Ibn Marzuq

Ibn Marzuq (full name: Shams al-Din Abu ʿAbd Allah Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr al-ʿAjisi al-Tilimsani, also known as al-Khatib (the Preacher) or al-Jadd (the Grandfather) or al-Rais (the Leader); c. 1310–1379) was a prominent 14th-century faqīh from Tlemcen (modern Algeria).

Biography

He was born around 1310 in Tlemcen and travelled in his late teens to the orient, where he studied with a group of around 250 scholars for fifteen years. He returned to the Maghreb as a faqih, or expert in Islamic law. The Marinid sultan, Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Othman, appointed Ibn Marzuq to the position of preacher at the al-ʿUbbad mosque in his native Tlemcen.

Ibn Marzuq subsequently became the sultan's advisor, teacher and secretary and was given an important diplomatic role, negotiating with rulers in Algeria and Spain, where he concluded a peace treaty with the King of Castile, Alphonse XI. On the death of Abu al-Hasan, he returned to Tlemcen, where he engaged in intrigue against the new Marinid sultan Abu Inan Faris, before fleeing to Spain, where he was offered the position of khatib (sermon-giver) at the great mosque al-Hamra in Granada. A Spanish translation was published in 1977 by the Instituto Hispano-Arabe de Cultura, as El Musnad: Hechos memorables de Abu l-Hasan, sultan de los benimerines.

He also wrote a kitâb al-imâma, a definition of the Islamic caliphate and discussion of political and governmental principles, as well as an extremely voluminous fahrasa (list of teachers) which, unusually, includes a number of learned women.

His work Miftah al-Wusul was recently translated into English by Professor Mohammad S. Alrahawan and was published in 2020 by Peter Lang/ International Academic Publishers.