Abstract
It has been widely accepted that medieval Muslims produced a massive corpus of geographical literature, much of which has not yet been comprehensively explored (Heinen, “Geographical Investigations under the Guidance of Islam,” 459). In addition to the purely religious factors that contributed to the early growth and subsequent flourishing of medieval Islamic geography, there were unquestionably several other worldly incentives.1 As previously noted, the vigorous policy of the caliphs of mapping their dominions and extending their territories east and west of dar al-islam had important ramifications, as evidenced by the production mainly by the Balkhi school of geographers of the Atlas Islamicus. This designates the body of geographical scholarship dealing with al-masalik (routes) and al-mamalik (kingdoms) and that, in many ways, culminated in numerous works entitled Kitab al-Masalik wa-l-Mamalik (Book of Routes and Kingdoms) and Kitab al-Buldan (Book of Countries). Although focused primarily on the world of Islam, these works “introduced the concept of a country as a geographical unit and enlarged the scope of their science with elements of ‘human geography,’ discussing the languages and races of peoples, their occupations, customs, and religions” (Tolmacheva, “Geography,” 286).2
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Notes
Some scholars coined the phrase “sacred geography,” which principally focused on the determination of the correct orientation toward the sanctuary of the Kaba in Mecca, the proper time judged by Islamic law as indispensable for the performance of the mandatory daily salat (prayer), the mapping of the routes for the hajj, and so on. For more on this topic, see David A. King, World-Maps for Finding the Direction and Distance to Mecca: Innovation and Tradition in Islamic Science (Leiden: Brill, 1999).
See Gerald R. Tibbetts, “The Balkhi School of Geographers,” in The History of Cartography: Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies, vol. 1, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 108–136.
It seems clear, therefore, that classical Greek Ptolemaic ideas in the first instance came to dominate much of the medieval Arab-Islamic taqsim alardh (division of the world) and tasnif al-umam (classification of nations), along with some minor Persian and Hindu influences. Briefly speaking, as shown by Nazmi, some classical Muslim geographers “from the eastern caliphate” (The Muslim Geographical Image of the World, 145) were influenced by the Persian kishwar system dividing the world “into seven circles of equal size” (143). Few others, however, opted for the Indian system of dividing the world “into three squares (instead of circles) which lead out three by three” and corresponded to different nations and countries (145). For more on non-Greek influences on medieval Islamic views of the world, see Adam J. Silverstein, “The Medieval Islamic Worldview: Arabic Geography in Its Historical Context,” in Geography, Ethnography, and Perceptions of the World from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. K. Raaflaub and R. Talbert (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2009), 273–290.
For more on the translation of Orosius into Arabic, see Ann Christys’s chapter “The Arabic Translation of Orosius” in her own book Christians in Al-Andalus, 711–1000 (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2002), 134–157.
As mentioned by several medieval chronicles such as al-Idrissi and al-Himyari, a group of adventurous young cousins are reported to have sailed from Lisbon into the Atlantic Ocean. They were called al-fitya al-mugharrarin, which could be translated as “the young men who were deceived,” but in the context of their presumed journey, some scholars tend to translate the term as “those who were driven to take a dangerous adventure.” There are also reports of an older adventure seemingly undertaken by a sailor by the name of Khashkhash ibn Sa’id of Cordoba, more commonly known as Khashkhash al-Bahri, that is, the sailor. As mentioned by al-Mas’udi based on Andalusian sources, Khashkhash is said to have crossed the Atlantic Ocean around 889 before embarking on what is described as ardh majhula, an unknown land from which he sailed back home with valuable and exotic goods (Nazmi, The Muslim Geographical Image of the World, 209–211). For more on this, see in particular Abbas Hamdani, “An Islamic Background to the Voyages of Discovery,” in The Legacy of Muslim Spain, ed. Salma Jayyusi and Manuela Marín (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 273–306.
The same is true of John Wolff, Religion in History: Conflict, Conversion and Coexistence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 57.
There is heated debate among scholars regarding the king’s historical identity and the location of his kingdom. See Ahmad Nazmi, “The King of Ad-Dīr in Al-Ma’sudi’s Murug ad-dahab,” Studia Arabistyczne i Islamistyczne 2 (1994): 5–11.
See, for example, Pierre Riché, The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993).
One can cite Tawfiq al-Hakim’s ‘Usfur min al-Sharq (Bird from the East) and Suhayl Idriss’s Al-Hayy al-Latini (The Latin Quarter). For a comprehensive study of these two novels and others, see Rasheed el-Enany’s Arab Representations of the Occident: East-West Encounters in Arabic Fiction(London: Routledge, 2006).
See Nazik Saba Yared’s Arab Travellers and Western Civilization (London: Saqi Books, 1996).
See N. Levtzion and J. F. Hopkins, Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
N. Levtzion and Jay Spaulding, Medieval West Africa: Views from Arab Scholars and Merchants (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2003).
See, for example, Sir William Smith’s magisterial A New Classical Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Mythology (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1860), 376;
Adrian Room’s Placenames of the World(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 172
Gary W. McDonogh’s Iberian Worlds (London: Routledge, 2009), 84
Carl Waldman and Catherine Mason’s Encyclopedia of European Peoples, Vol. 1 (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2006), 400.
James T. Monroe’s The Shu ubiyya in al-Andalus: The Risala of Ibn Garcia and Five Refutations(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970)
Göran Larsson’s Ibn García’s Shu ‘ubiyya Letter: Ethnic and Theological Tensions in Medieval al-Andalus (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
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© 2012 Nizar F. Hermes
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Hermes, N.F. (2012). European Barbarity and Civilization in Some Medieval Arabic Geographical Sources: Al-Mas‘Udi and Al-Bakri as Two Case Studies. In: The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137081650_3
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