Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti
1753 - 1825
Egyptian historian and scholar.
Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti is best known as the foremost Egyptian Muslim chronicler of Napoléon Bonaparte's invasion and occupation of Egypt from 1798 to 1801. His family was originally from the village of Jabart on the Red Sea coast, but al-Jabarti himself was born in Cairo to a wealthy family whose economic base included iltizams (tax farms) and a waqf (religious endowment). Both he and his father were educated at al-Azhar University.
Al-Jabarti's studies included medicine and arithmetic, but his main scholarly activity was writing histories of Egypt. His principal works were Ajaʾib al-Athar fi al-Tarajim wa al-Akhbar (Wondrous seeds of men and their deeds), Muzhir al-Taqdis bi Dhahab Dawlat al-Faransis (The demonstration of piety in the demise of French society), and Tʾarikh Muddat al-Faransis bi Misr (History of the French presence in Egypt).
There is debate over whether Tʾarikh Muddat alFaransis is an earlier version of Muzhir al-Taqdis. Both are short works dealing only with the period of French occupation. Tʾarikh Muddat al-Faransis appears to be an eyewitness account of the events, probably written in 1798; Muzhir al-Taqdis was probably completed in 1801. Ajaʾib is a longer work covering Egyptian history from 1688 to 1821 in four volumes. There are also questions about the relative dating of the first three volumes of Ajaʾib, which include the events of the French occupation, and Muzhir al-Taqdis. The parts of Ajaʾib relevant to the French occupation are now thought to have been completed in 1805 or 1806, after Muzhir al-Taqdis. The issue of the relative dating of the two works is considered important because Muzhir al-Taqdis is more critical of the French than Ajaʾib, which, if it were indeed written after Muzhir al-Taqdis, suggests that it could have been a "revisionist" work reflecting the real opinions of al-Jabarti, as opposed to "official" versions of the events related in the other works.
Although al-Jabarti is a key figure in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Egyptian history, historians have reevaluated the period itself. In particular, they question the idea that the French invasion marked the definitive onset of modernity in the Middle East. Both historians Peter Gran and Kenneth Cuno argue, from otherwise different perspectives, that the French invasion is best understood as an event in the larger processes of Egyptian history. In the same vein, the nature of al-Jabarti's histories has been reexamined. Jack Crabbs, for example, argues that al-Jabarti was an outstanding, but typical, medieval Egyptian historian who happened to have recorded extraordinary events. In contrast, Gran claims that al-Jabarti's accounts of the French invasion, and his historiography in general, were cultural manifestations of a nascent capitalist transformation already underway before the first European attempts to colonize the region. But aside from such issues, there is general consensus that al-Jabarti's histories were the best account of the French invasion from an Egyptian or Arab perspective, and generally above the standards for accuracy and detail common in late Ottoman historical writing. Al-Jabarti remains one of the principal sources for historians interested in early modern Egypt.
Bibliography
Ayalon, David. "The Historian al-Jabarti and His Background." Bulletin of the Society of Oriental and African Studies 23 (1960): 217 - 249.
Crabbs, Jack A., Jr. The Writing of History in Nineteenth-Century Egypt: A Study in National Transformation. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1984.
Cuno, Kenneth. The Pasha's Peasants: Land, Society, and Economy in Lower Egypt, 1740 - 1858. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Gran, Peter. Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760 - 1840. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.
Jabarti, Abd al-Rahman al-. Napoleon in Egypt: Al-Jabarti'sChronicle of the French Occupation, 1798, translated by Shmuel Moreh. Princeton, NJ: M. Wiener, 1993.
— WALTER ARMBRUST
