Ibn al-Qūṭiyya

Who was Ibn al-Qūṭiyya?

Ibn al-Qūṭiyya, born ‘Muḥammad Ibn ‘Umar Ibn ‘Abd al-Azīz ibn Ibrāhīm ibn ‘Isa ibn Mazāhim, was an Andalusian historian whose chief work, the Ta'rikh iftitah al-Andalus, is one of the earliest Arabic Muslim accounts of the Islamic conquest of Spain. The name "Ibn al-Qūṭiyya" means "the son [i.e. descendant] of the Gothic woman", and the author claims to descend from Wittiza, the last king of the united Visigoths in Spain, through his granddaughter, Sara the Goth, who had traveled to Damascus and married an Arab client of the Caliph Hisham.

Ibn al-Qūṭiyya was born and raised in Seville. His family, known by the surname Abū Bakr, was under the patronage of the Qurayshi tribe, and his father was a judge in Seville and Écija. The Banu Hayyay, also of Seville, were close relatives of his family, also claiming descent from Visigothic royalty. Ibn al-Qūṭiyya's student al-Faraḍī composed a short biographical sketch of his master for his biographical dictionary, preserved in a late medieval manuscript discovered in Tunis in 1887. According to him, Ibn al-Qūṭiyya studied first in Seville, then in Córdoba. Al-Faraḍī calls him the most learned grammarian of the time. He wrote two famous grammars: Book on the Conjugation of Verbs and Book on the Shortened and Extended Alif. His biographer cautions that his histories were written from memory, not following the hadīth and the fiqh, and they lacked original sources, literal truth, and verification. He heard the Kāmil of Muḥammad ibn Yazīd al-Mubarrad from Sa‘īd ibn Qāhir and transmitted it from memory. He died at Córdoba.