Ahmed Mohammed al-Maqqari

Abu-l-'Abbas Ahmad ibn Mohammed al-Maqqari (or Al-Makkari) (c. 1578–1632) was an Algerian scholar who was born in Tlemcen in 1577 from a prominent intellectual family that traced its origin to the village of Maqqara, near M'sila.

After an early training in Tlemcen, al-Maqqari moved to Fes in Morocco and then to Marrakech, following the court of Ahmad al-Mansur, to whom he dedicated his Rawdat al-As (The garden of Myrtle) about the ulemas of Marrakech and Fes. After al- Mansur's death in 1603, al-Maqqari established himself in Fes, where he was appointed both as mufti and as the imam of the Qarawiyyin mosque by al-Mansour's successor Zidan Abu Maali. In 1617, he left for the East, possibly because of a quarrel with the local ruler, and took his residence in Cairo, where he composed his best known work, Nafh al-Tib.

In 1620 he visited Jerusalem and Damascus, and during the next six years made the pilgrimage five times. In 1628 he was again in Damascus, where he gave a course of lectures on Bukhari's collection of Traditions, spoke much of the glories of Muslim Iberia, and received the impulse to write his work on this subject later. In the same year he returned to Cairo, where he spent a year in writing his history. He was just making preparations to settle definitely in Damascus when he died in 1632.

His greatest work, The Breath of Perfume from the Branch of Green Andalusia and Memorials of its Vizier Lisan ud-Din ibn ul-Khattib, consists of two parts. The first is a compilation from many authors on the description and history of Muslim Iberia; it was published by William Wright, Christoph Krehl, Reinhart Dozy and Gustave Dugat as Analectes sur l'histoire et la littérature des Arabes d'Espagne (1855–1861), and in an abridged English translation by Pascual de Gayangos (1840–1843). The second part is a biography of Ibn al-Khatib. The whole work was published at Bulaq (1863), Cairo (1885) and Beirut (1968).

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