A Planet-Less Nautical Astronomy

From the RUTTER crew conversations logbook, preserved for posterity: We have been wondering at the early modern pilots of the Indian Ocean, who famously used complex combinations of stars to navigate by night—a catalogue of about 150 celestial bodies was in their treatises— but, and here’s the question, without ever even bothering to mention the planets. By this I mean the five known at the time, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The same planets without which Ptolemy’s astronomy would have been reduced to nothing, and the same planets without which astrology would have been unimaginable.

The reason for this absence is obvious, and it is a nice etymological lesson. A planet, as is well known, means in the original Greek a “wanderer”, a “vagabond”. Now, if you are going to depend on guidance through the night and through the vast expanse of the ocean, you cannot rely on something changeable. You need fixed, unchanging points of reference, and this is exactly what was provided by the night sky, those wanderers excepted.

How bright they are, and unflickering! We have just been witnessing in Lisbon the approach and conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, every day, in the sunset sky, very impressive. And yet for all their steady light, they are not good for navigation: one day they are here, next day there, one day going straight, next day retrograding… They are strong, but fickle. The importance that they have in the astrological view of the cosmos is quite indicative of the variable state of the world: matters of the world and we are not ruled by stars, which would make us constant, but by those wandering bright lights.

Photo: Jorge Rodrigues da Silva

The lack of importance that the planets have in navigation is, in turn, quite indicative of the nature of this craft, and of how special is the state of being at sea and being in transit to a destination: there is peril, and there is the urgency to reach a place, and so all the variable concerns of the pilot are subordinate to accomplishing his task, as Ibn Mājid says, “going and returning with the passengers and the cargo safe.” [JA]

Infirmities of Time

As a new Gregorian year sets in, and as we start a new year of Arabic readings, this week’s passage of Ibn Mājid’s Fawā’id could not be more appropriate for a good reflection on the passing of time.

In one of his trademark digressions from the hard technical details of his craft, Ibn Mājid launches into a lengthy poem lamenting the swift passage of time, speaking of lovers in the night, turtledoves, wine and stringed instruments—all the usual imagery of medieval Arabic love poetry—“pierced by dawn and by the muezzin’s voice as if by an arrow.” All this, remember, at the end of a lengthy chapter on sailing seasons, and on the calendrical accuracy and traditional knowledge needed to travel safely across the Indian Ocean. And then comes his reflection after the poem,

“It may be that the monsoon (sailing season) too is afflicted by time with some illness which our minds cannot begin to grasp. Because it is said that every year the season comes later by a quarter of a day of the sphere.”

Layla Visits Majnun in the Palm Grove, page from a 16th-c. manuscript (Los Angeles County Museum of Art).

This ingenious return from the romance of the previous verses to the chapter’s subject matter gives us concrete scientific indications and also a cosmological subtlety.

The scientific indication has to do with the specific solar calendar used by the Arab pilots at the time. It is known that it was a variation of the Yazdgerdi calendar, itself a development of the Zoroastrian calendar, but it is hard to pin down exactly which variant. Here it seems clear that it was a calendar of 365 days without any adjustment for the extra quarter of a day (the tropical year has roughly 365 days and a quarter), and this explains the fact that the seasonal dates were shifting, one day every four years—a known feature of some of the early Persian calendars.

The subtlety has to do with the Arabic word ‘illah, translated here as “illness” and often meaning also a “cause”. Suffice to say that the three semi-vowels central to Arabic writing are called hurūf al-‘ilal, “causal letters” or “letters of infirmity”, corresponding to the Hebrew “mothers of the reading” (imot qeri’ah/matres lectionis)—by being “weak”, like “accidents” of the consonantal fabric, they make articulation possible; they are the efficient causes of articulation.

In this particular case, the infirmity is the ever-uneasy discrepancy between solar days and the solar year (why, oh why can’t the sun return to the equinoctial point in an exact number of days!?). But through this “weakness” in the astronomical fabric, how many changes are set in motion, and how much science has developed!

Ibn Mājid’s point is a sort of poignant physico-lyrical subtlety: the order of the world is full of such little ”cracks”, “weak spots” which are as discreet doors to the forces of causality. They are happy accidents, hotspots for discovery, invention, but also turning points away from every stability, and so unhappy and sad from the point of view of the contented lovers.

As we start a new year, here is to many happy accidents of invention and discovery to our readers and colleagues. Kullu ‘am wa antum bi-khayr! [JA]

If You Are Patient…

Speaking of celestial rhumbs, Ibn Mājid is constantly going back to fine points of astronomical observations, how one star is “fettered” to another and how each one pertains to a rich interplay of positions. “Look at it when it is rising, then what is at the zenith and four fingers to the north at the same level. Then look at it when it is culminating, and check what is level with it and what is setting and rising at the same time…” and so on and so forth to a point of baffling complexity. It was the business of the pilots, who watched through the night and recognised the different configurations, as is encapsulated in the following advice:

If you persevere from its rising to its setting, from the beginning to the end of the night, you will see how all the configurations of its altitude measurements take shape through the sky.

Shapes seen in the sky by more than thirty different civilizations.
Design by Eleanor Lutz.

We had had occasion to comment on this “figurative” view of the stars, including its artisanal aspects and some of its more abstract associations. What is peculiar here is the emphasis on the prolonged observation to get “the full picture”, the direct relation between the tenacity of the practitioner and the access to the whole of the material, as it where.

