Abū Jaʿfar al-Ghāfiqī

Abū Jaʿfar al-Ghāfiqī (uncertain birth and death dates),^[1] was a 12th-century 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]

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.^[4][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.^[7]

See also[]

• Medicine in the medieval Islamic world

References[]

External links[]

• Indigenous Bedouin Medicine