Us vs. Them: Early Modern Nautical Othering

Reading through the initial pages of chapter 4 of the Fawā’id, we came last week across a remarkable passage on Mediterranean/European vs. Indian Ocean/Arabic nautical techniques. The Westerners are in fact called here by Ibn Mājid “the people of the Egyptian abodes”:

…they have the compass, and in it they have lines, and marks for miles, and their rhumbs are only sixteen… We use thirty-two rhumbs… and they are incapable of understanding our level of attainment, whereas we do reach as far as their knowledge goes and we can sail their ships, for the Indian Ocean is connected to the Atlantic Ocean (al-Bahr al-Muhīt), and it has a knowledge recorded in writings and stellar altitude measures…

Leaving aside other technical details for a future occasion, let us focus on these final lines, where we find one striking assertion and one subtly insightful statement.

The first one is striking if we consider that Ibn Mājid is writing this probably in the 1490s, just as the Portuguese started rounding the Cape (Bartolomeu Dias, 1488), and yet he takes as a given the connection of the two oceans. This is no novelty if we remember that al-Birūnī (11th century), already spoke clearly of this connection with al-Bahr al-Muhīt. Literally the Circumambient, or All-Encompassing Sea, this was the most frequent Arabic name for the Atlantic—while still carrying echoes of the archaic notion of a Universal Surrounding body of water, what the Greeks called Okeanos. We wonder anyway, had Ibn Mājid also had news of the Dias expedition?

Sebastian Münster 1554 map

The second statement is this idea that there was a written body of Indian Ocean nautical science, and that it was this, combined with a certain knowledge of astronavigation, which gave Arab sailors the edge over those “Egyptians”. We have by now got used to Ibn Mājid boasting about his own writings, but here it does certainly sound as if he is referring also to a traditional, well known, nautical corpus. Of these possibly lost writings we have, alas, only the faintest traces left in medieval Arabic literature… what a sunken Atlantis of maritime treasures! [JA]

The African Colleagues

A passing commentary by Ibn Mājid last week draws my attention to some aspects of his relation to Africa: “According to the ancients, this mansion (he is referring to Sa‘d al-su‘ūd, mansion 24) is found within the sign of Capricorn, but the people of Zanj (roughly what we know as the Swahili coast) consider that, as of the date of this book, it belongs in Aquarius.”

The intensity and historical importance of the maritime traffic between the west coast of India, the Arabian Peninsula, and the east coast of Africa, has been the subject of much international research, and it has elicited from medieval legends to modern soap operas shared across cultural and national boundaries. This sort of Oceanic triangle, comprising the historical areas of the Arabian Sea and the Sea of Zanj, bears testimony archaeologically, linguistically, religiously, economically and in other domains to perennial cultural exchange. So this is not new, and recent scholarship keeps stretching the historical boundaries of this fascinating record.

A second takeaway from our initial citation is the reference to those Zanji astronomers whom he obviously considered as interlocutors, or who were at least into the details of the overlapping between solar and lunar zodiacs. This amounts to saying they had an interest in both theoretical and practical astronomy, including awareness of precessional shifts. It is an enticing testimony to the collegial relations across the waters, and to the state of astronomical study on the Swahili Coast during the 15th century.

Finally, note the ring of immediacy and adventure when he implies that his book is informed by contemporaneous scientific dialogue between Africa and Arabia, and naturally Persia, Gujarat, Malabar… It makes you wonder to what extent our many new exciting initiatives of Indian Ocean Studies are simply picking up the torch, restarting a tradition of generous exchange which became dormant only a few centuries ago. [JA]