Accounts of China and India. Abu Zayd al-Sirafi

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ probably have been more than happy to make use of material amassed over the years by Abū Zayd, the patient and discriminating collector of akhbār.

      4. Lastly—and this is no more than a hunch founded on circumstantial evidence—it might be that al-Masʿūdī himself is that shadowy figure who “commanded” Abū Zayd to check through and supplement Book One, thus providing more rough gems to be mined, cut, polished, and inserted into his own more finely wrought Meadows of Gold.

      THE LITERARY LEGACY

      Al-Masʿūdī was not the only writer to delve into the Accounts’ rich lode of data. Other writers were to draw from it—either directly, via al-Masʿūdī, or via each other—for centuries to come. They include some celebrated names in Arabic geography: Ibn Khurradādhbih, who, as early as the third/ninth century, borrowed from Book One material on the maritime route east; in the fourth/tenth, Ibn al-Faqīh and Ibn Rustah; later on, al-Idrīsī and al-Qazwīnī; and, later still, the ninth/fifteenth-century Ibn al-Wardī.

      For centuries, then, the Accounts was the mother lode of information on the further Orient. There are several reasons. First, after that catastrophic Chinese rebellion in the later third/ninth century, there was little direct contact between the Arab world and China until the time of the cosmopolitan Mongol dynasty, the Yuan, in the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries. In the meantime, concerning the subcontinent of India and the rest of the Indian Ocean world, the only other sources of information were either suspect or, in one case, so abstrusely detailed as to be off-putting.

      At the head of the first category is al-Rāmhurmuzī’s Wonders of India from about the year 390/1000, in which the yarning sailors are finally given their say. In fact, many useful matters of fact do lurk in its picturesque jungles of legend, but a process of fabulation had clearly set in that would reach its climax in the Sindbad tales. Alone in the second category is the work of the highly serious early-fifth/eleventh-century indologist al-Bīrūnī. Faced, however, by chapter headings loaded with Sanskrit terms, such as “An Explanation of the Terms ‘Adhimāsa,’ ‘Ūnarātra,’ and the ‘Ahargaṇas,’”⁴² geographical encyclopedists, such as Yāqūt and al-Qazwīnī, must have scratched their heads.

      In contrast, the material of the Accounts is reliable, valuable, and accessible. For a true successor to those traveling merchants of information, the Arabic reading world would have to wait until Ibn Baṭṭūṭah in the eighth/fourteenth century. As Miquel has said, that curious, objective, and tolerant traveler is their true heir.⁴³

      THE LEGACY ENDURES

      Today, the Accounts is not only a major repository of historical information; it also shows us what endures. Much of the book may be literally exotic, but it is also strangely familiar (or, perhaps, familiarly strange): the irrepressible Indianness of India, with its castes and saddhus and suttees; the industrious orderliness of China, whatever the period and the political complexion, punctuated by paroxysms of revolution. The Accounts reminds us how those ancient civilizations mark time by the longue durée; how, as Jan Morris has said, “a century … [is] an eternity by British standards, a flicker of the eye by Chinese.”⁴⁴

      Perhaps above all, the Accounts shows us a world—at least an Old World—already interconnected. It is composed of meshing economies, in which, even if communications were slower, repercussions of events were no less profound. Because of a rebellion in China, not only does a Tang emperor lose his throne, but the ladies of Baghdad, a 12,000-kilometer journey away, lose their silks,⁴⁵ and the brokers and merchant skippers of equally distant Sīrāf—the men who make the cogs of the economy turn—lose their jobs.⁴⁶

      Shades, or foreshadowings, of subprime-mortgage default in the United States and real-estate agents fleeing distant Dubai.

      A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

      The Arabic of the Accounts is often compressed, especially in Book One. In a translation that aims for clarity and ease of reading, interpolations are needed. Many are of a minor nature, for example, conjunctions (in which Arabic tends to be poor) and clarifications of whom or what a pronoun refers to. Interpolations of greater substance have at times been necessary to help the text make sense. English versions of two short quotations from the Qurʾān are this translator’s own.

      The only other English version of the Accounts was published in London in 1733 as Ancient Accounts of India and China by Two Mohammedan Travellers, Who Went to Those Parts in the Ninth Century; the translator’s name does not appear on the title page. It has been reprinted as recently as 1995, in New Delhi. This version was done, however, not from the Arabic but from a French translation of 1718 by Abbé Eusèbe Renaudot. Sauvaget judged Renaudot’s version to be good for its period though marred by “too many errors in reading and interpretation.”⁴⁷ Despite improvements on the translations of both Renaudot and Reinaud, a new French version published in 1922 by Ferrand was also deemed by Sauvaget to include erroneous readings and interpretations, particularly in the field of geography.⁴⁸ This is, therefore, the first new English translation of the Accounts in nearly three centuries and the first made directly from the Arabic.⁴⁹

      NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

      1 2.15.3.

      2 2.19.1.

      3 Pellat, The Life and Works of Jāḥiẓ, 172–73.

      4 2.19.1.

      5 2.1.1.

      6 Cf. Sauvaget, Relation de la Chine et de lʼInde, xxiv–xxv n. 8.

      7 Sauvaget, Relation, xix and n. 7.

      8 1.3.2.

      9 2.1.1.

      10 2.15.1.

      11 2.1.1.

      12 Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, 1:145.

      13 2.2.1.

      14 2.1.1

      15 2.4.1.

      16 1.10.11.

      17 Al-Ṭabarī, quoted in Mackintosh-Smith, Landfalls, 170.

      18 Quoted in Zhang, “Relations between China and the Arabs in Early Times,” 93.

      19 2.9.1.

      20 Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary, s.v. “Monsoon.”

      21 2.2.1.

      22 On excavations at Sīrāf, see Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times, 140–41.

      23 2.2.1.

      24 2.2.2.

      25 Adūnīs, Al-Thābit wa-l-mutaḥawwil, 4:269 n.12.

      26 For example, «Go about the earth and look at how He [God] originated creation.» Q ʿAnkabūt 29:20.

      27 Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj, 2:228–29.

      28 Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj, 2:299.

      29 2.9.1.

СКАЧАТЬ