One of the few Arabic historians that I know by name is Abulfeda. This evening I thought that I would see what I could find about him online.
A Google search brought up a rather useless Wikipedia article. Once I might have edited it, but these days I know better.
But it seemed to be based on an article in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. This I found online, and it indicated that he wrote two works, a history and a geography. A French translation of the latter was soon at my disposal, thanks to Google Books.
I found already on my hard disk a “Historia ante-Islamica” of Abulfeda. Apparently the work has been published in bits. But I learned of an “Annales Moslemici” by Reiske, in five volumes, from ca. 1800, which covered the rest of the work. This I could not locate, until I searched on Europeana.eu, which is the eurocrats attempt to rival Google Books. It’s so badly designed, however, that it isn’t always obvious that there is material in PDF for download there. But a bit of persistence brought me to pages at a German library with it on, and I am downloading it at the moment. Never know when it might be useful!
I would have added links to the Wikipedia article; but since they would just be deleted by some troll, I don’t see the point.
I did unpack a PDF of Supplement 1 of Brockelmann’s Geschichte, with a view to turning it into a PDF to upload and get a printed copy. But I think I will defer it, as I doubt I shall be looking at Brockelmann in the next few days.
UPDATE: I will add some links here.
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Europeana results for Abulfeda – at BSB
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Geographie d’Aboulfeda, ed. Reinaud, 1840
In addition, doing these searches turned up other interesting material:
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Google books search for Aḥmad ibn ʻAlī Maqrīzī – not the same chap, but some interesting finds.
“Once I might have edited [Wikipedia], but these days I know better.” Exactly; what a shame it got that way, though.
It is, isn’t it? But I think it’s worse than ever. I know that you had a go at sorting out the Mithras article years ago — yet it soon reverted to wilderness. And my attempt, I fear, has actually made matters worse, by teaching the trolls how to make an article look respectable to others.