Ahmad al-Nasiri al-Salawi (Moroccan historian, 1835–1897)

Ahmad al-Nasiri al-Salawi (1835–1897) was a Moroccan historian and minor Sharifian official. His Kitab al-Istiqsa is the first comprehensive history of Morocco written in the Arabic-speaking Maghrib and printed in the East.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.), article signed E. Lévi-Provençal, describes Abu l-'Abbas Shihab al-Din Ahmad b. Khalid al-Nasiri al-Salawi as a Moroccan historian of the Nasiriyya brotherhood's line, born at Sale on 22 Dhu'l-Hijja 1250/20 April 1835, who died there on 16 Jumada I 1315/13 October 1897. He studied at Sale, and at about forty entered the judicial branch of the Sharifian administration as notary or steward of state lands. He lived at Casablanca from 1875 and twice at Marrakesh in the household's stewardship, later as a customs official at Mazagan, and finally at Tangier and Fez. He ended his life teaching in his native town. ¹

His works include a commentary on the Shamakmakiyya, Zahr al-akman (lithographed at Fez in 1896), a survey of the schisms and heresies of Islam, and a monograph on the Nasiri family and the zawiya of Tamgrut, Tal'at al-mushtari (completed 1881). His major work is the Kitab al-Istiqsa li-akhbar duwal al-Maghrib al-aqsa, which he began as a history of the Marinids and extended to a general history of Morocco. He dedicated it to Mawlay al-Hasan in 1881, and it appeared at Cairo in four volumes in 1894. It was the first Moroccan chronicle that drew on European sources, here the history of Mazagan under the Portuguese and a Spanish description of Morocco. The EI2 article judges him a man of letters and a historian by accident, with an unusual intellectual independence, whose style is lucid and polished. ²