He is the Moroccan scholar Al-Sharif Al-Idrisi, and his name is Abu Abdullah Muhammad bin Muhammad Ibn Abdullah bin Idris Al-Saqli, one of the great Arab Muslim geographers. He was born in the city of Ceuta in northern Morocco in 493 Hijri (1100) and died in 560 Hijri (1166). He received his education in Andalusian Cordoba and is, therefore, sometimes called al-Qurtubi. He toured the country, reaching Egypt and the Hijaz in the east, Portugal, France, and England in the west, and Constantinople in the north. Al-Idrisi lived in Sicily for a period of time and stayed as a guest of its king, Roger II, who lavished money on him to complete many pioneering works, then returned to his country, Ceuta, to spend the rest of his life there.
Al-Idrisi was famous for his writings on geography, botany, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and literature. Al-Idrisi accomplished many scientific works, perhaps the most important of which was his book “Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fi Intikrah al-Afaq,” which he wrote in Sicily at the request of King Roger II. This author gained great fame because of the encyclopedic information it contained about many places in the East and West that were mentioned by the ancients, adding to it field information he saw and monitored by Al-Idrisi in his travels and travels that penetrated the horizons. This author includes more than 70 maps of the world and specific regions of it. This book remained a reference for European and non-European scholars for more than three hundred years until the 16th century, which is why this book, as indicated by the French Encyclopedia, is the greatest geographical document in the Middle Ages. This book was attributed to the Europeans by Roger, and that is why it is called (Al-Kitab Al-Rajari). The book has been translated into several languages, including Latin, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English.

Al-Idrisi presented other books, but they did not gain the fame of the previous book. Among these books:
1- The “demarcation board,” which is a geographical design of the globe on which Al-Idrisi placed the locations of the countries, verifying the locations of many of them so that his map would come out in an image close to the correct position in which it is now, even if the position of the south is at the top of the map. Al-Idrisi worked to perpetuate his map, so he designed it on a huge circle of pure silver weighing about 400 pounds, on which the seven regions, with their countries, rivers, seas, mountains, roads, and the distances separating them, were engraved. The painting is considered the basis of the book: “The Walk of Hardships in Threatening Horizons,” which explains the map. The map is more accurate than the maps of his predecessors, such as Ptolemy. Al-Idrisi identified the seven regions according to the degrees of latitude, so he made the first region between degrees (0) and degrees (23) north of the equator, and the next five regions extend to six degrees each, and the seventh region extends between degrees 54-63 and beyond. The last degree is uninhabited and covered with snow. The German scientist Miller produced Al-Idrisi's map in color printing for the first time in 1931.
2- “The Compiler of the Characteristics of Plant Sundries and Varieties of Individual Types of Trees, Fruits, Herbs, Flowers, Animals, and Minerals, and Interpretation of Their Names in Syriac, Greek, Terracotta, and Berber.”
3- A book: “Rawd Al-Anas wa Nuzhat Al-Nafs” or “The Book of Kingdoms and Paths.”
4- Book: “Anas the Curriculum and Rawd Al-Faraj.” It is sometimes called “Rawd Al-Farag and Nuzhat Al-Marj.”