Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Muḥammad

Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Muḥammad was a member of the Kharrubi merchant family which was a part of the Karimi merchant guild engaged in trade with spices, perfumes, sugar, pottery, textiles, and other goods between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods.

He was a younger brother of another businessman, Salan al-din Ahmad (died 1368) who eventually became a wealthy and prominent Karimi merchant. Altough younger, Badr al - Din was obviously more resorceful and he achieved considerable success in trade before his brother do. It is interesting to notice that Badr al-Din seems not to have offered a helping hand to his, in that time, poorer elder brother. This might be an evidence that the Kharrubis, or the Karimi merchants in general, operated on individual bases, and not according to organized system.

Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad also called “the leader of the Kharrūbīs,” was particularly well knownas a “sugar refinery merchant” (tājir fī maṭābikh al-sukkar) in al-Fusṭāṭ. The 1351 government order for the Kharrūbīs to provide sugar might have been dealt with under Badr al-Dīn’s leadership.