Diary of a Hanbali Jurist of the Fifth Century AH: Ibn al-Banna al-Hanbali’s Commentaries on the Events of His Time

This is the oldest private diary discovered in all of human history, written in his own hand by the Baghdad historian Abu Ali Ibn al-Banna al-Hanbali around the middle of the fifth century AH. It was discovered by the great orientalist and eminent historian George Makdisi as a manuscript in the Zahiriyya Library in Damascus; he edited it, introduced it, translated its text into English, and published it in five instalments in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London (BSOAS) between 1956 and 1957. Ibn al-Banna’s diary remained all that time unknown to the Arab reader despite being held in one of the most famous manuscript repositories in the Arab world, and it did not help the diary that the one who edited and published it was one of the most famous orientalists. The Egyptian historian and translator Dr. Ahmed El-Adawy re-collated the text of the diary against its manuscript original, corrected several errors Makdisi made in the course of his edition, and introduced it, opening it with a translation of Makdisi’s introduction to Ibn al-Banna’s diary, and appended an article Makdisi wrote a quarter of a century after publishing the diary, “Remarks on Diaries in Islamic Historical Writing”, to complete the benefit. This work is not separate from Makdisi’s interest in the history of Islamic schools of thought and institutions, which bore fruit in his rich books in these fields: Ibn Aqil, The Rise of Colleges, and The Rise of Humanism. It also meets the needs of readers interested in history and literature alike, as it presents a picture rich in detail of the political, intellectual, social and religious life of Baghdad in the fifth century AH.