Writing Egypt wins 2024 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize

We are delighted to announce that Writing Egypt: Al-Maqrizi and his Historical Project has won the 2024 British-Kuwait Friendship Society Prize. Nasser Rabbat's biography offers a complete, probing and layered analysis of the life and work of celebrated Egyptian historian, Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi.

From the prize committee:

'Nasser Rabbat has published a study of the 9th/15th century historian Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi, and his writings, that is unique in the development of pre-modern Egyptian Historiography, and in the wider field of Islamic Historiography more generally.

Much of the monograph that follows traces the tangled evolution of this huge work, which Maqrizi continuously revised and expanded over several decades. Rabbat’s depiction of this process forms the monograph’s core, and is marked by incisive deductions about chronological sequences of topics - and the choices that lay behind them.  While this accomplishment is impressive, it does not constitute the essence of Rabbat’s objective. Rabbat has also produced a compelling critique of the contemporary methodological approach (largely western empiricism) applied to assessing historiographical writing during the medieval period in Egypt and Syria. Rabbat challenges the assumed view that the indigenous tradition was sophisticated with regard to assemblage of data on multifarious subjects, but devoid of an ideological rationale underlying the process.

This monograph represents an unprecedented landmark in the field of Arabic Islamic Historiography.’

About the prize

Since 1998, the British-Kuwait Friendship Society has awarded an annual prize to the best scholarly work in Middle Eastern Studies.

Find out more about this year's prize

About the book

Writing Egypt recounts the life of Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi, Egypt’s greatest historian, analysing his work and assessing its impact then and now. Although al-Maqrizi is recognised as the most influential historian of pre-modern Egypt, he has never received the probing historical treatment warranted by his standing and scholarly output. This book fills that gap. Arranged in three sections, it tells al-Maqrizi’s life story in the first, weaves it with historiographical, textual and methodological analysis of his oeuvre in the second, and reconstructs the afterlife of the author and his work down to the present in the third part.

Find out more about Writing Egypt