Al-Bakri, Abu Ubayd Abd Allah ibn Abd al-Aziz

Abd Allah ibn Abd al-Aziz ibn Muhammad ibn Ayyub al-Bakri al-Andalusi, Abu Ubayd, an encyclopaedic scholar from al-Andalus. He is the author of "al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik" on geography and history. The encyclopaedia gives his birth as 432 AH and his death as 487 AH. ¹

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.), signed by H. A. R. Gibb, describes Abu 'Ubayd Abd Allah b. Abd al-'Aziz b. Muhammad b. Ayyub al-Bakri as, with al-Sharif al-Idrisi, the greatest geographer of the Muslim West and a representative of Arab Andalusian erudition. He seems never to have travelled in the East or even North Africa, although he described North Africa minutely. His father, 'Izz al-Dawla 'Abd al-'Aziz, ruled the small principality of Huelva, founded in 403/1012, until in 443/1051 the king of Seville annexed it. Abu 'Ubayd went with his father to Cordova, and the article says that another source has father and son withdrawing to Seville, which it finds not improbable; his father died about 456/1064. ²

He was a pupil of the chronicler Abu Marwan b. Hayyan and other masters, and moved in the court circles of the Banu Sumadih of Almeria. He had written most of his works before the Almoravid intervention in Spain and the deposition of the mulk al-tawa'if. He settled at Cordova, restored under Yusuf b. Tashufin as capital of al-Andalus, and died there in Shawwal 487/October-November 1094 (496 according to al-Dabbi). The article calls him a perfect polymath: a geographer, theologian, philologist and botanist, who also wrote poetry, and whose works Ibn Bashkuwal and Ibn Khayr list. ²

Abu 'Ubayd al-Bakri's works fall into several fields. As a philologist he wrote a critique of Abu 'Ali al-Qali's al-Tanbih 'ala awham Abi 'Ali fi Kitab al-Nawadir, a commentary on al-Qali's Amali (Simt al-La'ali), a commentary on the verses of Abu 'Ubayd al-Qasim b. Sallam's al-Gharib al-musannaf (Fasl al-maqal), and a commentary on Ibn Sallam's collection of proverbs. He also wrote a semi-historical work on the names of the Arab tribes, al-Mutalat wa-l-mukhtalat, which seems lost, and a botanical work, Kitab al-Nabat, which served Ibn 'Abdun in his Umdat al-tabib. ³

His renown rests on his geographical work, which has two books. The Mu'jam ma-sta'jam, published by Wustenfeld, is a list of toponyms mostly in the Arabian peninsula which occur in pre-Islamic poetry and hadith, preceded by an introduction on the ancient geography of Arabia. The Masalik wa-l-mamalik, of which only extensive fragments survive, is a roadbook of itineraries and kingdoms, giving distances between towns, but it also contains political, social and ethnographic history. The article values his accounts of the Idrisids and the Almoravids, and his toponymy of the Maghrib, Ifriqiya and the Bilad al-Sudan. He drew on earlier sources, among them al-Warraq's work on Ifriqiya. Editions of the Maghrib part by de Slane (Algiers, 1857 and 1910) are very outdated. ⁴