Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti

The book of "Sulayman al-Halaby Trial and killing of Sari Askar Klieber" by al-Jabarti

Little is known of Al-Jabarti's life. According to Franz Steiner, he was born in the village of Tell al-Gabarti in the northern Delta province of Beheira, Egypt. Abdulkader Saleh asserts that Al-Jabarti was instead born in Cairo.

Al-Jabarti's family was of Somali ancestry. According to his writings, his name comes from his "seventh-degree grandfather," Abd al-Rahman, who was the earliest member of his family known to him. The older Abd al-Rahman was from the Jabarah ( located in the Horn of Africa ). He visited the Riwaqs of the Jabarti communities in Mecca and Medina before making it to Egypt, where he became Sheikh of the Riwaq there and head of the Jabarti community (Muslims from the Horn region).

Al-Jabarti was trained as a Sheikh at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He began keeping a monthly chronicle of local events. This document, which is generally known in English simply as Al-Jabarti's History of Egypt and known in Arabic as Aja'ib al-athar fi al-tarajim wal-akhbar (عجائب الاَثار في التراجم والاخبار), became a world-famous historical text by virtue of its eyewitness accounts of Napoleon's invasion and Muhammad Ali's seizure of power. The entries from his chronicle dealing with the French expedition and occupation have been excerpted and compiled in English as a separate volume entitled Napoleon in Egypt. He was one of the first Arabs to realize the significance of the wave of modernity that accompanied the French occupation, and the gulf that existed between Western and Islamic knowledge "shocked him profoundly".

According to Marsot, at the end of his life, Al-Jabarti chose to be buried in Tell al-Gabarti, the town to which he traced his descent.