ABSTRACT
Sir Lewis Namier, the prosopographic historian of Hanoverian Britain, once observed that ‘historians imagine the past and remember the future’.1 By this he meant that our own version of history – Whig, Marxist, or whatever it may be – will constantly be rewritten in the light of what direction we perceive our culture and society to be taking. Although Namier intended his aphorism to apply to all historians in all periods, there can be few if any historians to whom it more closely applies than Shaykh Aåmad ibn ‘Alj ibn Zunbul al-Rammhl al-Maåallj al-Shhfi‘j, a man who wrote about the past, but who earned a living by foretelling the future.
