Living the history of Cairo
A bit of turbulence in the job market can affect people in different ways. Consider the Egyptian scholar Taqiyy al-Din Ahmad ibn ‘Ali al-Maqrizi (1364-1442). In the early 1400s, after about a quarter-century of frustration in seeking short-lived administrative jobs and wealthy patrons in Cairo, al-Maqrizi became fed up for good. He retreated to his house, started writing, and more or less did not stop for 30 years. What resulted is the most expansive corpus of historical writing of...