Hasan Taj al-Din

Who is Hasan Taj al-Din?

Hasan Taj al-Din was a Maldivian qadi, or chief Islamic judge, who compiled the Ta'rikh, the principal Arabic-language chronicle of Maldivian royal history, before his death in 1727 (1139 AH). His chronicle traced Maldivian history from the islands' traditional conversion to Islam in the twelfth century onward, deliberately situating the Maldives within the wider narrative of Islamic history reaching back to the early caliphs, while using episodes from the past to offer moral instruction to the sultans of his own day. The work was continued after him by his nephew Muhammad Muhibb al-Din and later by his grandson Ibrahim Siraj al-Din, extending the chronicle across several generations of the same scholarly family. As a qadi, Hasan Taj al-Din was also personally entangled in the factional court politics of his era, and modern historians note that his portrayal of events was shaped by his own political and religious allegiances. Despite this bias, or perhaps because it makes those allegiances visible, the Ta'rikh remains one of the most important surviving primary sources for the political and religious history of the Maldives and the wider Indian Ocean world in the early modern period.

Sources: De Gruyter Brill, "History, piety and factional politics in the Arabic chronicle of the Maldives: Ḥasan Tāj al-Dīn's Ta'rīkh and its continuations", Asiatische Studien / Études Asiatiques (2020) · University of St Andrews Research Repository, deposit of the same study