A Great Book Read in Good Company

After months of slow travel between the dangerous reefs and sand banks of the Red Sea coast, tacking northwards through narrow channels, sometimes against the current!, along rows of half-sunk islets and rocks, we have come to the end of chapter 12 of Ibn Majid’s Fawa’id, “On the Red Sea”. And so we come to the end of the book, closing a three-year long cycle (around one hundred meetings), tackling head-on every week the challenges posed by a very technical 500-year-old Arabic manuscript. It is worth pausing for a minute to reflect on the book as a whole, and also on the format of our group reading.

The lingering question, almost as an aftertaste, is still about the readership of the book. The Fawa’id is, explicitly, the work of the old age of a veteran sea captain, full of diversions as he brings up literary rarities in the middle of technical discussions, rambling and then coming back to his topic. It is in turn charming, bewildering, puzzling and annoying, but always informative. Now, who would read this among the pilots and the sea folk? One fascinating detail, partly as an answer, is that centuries later we find excerpts of the Fawa’id copied verbatim in very technical seafaring manuals called rahmanaj. These newer manuals are opening new vistas into the evolution and spread of Indian Ocean nautical literature, and we are already working on this “continuation” of the story.

Speaking of readership, isn’t it amazing that so long after its composition we have gathered every week for over three years to jointly decipher and comment every line? Some texts like the Fawa’id are called “classics”—understanding that the label can be applied more or less loosely, and that there are variations of quality among them. They elicit an interest century after century, and more specifically, it is as if they issue a permanent invitation for collegial engagement: “Hey, get some friends together to read me!”, or maybe, more solemnly: “Tolle, lege!”

This perennial convocation of the great books is at the unchanging basis of what was called in medieval Europe the communio or universitas magistrorum, the “society of masters”, those who had been prepared to read and understand the texts. The Latin version of our saying “three’s company,” is in fact tres faciunt collegium, which can be interpreted as “three make a college,” meaning that in the quest for knowledge, you cannot “go it alone”—non solus!.

Like all major institutions, universities undergo change: study methods evolve, governance errs and finance creeps in, and, in short, the flesh is weak. But if you go ahead and find yourself the closest group of at least three who are responding to the appeal of a great book, do know that there, sharing doubts and certainties, and exposing your ignorance and your knowledge around a central text, you will be back at the root, reviving and strengthening the essence of the university. [Juan Acevedo]