Al-Jabarti's father was a Hanafi religious scholar and served as the director of the al-Jabarti residence hall for students at al-Azhar University, a title al-Jabarti inherited following his father's death in 1744. As a result, al-Jabarti was trained as a Sheikh at the Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Through his family ties, al-Jabarti gained access to prominent scholars al-Muradi and al-Murtada, both of whom influenced his decision to write about Egyptian history. He began keeping a monthly chronicle of local events, from which he compiled his three most famous works. The last and lengthiest of these documents, in Arabic "Aja'ib al-athar fi al-tarajim wal-akhbar" (عجائب الاَثار في التراجم والاخبار), which is generally known in English simply as "Al-Jabarti's History of Egypt", sometimes as "The Marvelous Compositions of Biographies and Events", and, became a world-famous historical text by virtue of its eyewitness accounts of Napoleon's invasion and Muhammad Ali's seizure of power. The entries from his chronicle dealing with the French expedition and occupation have been excerpted and compiled in English as a separate volume entitled "Napoleon in Egypt". He was one of the first Muslims to realize the significance of the wave of modernity that accompanied the French occupation, and the gulf that existed between Western and Islamic knowledge "shocked him profoundly".