Biography:Ibn Zafar al Siqilli

Ibn Ẓafar al-Siqillī, miniature of the XII century

Ibn Zafar al Siqilli, (Arabic: ابن ظفر الصقلي), or (Arabic: احجة الدين أبو عبد الله محمد بن أبي محمد بن محمد بن ظفر الصقلي), or Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad Ibn Abī Muḥammad Ibn Ẓafar al-Siqillī al-Makkī al-Mālikī (are among the several variants), was a philosopher, polymath and Arab-Sicilian politician of the Norman period (1104 - 1170), and has come to be known in the West as "Niccolò Machiavelli's Arab Precursor".

Biography

Ibn Ẓafar was said to be physically small and frail. His demonym 'al-Siqillī' indicates he was born in Sicily, but the patronym 'al-Makkī' suggests his family origins were in Mecca, where he is believed to have been raised and educated. Nicknamed 'The Wanderer', the precise chronology of his travels are uncertain. He probably spent his youth in Fatimid Egypt and Mahdia in Tunisia, but left there in 1148 when it fell to the Normans. After a period in Sicily, Ibn Ẓafar first went to Egypt, then to Aleppo in 1146, where he taught at the Madrasa Ibn Abī ‘Aṣrūn under the patronage of Ṣāfīal-Dīn. In 1154 he returned to Sicily under the patronage of Amīr Abū ‘Abd Allāh Ibn Abī al-Qāsim Ibn ‘Alī al-Qurashī, known as Ibn Hajar, a Sicilian Arab noble, who served as a general in the Norman army. Due to the civil unrest of the Muslim population some time later, Ibn Ẓafar left Sicily definitively and took refuge in Hamat, in Syria, where he died in poverty in 1170, or 1172. The geographer Yāqūt al-Rūmī referred to him as a ‘refined philologist’, and both Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī and Ibn Khallikān praised his scholarship and thought.

Literary career

Ibn Ẓafar was said to have authored 32 books

Solwan, or Waters of Comfort

Sulwān al-Muṭā fī Udwān al-Atbā (Arabic: سلوان المطاع في عدوان الأتباع) (Consolation for the Ruler During the Hostility of his Subjects) is his magnum opus. When Niccolò Machiavelli, the famous Florentine, dedicated his treatise, 'The Prince', to Lorenzo di Medici four centuries later, Ibn Ẓafar was almost unknown to the Western world. He remained in relative obscurity even after Michele Amari's Italian translation appeared in 1851. Amari's introduction had included a biographical account of Ibn Ẓafar and his manuscript's history, and Richard Bentley published an English version in 1852. At the beginning of the 20th century another Sicilian and political scientist philosopher, Gaetano Mosca, wrote of the striking parallels between Ibn Ẓafar's treatise and Machiavelli's. Ibn Ẓafar's name is rarely credited as the precursor to its famous successor.

The treatise is a form of Wisdom literature with a long Arabian and Persian tradition, called 'Mirrors for princes', which purported to be handbooks for princes and caliphs offering counsel on the proper use of power, good governance and the conduct of commerce and trade. Ibn Ẓafar dedicated the first edition of 'Sulwan' to an unknown king facing revolt - possibly the ruler of Damascus expelled by Nur Eddin - and the second edition to his patron Abū al-Qāsim (Ibn Hajar).

Other Works

A Biography of Illustrious Men, translated into Italian, English and Turkish.

Bibliography

• Richard Hrair Dekmejian and Adel Fathy Thabit: Machiavelli's Arab Precursor: Ibn Zafar al-Siquilli; British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (2000), 27, 125-137.
• Carl Brockelmann,Geschichte der arabischen Literatur, Vol. 1. Weimar 1898.
• Rachel Arié, Miniatures hispano-musulmanes, Leyden (E. J. Brill) 1969.
• Umberto Rizzitano, Ibn Ẓafar, Abū ‘Abd Allāh in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Vol. IV, p. 970.
• Emeri J. van Donzel, Islamic Desk Reference