A Traveller in Thirteenth-Century Arabia / Ibn al-Mujawir's Tarikh al-Mustabsir

This is the first English translation of the Tarikh al-Mustabsir, written in the early quarter of the thirteenth century by Ibn al-Mujawir. The text is a fascinating account of the western and southern areas of the Arabian Peninsula by a man from the east of the Islamic world, probably from Khurasan in Iran, and provides a unique source for social and economic history, written with a humour and wit otherwise unknown in the writings of medieval Islam. This translation is fully annotated with an introduction, appendices, glossary and full index, and contains maps and illustrations.

Autorentext

G. Rex Smith is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Manchester, UK. He was professor of Arabic there, 1990-97, after teaching also in the universities of Cambridge, 1970-75, and Durham, 1978-89. A large part of his research over the years has been in the field of Arabian history, particularly that of the south of the peninsula, the Yemen. He has published numerous articles on this subject, some of which are collected in Studies in the Medieval History of the Yemen and South Arabia (Variorum, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997). He has also published (in two volumes) The Ayyubids and Early Rasulids in the Yemen, Gibb Memorial Series, London, 1974-78, the first volume of which is the edition of an Arabic chronicle which covers the period of the Ayyubids in the Yemen and the Rasulids down to the year 694/1295. He is the translator and annotator of a volume of The History of al-Tabari. The Conquest of Iran, vol. XIV of the Bibliotheca Persica, Albany NY, 1994. Recently he published A Medieval Administrative and Fiscal Treatise from the Yemen, Journal of Semitic Studies Supplement 20, Oxford, 2006. He has written numerous entries for the Encyclopaedia of Islam (second edition) and has been an editor of the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, Journal of Semitic Studies and New Arabian Studies.

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A Traveller in Thirteenth-Century Arabia / Ibn al-Mujawir's Tarikh al-Mustabsir