. Apparently, his travels took him to many parts of western Europe, including Portugal, northern Spain, the French Atlantic coast, and southern England. He visited Asia Minor when he was barely 16 years old.

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About 1145, while still at the peak of his powers, al-Idrīsī entered the service of Roger II of Sicily—a step that marked a turning point in his career. Henceforward, all his great achievements were to be indissolubly linked to the Norman court at Palermo, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. Some Western scholars have suggested that al-Idrīsī may have been regarded as a renegade by other Muslims for entering the service of a Christian king and praising him lavishly in his writings. Moreover, some writers have attributed the paucity of biographical information on al-Idrīsī in Muslim sources to these circumstances.

There has always been uncertainty about al-Idrīsī’s reasons for going to Sicily. It has been suggested that he may have been induced to do so by some of his Ḥammūdī kinsmen, who are known to have settled there and who, according to the Spanish Muslim traveler Ibn Jubayr (1145–1217), enjoyed great power and prestige among Sicilian Muslims. According to the 14th-century Arab scholar al-Ṣafadī, Roger II invited al-Idrīsī to Sicily to make a map of the world for him, telling him:

You are a member of the caliphal family. For that reason, when you happen to be among Muslims, their kings will seek to kill you, whereas when you are with me you are assured of the safety of your person.

Al-Idrīsī agreed to stay, and Roger settled upon him a king’s pension.

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Al-Idrīsī’s service in Sicily resulted in the completion of three major geographic works: (1) a silver planisphere on which was depicted a map of the world, (2) a world map consisting of 70 sections formed by dividing Earth north of the Equator into 7 climatic zones of equal width, each of which was subdivided into 10 equal parts by lines of longitude, and (3) a geographic text intended as a key to the planisphere. This was his great work of descriptive geography, known as Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq and also as Kitā Rujār, or Al-Kitāb al-Rujārī (“The Book of Roger”). In compiling it, al-Idrīsī combined material from Arabic and Greek geographic works with information obtained through firsthand observation and eyewitness reports. The king and his Muslim geographer chose a number of persons, including men skilled in drawing, and dispatched them to various countries to observe and record what they saw. Al-Idrīsī completed the book in January 1154, shortly before Roger’s death.

The silver planisphere has been lost, but the maps and book have survived. A German scholar, Konrad Miller, published the maps in his Mappe Arabicae (1926–31), and later an emended world map, based upon Miller’s work, was published by the Iraq Academy (Baghdad, 1951). The first loose sections of a critical edition of Idrīsī’s Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq, undertaken by a committee of Italian scholars in cooperation with a group of international experts, had begun to appear in the early 1970s.

Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq represents a serious attempt to combine descriptive and astronomical geography. That this effort was not an unqualified success apparently stems from the author’s inadequate mastery of the physical and mathematical aspects of geography. He has been criticized not only for failing to make use of the important geographic contributions of other scientists of his times, such as the 11th-century Arab scholar al-Bīrūnī, but also for his uncritical use of earlier Greek and Arab sources. Nevertheless, al-Idrīsī’s book is a major geographic monument. It is particularly valuable for its data on such regions as the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans.

A number of other geographic works are attributed to al-Idrīsī, including one (now lost) written for William I, Roger’s son and successor who reigned from 1154 to 1166, as well as several critical revisions and abridgments. The Medici press in Rome published an abridgment of Kitāb nuzhat al-mushtāq in 1592; a Latin translation was published under the title Geographia Nubiensis. The only complete translation of the work in any language is P.A. Jaubert’s two-volume Géographie d’Édrisi (1836–40); it is unreliable, however, because it was based on faulty manuscripts.

Al-Idrīsī’s scientific interests embraced medical matters as well, and his Kitāb al-adwiyah al-mufradah (“Book of Simple Drugs”), in which he lists the names of drugs in as many as 12 languages, demonstrates the range of his linguistic abilities. Al-Idrīsī seems to have had a good knowledge of Arabic literature, and—judging by some of his verse that has survived—he was also an accomplished poet. No details are known about the last years of his life.