A Universal History, and a Very Modern Afterlife

His other large work runs from the creation to the events of his own century in Damascus, and then keeps going, because its last portion treats the signs of the hour and what is to come. Building a history that begins before Adam and ends after the resurrection is a statement about what history is, and the arrangement was not unusual in his time; what makes the book durable is the amount of documentary material preserved in its middle sections on the early Islamic centuries, which historians use whatever they think of the frame.

The afterlife is the striking part. Of all the medieval commentaries on the Quran, his is the one most likely to be found today in an English, Urdu or Indonesian translation, in an abridgement, or on a phone. That is not simply a verdict on quality. Report based exegesis suits a modern readership that wants the text explained without the long grammatical and theological apparatus of the classical commentaries, and it has been promoted energetically by publishing tied to a particular reforming current. The atlas notes both facts together, because the current visibility of a fourteenth century book is a fact about the twentieth century as much as about the fourteenth.