Edrisi, an Arabian geographer, supposed to be the person mentioned by historians of his nation under the name of Abu Abdallah Mohammed ben Mohammed ben Abdallah ben Edris esh-Sherif, who was a descendant of the Mussulman Edriside princes who reigned at Fez before the Fatimites, born in Ceuta in 1099, died in Sicily about 1180. He studied at Cordova, where he distinguished himself by his knowledge of cosmography, geography, philosophy, medicine, and astrology, and by his skill as a poet. After visiting Constantinople, Asia Minor, Egypt, Morocco, Andalusia, France, and England, he went to Sicily on the invitation of King Roger II. He made for that prince a terrestrial globe of silver, upon which he inscribed in Arabic characters all that he knew of the various countries of the earth. To explain the globe, he compiled from the reports of travellers a treatise on geography. The globe is lost, but a complete manuscript of the geography was discovered in the royal library at Paris in 1829, of which a French translation by Jaubert appeared in 1836-'40. Several portions and abridgments of the work had been published many years before.

Edrisi divides the earth into seven climates or zones, and each of these into eleven regions; and in his descriptions he adheres strictly to his scheme, without considering whether his divisions resemble those which have been traced by natural features or society. His work represents the state of geographical knowledge among the Arabs in the 12th century, and although it contains nearly as many errors as there are in Strabo, it was the source from which the western geographers derived their notions prior to the Portuguese discoveries in the 15th century.