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At the center of the map are Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities of Islam. The north part of the map shows "China and India", and the south part shows "Christian sects and the states of Byzantium". The outer circles represent the seas. The manuscript is a cosmology and aims to present the reader with a systematic overview of the existing knowledge about the world, among Islamic scholars in late 17th century CE.
The drawing and text is by 'Umar bin Muzaffar Ibn al-Wardi. Kharidat al-'Aja'ib wa Faridat al-Ghara'ib. (The Pearl of Wonders and the Uniqueness of Things Strange). Late seventeenth century.
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Abū Ḥafs Zayn al-Dīn ʻUmar ibn al-Muẓaffar Ibn al-Wardī (Arabic: عمر ابن مظفر ابن الوردي), known as Ibn al-Wardi, was an Arab historian AH 691 (1291/1292)-AH 749 (1348/1349), the author of Kharīdat al-ʿAjā'ib wa farīdat al-gha'rāib ("The Pearl of wonders and the Uniqueness of strange things"), a geographical treatise with sections on natural history.[1] He also wrote Tarikh Ibn al-Wardi ("The History by Ibn al-Wardi").
The Kharīdat summed up the geographical knowledge of the Arabic world of the time, referring to climate, terrain, fauna and flora, population, way of living, existing states and their governments in individual regions of the world. The work was accompanied by a coloured world map and a picture of Ka'bah.
Although in the book al-Wardi credits al-Mas'udi, al-Tusi and several other sources, Mohamed Bencheneb claimed it was merely a plagiarism of a book by Egyptian writer Najm ad-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Ḥamdān ibn Shabib al-Ḥanbali (ca. 1332), entitled Jāmi ʿal-Funūn wa-Salwat al-Maḥzūn.[2][1] As for the first chapter of the Kharidat, although it may have well come indirectly through al-Ḥanbali as Bencheneb suggests, it is in fact very nearly a copy from Yaqut's Mu'jam ul-Buldān, including similar phraseology.[3]
The author also speaks about Slavs and their lifestyle and mentions al-Mahdiyya as the residence of the Fatimid dynasty. Therefore, the book is older than the city of Kairo (founded in 969 C. E.).
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