Al-Nuwayri

Shihab al-Din Ahmad ibn Abd al-Wahhab al-Nuwayri was born in the year 1279 (677 AH) in or near the town of Akhmim in Upper Egypt, though he took his name from the village of Nuwayra in the Beni Suef region with which his family was associated. He lived during the height of the Bahri Mamluk sultanate, an era in which Egypt, having repelled both the Crusaders and the Mongols, stood as the foremost power of the Islamic world and Cairo flourished as a magnet for scholars, administrators, and craftsmen. Al-Nuwayri belonged to the educated administrative class of this society, and he would become one of the most celebrated encyclopedists in the entire history of Arabic letters, the author of a vast compendium that sought to gather within its pages the sum of useful knowledge available to a cultivated man of his time.

His upbringing and education prepared him for a career that combined scholarship with service to the state. He received a thorough grounding in the religious and linguistic sciences, studying the Quran, Arabic grammar and literature, jurisprudence, and the disciplines of hadith and history. Like many learned men of the Mamluk period, he moved within the orbit of both the scholarly establishment and the administrative bureaucracy, and he acquired the practical competence in finance and management that government service demanded. He came to Cairo, the great capital, and there entered the employ of the Mamluk administration, holding a number of official positions over the course of his career. He served in the financial administration of the state and was at various times entrusted with the management of estates and revenues, including responsibilities connected to the affairs of Syria and Egypt. This combination of bookish learning and hands-on administrative experience gave him both the resources and the perspective from which to undertake his great literary project.

The work upon which al-Nuwayri's enduring fame rests is his immense encyclopedia, Nihayat al-Arab fi Funun al-Adab, a title that may be translated as The Ultimate Ambition in the Branches of Erudition, or The Aim of the Intelligent in the Arts of Letters. He laboured upon this work over many years, drawing upon the rich library resources of Cairo and his own wide reading, and the result was one of the most comprehensive encyclopedias ever produced in the Arabic language. In its printed editions the work extends to more than thirty volumes, an extraordinary monument of compilation that aimed to provide the educated reader and the working secretary with an orderly survey of virtually every subject worth knowing.

Al-Nuwayri organised his great work into five principal parts, a structure that reveals the breadth of his ambition and the order of his mind. The first part is devoted to the heavens and the earth: it treats astronomy and the celestial bodies, meteorology, geography, the divisions of the world, the seas, the mountains, the rivers, and the wonders of the natural environment. The second part concerns man himself: human anatomy and physiology, the faculties and characteristics of human beings, ethics and conduct, and the social organisation of human life, together with extensive material on government, statecraft, and the arts of administration that al-Nuwayri knew so well from his own service. The third part is given over to the animal kingdom, surveying the creatures of land, sea, and air, their natures, habits, and uses, in a manner that makes this section a rich repository of natural history. The fourth part treats plants, trees, fruits, flowers, and the vegetable world, again gathering practical and descriptive knowledge from many sources. The fifth and final part, the largest of all, is a comprehensive history, narrating the story of the world from the creation through the prophets, the pre-Islamic peoples, the life of the Prophet Muhammad, the caliphates of Islam, and the succession of dynasties down to al-Nuwayri's own time, concluding with the events of the early Mamluk period that he witnessed.

The scope of Nihayat al-Arab is breathtaking, for within its compass al-Nuwayri sought to assemble the essential knowledge of cosmology, geography, anatomy, zoology, botany, ethics, administration, and history into a single coherent and accessible whole. He did not claim to be the discoverer of the matters he described; rather, in the great tradition of the Islamic encyclopedists, he saw his task as the faithful collection, arrangement, and clear presentation of knowledge drawn from the entire heritage of Arabic and Islamic scholarship. He quoted and synthesised earlier authorities across every field, and in doing so he preserved a vast quantity of material from works that have since been lost, making his encyclopedia an invaluable source for the recovery of earlier learning. His historical sections in particular are prized by modern scholars, for they transmit detailed accounts of events and dynasties, and his treatment of the natural world preserves the zoological, botanical, and geographical knowledge of his civilisation in systematic form.

The purpose of such an encyclopedia was eminently practical as well as cultural. In the world of the Mamluk chancery and administration, the educated secretary or official was expected to be conversant with an enormous range of subjects, for the documents he composed and the duties he discharged might touch upon any branch of knowledge. A work like Nihayat al-Arab placed at the disposal of such a man a single ordered reference in which he could find, conveniently gathered, the information he might need on the stars or the seasons, the provinces of the realm or the kingdoms of the world, the properties of animals or the uses of plants, the principles of just rule or the precedents of history. Beyond its utility, the encyclopedia embodied a characteristic ideal of medieval Islamic civilisation: the conviction that all knowledge formed a unity, that the cultivated mind should range across every field, and that the diligent gathering and ordering of learning was both a noble service and a meritorious act.

Al-Nuwayri devoted the central energies of his life to this great compilation, working at it alongside his administrative duties and his scholarly studies. The very act of composing so vast a work, copying, comparing, selecting, and arranging an immense body of material into a coherent structure, was a labour of decades and a testament to extraordinary diligence and stamina. He was admired in his own time for his learning and his fine penmanship, and his encyclopedia circulated widely and was copied and consulted for centuries throughout the Islamic world.

He died in Cairo in the year 1333 (733 AH), having completed the work that would carry his name to posterity. Though he lived a relatively short span by some measures, he accomplished within it a feat of compilation that few have equalled. The Mamluk state he served would endure for nearly two more centuries before its fall, but the encyclopedia he composed has outlasted not only that state but most of the works it drew upon, surviving as one of the great storehouses of medieval Arabic knowledge.

The legacy of al-Nuwayri is bound up with the legacy of the encyclopedic tradition itself, of which Nihayat al-Arab stands as one of the supreme examples. For historians, his work is a primary source of the first importance, transmitting the history of the Islamic world and preserving the testimony of earlier authorities now lost. For students of medieval science and natural history, it offers an organised conspectus of the cosmological, zoological, and botanical knowledge of its age. For the historian of culture and ideas, it stands as a magnificent witness to the breadth of learning and the encyclopedic ambition of the Mamluk period. Al-Nuwayri exemplifies the scholar who, rather than seeking originality in narrow innovation, devotes his powers to the comprehensive gathering and faithful transmission of his civilisation's knowledge, and who in so doing performs an enduring service to all who come after. In an age before printing, when knowledge could be lost forever with the disappearance of a single manuscript, the encyclopedist who gathered and preserved was a guardian of civilisation, and al-Nuwayri was among the greatest of these guardians. His monumental work remains, six centuries after his death, a living testament to the intellectual richness of the Islamic world and to the abiding human aspiration to comprehend, order, and preserve the whole of useful knowledge.