Michele Amari

Michele Amari
Michele Amari
Born	(1806-07-07)7 July 1806 Palermo
Died	16 July 1889(1889-07-16) (aged 83) Florence
Occupation(s)	Sicilian historian and orientalist

Michele Amari (7 July 1806 – 16 July 1889) was a Sicilian patriot, historian and orientalist.

Biography

Born at Palermo son of Ferdinando and Giulia Venturelli, he devoted a great part of his life to the history of Sicily. Amari was also an Orientalist, who investigated the true character of the Sicilian Vespers. He also served as the Italy's first minister of public education.

Amari became an important figure during the Risorgimento. A liberal republican and carbonarist, who after the fall of Joachim Murat supported Sicilian secession. He became a link between Prime Minister Camillo Benso di Cavour and influential Sicilians, helping to convince them to support Italian unification. Amari did so expecting Cavour to grant Sicily some regional autonomy after unification.

He died at Florence in 1889.

Literary Works

Amari's historical works focus on Medieval Sicilian history, including extensive works on the period of Muslim control. He viewed the arrival of the Muslims as a positive development in that it freed Sicily from Byzantine civilization that for nearly three centuries had reduced the island, through excessive taxation, to a poor and under productive Island. And linked much of modern cultural traditions and elements of Sicilian society to the Islamic rule of Sicily.

His efforts have earned him acknowledgment as one of 19th century Europe's premier translators of Medieval Arabic writings. His Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia (History of the Muslims of Sicily, 1854) has been translated into many languages, including Arabic by a group of Egyptian scholars in 2004.

His translation from an Arabic manuscript of a mirror for princes text, including a biography of its author, the medieval Sicilian Arab Ibn Zafar al Siqilli, was published in 1851. Richard Bentley translated Amari's Italian translation of this 12th century work by the so-called " Machiavelli precursor" into English and published it under the title Solwan, or Waters of Comfort in 1852.

Oriental Studies

Considered the founder of the modern organization of Oriental studies in Italy, he was a scholar of Muslim Sicily and Sicilian Vespers, and author of various literary works of international importance.

Rationalist and positivist, he was endowed with a very strong ethical breath, all inspired by secularism and "civil virtues", completely insensitive to religious tensions.

His magisterium has been used by all historians of Islam of later age and, in Italy, Leone Caetani, Francesco Gabrieli, Umberto Rizzitano and Paolo Minganti.

The Professor Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, of the University of Leipzig, in publishing two supplements to the Arab-Sicula Library, called Michele Amari "The regenerator of Orientalist studies among his compatriots."

Sources

• Carteggio di Michele Amari, by Michele Amari (Roux Frassati, 1896)
• Cavour and Garibaldi, 1860: A Study in Political Conflict, by Denis Mack Smith (Cambridge University Press, 1954)
• Diari e appunti autobiografici inediti, by Michele Amari (Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1981)
• "Le idee politiche di Michele Amari", by Bianca Marcolongo in Documenti per servire alla storia di Sicilia, ed. Andrea Borruso, Rosa D'Angelo, and Rosa Scaglione Guccione (Societa Siciliana per la Storia Patria, 1991)
• Modern Italy: A Political History, by Denis Mack Smith (Yale University, 1997)

Works

• La Guerra del Vespro Siciliano (1876) vol.1; History of the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1850) vol.2
• Solwan; Or, Waters of Comfort by Ibn Zafer, (1852); vol.1; vol.2
• Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia, (1854); vol.1; vol.2
• Biblioteca Arabo-sicula (1880) vol.1,vol.2
• Un Periodo delle Istorie Siciliane del Secolo 13 (1842) [1]

External links

• A short biography (in Italian)
• Works by Michele Amari at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Michele Amari at the Internet Archive