Abū Shākir ibn al-Rāhib (c. 1205 – c. 1295) was a Coptic polymath and encyclopaedist from the golden age of Christian literature in Arabic.
[2] He served as the finance minister of Egypt under the Ayyūbids and also de facto administrator of the patriarchate of Alexandria towards the end of the long vacancy of 1216–1235.
[2] In 1260, Ibn al-Rāhib was appointed deacon of the famous Hanging Church by Patriarch Athanasius III, whose election he had opposed.
[1] Ibn al-Rāhib wrote on all the topics about which a Copt of his time could know: astronomy, chronology, history, philology, philosophy, theology and hermeneutics.
Although appreciated for his original contributions, he is more valued today for his use and quotation of a very wide variety of sources, classical Greek, patristic and Islamic.