Abd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī (1753–1825 CE) was born and died in Cairo. He was a prominent member of the Islamic religious scholarly class (the ulamāʾ) and witness to both Bonaparte’s invasion and the short-lived French occupation of Egypt (1798–1801). He also experienced the rise to power in Egypt of the Albanian military commander, Mehmet Ali Pasha (1769–1849), who would ultimate declare himself Khedive of Egypt as Ottoman forces reestablished themselves in the years following the negotiated French withdrawal (Fig. 1).
There is much we do not know about al-Jabartī’s family and life; however, by his own account, he grew up in the prosperity of a family that owned three houses in and around Cairo and many male and female slaves. Al-Jabartī reported he was the only one of his father’s forty children to survive past adolescence. Interior view of Cairene home believed to be that of al-Jabartī seated on the left. Watercolor, Pascal Coste
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Murphy, J.H. (2015). al-Jabarti. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_10180-1
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