Selections from the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain

📖 Public Domain Classic — Islamic Golden Age

Description

A prince flees a massacre across three continents and founds a dynasty on the far edge of the known world. Two centuries later his descendants' most brilliant Khalif is filling a palace library so vast it takes a catalogue of forty-four volumes just to list the titles. A generation after that, the dictator who really runs Cordoba is having the road-dust from his holy wars saved in kerchiefs, to be mixed into his own burial shroud. Selections from the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain follows this arc — rise, splendor, and the first cracks of decline — through four chapters drawn from Ahmed ibn Mohammed Al-Maqqari's sprawling 17th-century history of Muslim Iberia.

Al-Maqqari (c. 1578–1632), writing in Cairo generations after Granada had already fallen, compiled the fullest surviving Arabic record of the roughly 800 years Muslims ruled in Spain, drawing on hundreds of earlier chronicles and poetry collections now lost. The complete work, in Pascual de Gayangos's two-volume Oriental Translation Fund edition, runs past a thousand pages of chronicle, genealogy, and literary anthology; this edition selects the chapters that read as a single continuous story — Abd al-Rahman's founding of the Umayyad Emirate, the golden reign of Al-Hakem II, the rise and death of Al-Mansur, and Al-Maqqari's own reflection on the empire's coming unraveling.

Author & Genre

Author: Ahmed ibn Mohammed Al-Maqqari (c. 1578–1632)
Genre: History / Islamic Golden Age Non-Fiction
Translator: Pascual de Gayangos (1843)

"He collected and kept all the dust which adhered to his garments during his marches to the country of the infidels, or in his battles with them... intending to have it mixed with the perfumes for the embalming of his body."