Inicio | Noticias-EEA | ‘Christian Sources in al-Maqrīzī’s Kitāb al-Ḫiṭaṭ and al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar’, article by Mayte Penelas in Quaderni di Studi Arabi n.s.
‘Christian Sources in al-Maqrīzī’s Kitāb al-Ḫiṭaṭ and al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar’, article by Mayte Penelas in Quaderni di Studi Arabi n.s.
The EEA researcher Mayte Penelas has published the article “Christian Sources in al-Maqrīzī’s Kitāb al-Ḫiṭaṭ and al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar” in volume 16 (2021) of the Brill journal Quaderni di Studi Arabi. Nuova Serie (pages 233-270).
This is a themed volume entitled History Writing as an Inter-confessional Enterprise, which gathers thirteen articles produced by specialists from Europe, USA, and Israel under the coordination of Martino Diez (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan).
It is widely known that al-Maqrīzī relied extensively on the work by the Coptic author Ibn al-ʿAmīd for the chapter on the Copts included in his Kitāb al-Ḫiṭaṭ. Some scholars have assessed that the text known as Kitāb Hurūšiyūš, which was compiled by a Christian from al-Andalus, was also a major source for large fragments of al-Maqrīzī’s al-Ḫiṭaṭ. More recently, it has been argued that al-Maqrīzī also relied on those two Christian sources for his last major work, al-Ḫabar ʿan al-bašar. In this article, I intend to offer a more comprehensive survey of the use of both sources by al-Maqrīzī. By providing a good many examples, I aim to demonstrate that al-Maqrīzī built on them entire sections or long passages of his books, but also turned to them frequently to add in short reports, variant versions, a date, a nasab, or any information he considered relevant to his work.