Ibn al-Khatib

Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib (born 16 November 1313 in Loja, near Granada; died 1374 in Fez) was one of the last great intellectuals of Muslim Spain — a historian, poet, physician, and statesman whose career tracked the fortunes of the Nasrid emirate of Granada. His honorific "Dhu al-Wizaratayn" ("holder of the two vizierates," meaning he combined the offices of the pen and the sword) reflects how far he rose. After his father and brother were killed at the Battle of Río Salado (1340), he entered the chancery and, succeeding his mentor Ibn al-Jayyab, became vizier and chief secretary under the emirs Yusuf I and Muhammad V.

Court intrigue cut both ways. Twice he was driven into exile in the Marinid Maghrib (North Africa): first around 1360-1362, when he settled at Salé and met the historian Ibn Khaldun, and again from 1371, residing at Ceuta, Tlemcen, and Fez. He left over seventy works, including histories of Granada and a treatise that, unusually for its time, argued plague spread by contagion.

In 1374 he was tried at Fez for "zandaqa" (heresy) — charges, reported sources say, bound up with rivalries in Granada and with the chief judge al-Nubahi's condemnation of his philosophical and Sufi writings. He was strangled in prison; tradition holds his body was burned and buried at the Bab al-Mahruq gate. Whether the charges were sincere or political remains debated by historians.