Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti
Abd al-Rahman ibn Hasan al-Jabarti was an Egyptian-Somali Islamic scholar and historian who spent most of his life in Cairo.
Biography
Al-Jabarti may have been born in the village of Tell al-Gabarti in the northern Delta province of Beheira, Egypt. Abdulkader Saleh asserts that al-Jabarti was instead born in Cairo. Al-Jabarti was born into a prominent family of Ulama with ties to the Egyptian scholarly and political elite. Al-Jabarti's father, Hassan ibn Ibrahim, was a learned and highly venerated man in Cairo. It is believed that Hassan al-Jabarti travelled from Zeila to Cairo during the mid-18th century, and was of a Somali ethnic background. According to his writings, his name comes from his "seventh-degree grandfather", Abd al-Rahman, who was the earliest member of his family known to him. The older Abd al-Rahman was from Jabarah.Abd al-Rahman visited the of the Jabarti communities in Mecca and Medina before making it back to Egypt, where he became shaykh of the there. Al-Jabarti's father was a Hanafi religious scholar and served as the director of the al-Jabarti residence hall for students at al-Azhar University, a title al-Jabarti inherited following his father's death in 1774. As a result, al-Jabarti was trained as a Sheikh at the al-Azhar University in Cairo. Through his family ties, al-Jabarti gained access to prominent scholars al-Muradi and al-Murtada, both of whom influenced his decision to write about Egyptian history.He began keeping a monthly chronicle of local events, from which he compiled his three most famous works. The last and lengthiest of these documents, in Arabic, which is generally known in English simply as Al-Jabarti's History of Egypt, and sometimes as The Marvellous Compositions of Biographies and Events, became a world-famous historical text by virtue of its eyewitness accounts of Napoleon's invasion and Muhammad Ali's rise to power. The entries from his chronicle dealing with the French expedition and occupation have been excerpted and compiled in English as a separate volume entitled Napoleon in Egypt. He was one of the first Muslims to realise the significance of the wave of modernity that accompanied the French occupation, and the gulf that existed between Western and Islamic knowledge "shocked him profoundly."
Jabarti maintained a strict, puritanical tone in his reaction to his witnessing of the advanced military, technical sciences and cultural values of the French occupiers. He abhorred the Republican ideas of the French Revolution such as laicism, liberty and equality; insisting on the supremacy of Wahy over European rationalism. Although he had acknowledged the advances made by Europeans in certain fields, al-Jabarti firmly believed in the eventual triumph of Islam over the West and advocated the restoration of Islamic prowess through his works. Expressing a strong revulsion against the French occupiers in his writings, al-Jabarti famously prayed for God to:
"strike their tongues with dumbness... confound their intelligence, and cause their breath to cease"