From Our Heritage
He was an Arab scholar who lived in Seville. He left us his precious work, “Agriculture” — translated into Spanish in 1802 and into French in 1864 — which raised its author to the scientific summit, and which remains to this day a distinguished agricultural reference.
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Among the Arab scholars the details of whose lives have remained buried is a great scholar who lived in Seville in the second half of the twelfth century: Abu Zakariya Yahya ibn Muhammad ibn Ahmad Ibn al-Awwam al-Ishbili. Ibn Khaldun mentioned him, but did not do him justice, for he had not read Ibn al-Awwam’s book on agriculture. And it is truly regrettable that Ibn al-Awwam’s name occurs nowhere in the writings of Hajji Khalifa and Ibn Khallikan.
Ibn al-Awwam was an Arab to the core and a lover of reading. He was a wide-ranging investigator of the works of the scholars who preceded him in the sciences of botany and agriculture and their branches. After studying attentively the production of his own people, he turned to the works of the Greek and Roman scholars, extending his reading and study of them, and he did not neglect to read what the ancient Indians had written on these subjects. Ibn al-Awwam was distinguished by his keen, penetrating observation and his sound thinking, and he composed the book “Agriculture,” which immortalized his name among scholars. The book is divided into thirty-four chapters, thirty of them on agriculture and four on the raising of livestock. The book remained unknown, or narrow in its circulation, until its translation appeared in Madrid in the Spanish language in 1802; its circulation then increased after its translation into the French language
in 1864. This book aroused the interest of scholars; many of them read it, and it prompted some of them — the critics — to study it, and they aimed the arrows of their criticism at Ibn al-Awwam and at the translator of
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