Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti (1753–1825) (), full name: Abd al-Rahman bin Hasan bin Burhan al-Din al-Jabarti (), often simply known as Al-Jabarti, was a Somali-Egyptian scholar and historian who spent most of his life in Cairo. Biography Little is known of al-Jabarti's life. According to Franz Steiner, he was born in the village of Tell al-Gabarti in the northern Delta province of Beheira, Egypt. Abdulkader Saleh asserts that al-Jabarti was instead born in Cairo. Al-Jabarti was born into a prominent family of ulama with ties to the Egyptian scholarly and political elite. Al-Jabarti's father was Hassan Al-Jabarti, a learned and highly venerated man in Cairo. It is believed that Hassan Al-Jabarti travelled from Zeila to Cairo during the mid-18th century. Al-Jabarti's family was of ethnically Somali background. According to his writings, his name comes from his "seventh-degree grandfather," Abd al-Rahman, who was the earliest member of his family known to him. The older Abd al-Rahman was from the Jabarah (located in the Horn of Africa). Abd al-Rahman visited the Riwaqs of the Jabarti communities in Mecca and Medina before making it back to Egypt, where he became Sheikh of the Riwaq there. Al-Jabarti's father was a Hanafi religious scholar and served as the director of the al-Jabarti residence hall for students at al-Azhar University, a title al-Jabarti inherited following his father's death in 1744. As a result, al-Jabarti was trained as a Sheikh at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Through his family ties, al-Jabarti gained access to prominent scholars al-Muradi and al-Murtada, both of whom influenced his decision to write about Egyptian history. He began keeping a monthly chronicle of local events, from which he compiled his three most famous works. The last and lengthiest of these documents, in Arabic Aja'ib al-athar fi al-tarajim wal-akhbar (عجائب الاَثار في التراجم والاخبار), which is generally known in English simply as Al-Jabarti's History of Egypt, and sometimes as The Marvellous Compositions of Biographies and Events, became a world-famous historical text by virtue of its eyewitness accounts of Napoleon's invasion and Muhammad Ali's seizure of power. The entries from his chronicle dealing with the French expedition and occupation have been excerpted and compiled in English as a separate volume entitled Napoleon in Egypt. He was one of the first Muslims to realise the significance of the wave of modernity that accompanied the French occupation, and the gulf that existed between Western and Islamic knowledge "shocked