Jean-Charles Ducène, “The Geographical Works of Muḥammad al-Idrīsī (6th AH/12th CE)”

Jean-Charles Ducène
Jean-Charles Ducène defended his Ph.D. thesis on Ibn al-Qāṣṣ’s Kitāb dalā’il al-qibla at the Free University of Brussel in 1996 and has since continued to study medieval Arabic geography and natural sciences. Since 2012, he has been director of studies at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes études in Paris, where his teaching and research are devoted to the editing of medieval Arabic manuscripts. He has published several monographs on the subject, including Africa in al-Idrīsī’s Uns al-muhaǧ (2010) and nearly a hundred articles.

The Geographical Works of Muḥammad al-Idrīsī (6th AH/12th CE)
While al-Idrīsī’s biography and personality remain shrouded in grey areas, his geographical works represent a high point in medieval Arab cartography and geography. In fact, the author composed a universal geography for the Norman king Roger II of Sicily, “The Book of pleasant journeys into faraway lands”. These 70 maps are not there simply to decorate the text, but to show directly a spatial environment that the text would have found difficult to describe. In addition, a few years later, al-Idrīsī renewed the enterprise by writing a small treatise on geography, “The Entertainment of Hearts and Meadows of Contemplation”. The lecture will focus on the unprecedented achievement in terms of the amount of geographical information processed and set down in text.