Posted at Oct 17/2007 04:50PM:
Karl Su: Al-Muqaddasi was a notable early Islamic geographer, who penned the Ahsan at-Taqasim fi Ma`rifat il-Aqalim (The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions).

Islamic geography was a continuation of the Greek and Roman traditions that were lost in Christian Europe, and paticularly useful for the increasing number of Muslims who had to make the Haj from the far corners of the Islamic empire, or alignment of the qblas.

His works and others. while not entirely historical/objective, certainly can be useful in developing an idea of site names, economics, political contexts and even details of buildings- particularly so because they form an emic typology.

Posted at Dec 10/2007 08:52AM:
ian: One of his most importnat features is that despite his reliance on the owrk of his predecessors what he brings to geography is actual ethnographic experiences of having been to at least most of the places he describes. In this way he is attempting to be far more scientific and systematic in his approach, hence the knids of typologies that he offers. It is this penchant for classification that makes him such a favorite of arhcaeologists and other contemporary scholars.