Ibn al-Khatib
1313 CE–1374 CE · Granada
Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib (born 16 November 1313 in Loja, near Granada; died 1374 in Fez) was one of the last great intellectuals of Muslim Spain — a historian, poet, physician, and statesman whose career tracked the fortunes of the Nasrid emirate of Granada. His honorific "Dhu al-Wizaratayn" ("holder of the two vizierates," meaning he combined the offices of the pen and the sword) reflects how far he rose. After his father and brother were killed at the Battle of Río Salado (1340), he entered the chancery and, succeeding his mentor Ibn al-Jayyab, became vizier and chief secretary under the emirs Yusuf I and Muhammad V.
Court intrigue cut both ways. Twice he was driven into exile in the Marinid Maghrib (North Africa): first around 1360-1362, when he settled at Salé and met the historian Ibn Khaldun, and again from 1371, residing at Ceuta, Tlemcen, and Fez. He left over seventy works, including histories of Granada and a treatise that, unusually for its time, argued plague spread by contagion.
In 1374 he was tried at Fez for "zandaqa" (heresy) — charges, reported sources say, bound up with rivalries in Granada and with the chief judge al-Nubahi's condemnation of his philosophical and Sufi writings. He was strangled in prison; tradition holds his body was burned and buried at the Bab al-Mahruq gate. Whether the charges were sincere or political remains debated by historians.
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GranadaגרנדהAl-Andalus, Spain
What they did here
His family was at the Nasrid court from his youth; he was educated in Granada and rose through the chancery, becoming vizier and chief secretary under the emirs Yusuf I and Muhammad V. Some of his verse is inscribed in the Alhambra. Start year is approximate; his prominence is attested from the 1340s-1350s.
About Granada
Granada is a city in Andalusia, southern Spain, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. It became a major city of al-Andalus in the 11th century as capital of the Zirid taifa kingdom, where the Jewish statesman and poet Samuel ibn Naghrillah served as grand vizier; a massacre of the city's Jews followed in 1066. From the 13th century Granada was capital of the Nasrid emirate, the last Muslim-ruled state in Iberia, whose rulers built the Alhambra and whose court attracted Muslim scholars. The Catholic Monarchs took the city in 1492, and it became Christian over the 16th century; the Carmelite John of the Cross was prior of a monastery there and wrote major works in Granada.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Ibn al-Khatib’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
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