Abu Zakariya and the first chronicle of the Ibadi Maghrib

Written in the twelfth century, Kitab al-Sira gave the scattered Ibadi communities of North Africa a shared past. Its author was a son of Warjlan.

Abu Zakariya Yahya ibn Abi Bakr wrote at a moment of loss. Tahert had fallen, Isedraten was a refuge, and the memory of the imams lived mostly in the mouths of elders. He set out to write it down: who taught whom, who travelled where, what was said in the councils.

The result is less a chronicle of kings than a portrait of a learned community — merchants who were also jurists, women whose questions shaped rulings, students who walked weeks to reach a teacher. Later historians from Jerba to the Mzab built directly on his work.

Copies still circulate in family libraries across the region. In this series we compare three of them, page by page, and ask what each scribe chose to keep.

“He wrote so that those who came after would know the path of those who came before.”