Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri (1279-1333) was an Egyptian scholar and civil servant in the Mamluk Empire. His nine-thousand-page, thirty-three-volume encyclopedia,
The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, is one of the most important medieval collections of Arabic literature and Islamic thought.
Elias Muhanna (editor/translator) is the Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and the author of
The World in a Book: Al-Nuwayri and the Islamic Encyclopedic Tradition. A scholar of classical Arabic literature and Islamic intellectual history, he has written for
The New York Times,
The New Yorker,
The Nation, and
Foreign Policy, and he runs the blog
Qifa Nabki, about the contemporary Middle East. Born in Lebanon, he now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.