Name Ibn al-Furat | Died 1405 | |
Nāṣir al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. ʿAlī al-Miṣrī al-Ḥanafī (1334–1405), better known as Ibn al-Furāt, was an Egyptian historian, best known for his universal history, Taʾrīkh al-duwal wa ’l-mulūk ("History of the Dynasties and Kingdoms"). The work remained unfinished (only the volumes dealing with the years after 1106 were completed) and survives in fragments of the original autograph manuscript, mostly preserved in Vienna. It was not widely esteemed or disseminated among his contemporary and later Muslim historians, but Ibn al-Furat's work is of particular importance for modern scholars due to its high level of detail and the mostly verbatim use of a wide variety of sources, including Christian and Shia authors suspect to mainstream orthodox Sunni historiography. Some of these works survive only through Ibn al-Furat's reuse of them.