Abū Jaʿfar al-Ghāfiqī

Abū Jaʿfar al-Ghāfiqī (uncertain birth and death dates), [1] was an Andalusian Arab botanist, pharmacologist, physician and scholar from Ghafiq near Cordoba in the southern Iberian peninsula called al-Andalus, a region of mixed cultures, religions, and languages. He was responsible for the collating and creating of 'Kitāb fī l-adwiya al-mufrada' (“Book of simple drugs”), a remarkable compendium of some 400 hand-drawn and coloured images of plants and animals, popularly known as the “Herbal of al-Ghafiqi". The Herbal draws on ancient Greek sources like Dioscorides and Galen and more than thirty other works from India and the Hellenistic and Islamic worlds. [2][3][4]

Sir William Osler purchased a manuscript copy of the Herbal in 1912 and it was chosen for reproduction in a modern edition by McGill University - it deals with herbal, mineral, and animal-derived drugs. The edition has a glossary of over 2 000 entries providing synonyms in Greek, Sanskrit, Syriac, Persian, Berber, Old Spanish, Latin, Coptic, and Armenian, underlining the international nature of medicine and pharmacy at the time of its compilation. [5] Herbal and botanical gardens, generally, have always been greatly prized in the Arab world, and the gardens of al-Andalus were no exception, giving Abū Jaʿfar al-Ghāfiqī ample access to specimens for describing and illustrating. The exiled Syrian Abd al-Rahman I created an opulent garden in his palace Al-Munyat al-Rusafa (Arruzafa) in 756 and it was destroyed in 1010 by the Berbers. The garden had been to remind him of his former palace at Al-Rusafa, Syria where he had lived with his grandfather, the caliph Hisham (691–743). [6]

Ferdinand Wüstenfeld (1808-1899) seems to have been the first to suggest (erroneously) that Muhammad ibn Aslam Al-Ghafiqi might have been the father of the more famous Abū Jaʿfar al-Ghāfiqī, who was renowned for his treatise on medicaments. The only scholar known to have cited the Murshid is the Egyptian oculist Âadaqa b. Ibrāhīm al-Shādhilī, who wrote in the second half of the eighth/fourteenth century.

— https://www.academia.edu/12076825/al-Gh%C4%81fiq%C4%AB_Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_b._Qass%C5%ABm_b._Aslam_In_The_Encyclopaedia_of_Islam_3rd_ed._2013_pp._102_103

See also

References
  1. https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/al-ghafiki-SIM_2442?s.num=2&s.f.s2_parent=s.f.book.encyclopaedia-of-islam-2&s.q=al-G%CC%B2h%CC%B2%C4%81fi%E1%B8%B3%C4%AB
  2. https://mqup.tumblr.com/post/101358861104/the-herbal-of-al-gh%C4%81fiq%C4%AB
  3. https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/al-ghafiqi-abu-jafar-COM_27420?s.num=2&s.rows=50
  4. https://www.mcgill.ca/library/branches/osler/ghafiqi
  5. https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/secrets-12th-century-medicine-revealed-herbal-al-ghafiqi-165494
  6. https://www.doaks.org/resources/middle-east-garden-traditions/introduction/andalusian
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