MAQRIZIANA XI AL-MAQRĪZĪ ET AL-ṢAFADĪ: ANALYSE DE LA (RE)CONSTRUCTION D'UN RÉCIT BIOGRAPHIQUE

The various traces of al-Maqrīzī's work that have reached us enable us to analyze his writing process almost as precisely if he were a modern author. Among these traces, the notebook plays a major role. Thanks to it, we know that al-Maqrīzī would summarize a source progressively as he was reading it. The case of al-Ṣafadī's al-Wāfī is particularly edifying. Reading one biography after another, al-Maqrīzī would take note of the data he was interested in according to the use he wanted to make of them: in this particular case, to provide the biographies of the persons whom he mentioned in his opus magnum, the Khiṭaṭ. The selections he made reveal why al-Ṣafadī's biographical dictionary was of interest to him: he wanted to rely on a source which was up-to-date and above all contemporaneous with the facts reported. This concern underlines al-Maqrīzī's probity in this particular case; he tried to exploit the msot trustworthy sources, even though it was often to the disadvantage of these sources: al-Wāfī is never quoted in the Khiṭaṭ nor in any of al-Maqrīzī's other works where, nevertheless, he took advantage of the selected data. Furthermore, the analysis of a single biography permits us to understand how al-Maqrīzī reused the data in the course of time in his various works, how and when these data were reorganized and which additional (unquoted) sources he later utilized.