El Occidente islámico en la obra de al-Muqaddasī

In this article we are going to approach the geographical work of al-Muḳaddasī (380/990), Kitāb aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʿrifat al-aqālīm (The best divisions for knowledge of the regions). His geographical conception and his systematic methodology make him one of the best representative figures of the geographical literature of the 10th century. Even though, his work includes the geography of empire controlled by Muslims (mamlaka), my contribution just will focus on the Western Islamic world, of which al-Muḳaddasī offers an interesting point of view, firstly for his oriental origin, and secondly for the sources used (he didn’t travel to al-Andalus, and there are few possibilities that he did it to the Maghreb, but that doesn’t diminish his work). As an intellectual of the genre al-masālik wa-l-mamālik (the paths and kingdoms), he focused on toponymies and principle western routes, which are exhaustively detailed in his work. However, his work as an expert went beyond a part of the physical geographic, so that he focused his interest also in aspects typical of the human geographic. For that reason, his work offers a lot of details about populations of the areas described (habits, food, clothes, religion etc.), providing a testimony which is unique and precise, with a huge value for who is interested in Western Islamic medieval world.