Kemal ad-Din (aka Ibn al-Adim)

Kemal ad-Din (aka Ibn al-Adim) was born in Aleppo in 1193 CE into a family celebrated for supplying qadis (Islamic judges) to the city over generations David Morray in Meri and Bacharach, 2006). He died in Cairo in 1262 CE, David Morray in Meri and Bacharach (2006) provides the following on his life and works.

Ibn al-‘Adim [aka Kemal ad-Din] was trained in fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and became director of one of Aleppo’s principal Islamic schools, the Madrasah al-Hallawiyya. Successive Ayyubid rulers of Aleppo entrusted him with a number of diplomatic missions. The last of these was in AH 658/1260 CE, in which he went to Egypt to seek help against the Mongols, shortly before they took Aleppo. He died in exile in Cairo two years later.

Ibn al-‘Adim wrote a number of works, not all of which have survived. They include a treatise on handwriting, a thesis on the preparation of perfumes, and an address to a ruler of Aleppo on the birth of his son. But he is best known to modern scholarship for his chronicle of Aleppo and northern Syria, the Zubdat al-halab fi ta’rikh Halab (The Cream of the Milk as Regards the History of Aleppo). This is the principal source for events in the area during the author’s lifetime.

In his own day, however, Ibn al-‘Adim was celebrated for his Bughyat al-talab fi ta’rikh Halab (What Is Desirable in the Pursuit for the History of Aleppo). A characteristic production of the medieval adab (belles-lettres) tradition, the Bughyat al-talab is a biographical dictionary of notable people associated with Aleppo, from remotest antiquity to the compiler’s own times. In addition to factual information, an entry often contains examples of the subject’s verse, or transmission of hadith (Prophetic tradition). The original work, of which only a quarter survives, apparently filled forty volumes containing seventeen thousand pages of twenty lines each, and is believed to have been penned by Ibn al-‘Adim himself during the last two years of his life.