Died 1248 Name Al Qifti | ||
Jamal al-Din abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Abd al-Wahid al-Shaybani (Arabic: جمال الدين أبو الحسن علي بن يوسف القفطي Jamāl al-Dīn Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Yūsuf ibn Ibrāhīm al-Shaybānī l-Qifṭī, ca. 1172–1248) was an Egyptian Arab scholar, writer, patron, and administrator under the Ayyubid rulers of Aleppo. He is remembered today mainly for his History of Learned Men.
Life and Works
He was born to a judge's family in Qift in Upper Egypt. He was reared and educated in Cairo, but in 1195, he joined his father, who as the deputy of Qadi al-Fadil, the famous adviser of Saladin and patron and benefactor of Maimonides, had become the administrator of Jerusalem. He was able to learn administration and the way of life of the ruling class, and he became acquainted with members of the royal family before the death of Saladin in March 1193.
By 1212, he seems already to have moved to the court of Saladin's son, Az-Zahir Ghazi, where he was mentored in bureaucracy by his father's friend, Faris al-Din Maimum ibn -al-Qasri, the former governor of Jerusalem and Nablus. When al-Qasri died in 1214, the sultan permitted al-Qifti to devote himself to scholarship for a while but at last constrained him to take over the registry of the army against his own inclination. He received the title of Qadi al-Akram ("most noble judge") and was later made chief minister, or wazir, and later died in that office.
26 of his works are known by title, of which only two survive:
Some fragments survive of the posthumous Akhbar al-Muhammadin min al-shu'ara' (Ms. Paris Arab. 3335).
The lost works dealt mostly with historiography, including a history of Cairo, a history of the Seljuks, and histories of the Mirdasids, of the Buyids, of Mahmud b. Sabuktakin, of the Maghreb, and of the Yemen.