In a few words we get a vivid and timeless picture of the Indian Ocean pilot’s discipline: watching through the night, patiently, registering the manyfold complexity that made wayfinding possible. I wonder to what extent this applies to the proficiency in other arts and techniques: the relentless attention, watching while everyone else sleeps, absorbing those guiding, principial forms—in the end, this is as good an image as it gets of what “in-formation“ used to mean; not just being exposed to data, but imbibing knowledge through the night with diligent eyes, to find a way. [JA]

Black and White Waters at Sea

One of the abiding question marks as we study the Indian Ocean nautical texts is that practically all their wayfinding lore, all their sophisticated, awe-inspiring system of astronavigation depends on darkness—specifically on the absence of daylight. No wonder that one of the recurrent pieces of advice of Ibn Mājid to aspiring pilots is that “they shall sleep very little at night.” It is as if the astronomical skill of the pilots required them to live by night, because it was by night, in darkness, that they found their guidance and their certainty. One wonders at some reports in European nautical literature, about pilots who habitually slept by day to be awake at night.

Drawing clarity from darkness and coming to life in the dead of night are motives of inversion which are common to other nocturnal professions; they speak of an inversion of normality related to a special kind of knowledge. Noblesse oblige, in the case of the pilots, meant that they could no longer live like ordinary sailors.

Another remarkable inversion of values at sea is the appreciation of black waters mentioned in the Fawā’id. Black waters do not mean stormy weather or anything ominous, but are foam-less waters, while white waters are choppy waters, when it is windy and small peaks of foam take shape on the surface of the sea. Black smooth water means stability, calm winds, and above all, an even ride for the observation of the sky and for better calibrated measures.

In what is a typical experience of reversal (taqallub) as one advances through the degrees of knowledge, down the rabbit-hole, or through the looking-glass, or coming out of the cave of ordinary life, the Arab pilots (the ma‘ālimah, “those who know and teach”), seem to have led lives of subtly shifted values. The night and dark which inspire fear and misgivings to ordinary mortals, and which give shelter to crime and transgression, was their element and was for them a time of discernment and attainment. [JA]

The Greeting Stars

When speaking of “stellar navigation”, “celestial navigation”, or “astronavigation”, the implicit understanding is that of a sophisticated observational system. Long nights, repetitive activities, meticulous recording and so on. But Ibn Majid tries to shows us a different aspect of the relation between the pilot and the stars when he says: “It would be fair to use the following image to speak about me,

The radiance of the stars became so fond of me
That they would ask about me whenever I went out of sight.
When arriving they would say hello to me,
And when departing they would wave goodbye.”

Joniton, fourth son of Noah, the First Astronomer
(World Chronicle, 15th c., J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. 33, fol. 12)

Can we derive any lesson from such a poetic utterance, to further our understanding of early modern technoscience? Perhaps only this, which we had already touched upon when discussing embodied knowledge: the relation between the expert “artist” (harking back to the technical sense of Latin ars) is multilayered and multifaceted, and hard to fathom. It seems clear enough, in any case, that unwavering attention to an object of knowledge, even something as inconceivably distant and alien as the stars—they who know neither joy nor pain of birth and death—brings about an epistemological shift. The cold object is no longer that cold, the relation not so distant… suddenly, one day, that distant star may wink at you.

This is not quite unrelated to the observer effect in physics, playing out in subtle overtones which were accounted for in medieval science but are fundamentally dismissed nowadays. Somewhere between the detached and practical stargazing, and the loving company of the celestial bodies, a different kind of “objectivity” arises. The cosmos is no longer altogether distinct from the observer, but a “wondrous cosmos” in which “all observers, from the farmer to the astronomer to the monk, had something to learn from watching the sky.” [JA]

Nautical Melothesia

Melothesia is not a word you encounter every day at the supermarket, and yet it names an idea that never ceased to accompany civilization until the advent of our modernity. Straight from the Greek μελοθεσία, the “assignment of parts” or the “apportioning of limbs”, it refers to the vital correspondence between the parts of the human body and the divisions of the sky; it is the immemorial macrocosm-microcosm doctrine, and one of the applications of the Emerald Tablet’s famous opening sentence: “As above, so below.” There are famous images about it across cultures, most known to us as one or other kind of “Zodiac Man” image, the homo signorum.

One of the best known depictions of melothesia,
from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, 15th c.

Melothesia was not limited to correspondence of the body with the duodecimal solar zodiac signs. There was also a nakshatra-purusha in Indian tradition, the “Lunar Stations Man”, i.e. based on the lunar zodiac division of 27/28 divisions; and other cultures had analogous correspondences based on different divisions.

27 lunar stations on the body of Vishnu.

Melothesia was generally associated with medicine, martial arts, music… but in early modern Arab navigation we also have a fascinating analogue and a true nautical melothesia based on the division of the horizon in 32 rhumbs. The basic practice, details of which we will be reading about during the coming weeks, is that the ship, instead of the body, is virtually divided in 32 “directions” projected from the compass card, as if the wind rose were projected around the ship’s deck. For example, if we assign the north to the bow, then the stern will correspond to the south. This way, the parts of the vessel are mapped onto the directions, and by focusing on a part of the vessel, a certain destination will be reached.

This strictly practical application of the immemorial macrocosm-microcosm doctrine illustrates the better-known astrological and alchemical doctrines making them more concretely understandable. In fact, it seems to echo the astrological adage: “character is destiny,” which then, put in navigation terms, might be: “The disposition of your rhumbs will determine your destination.” Destiny–Destination, perhaps just one among many pairs of crucial terms of ancient cosmologies which are illuminated by an unbiased study of medieval technoscience. [JA]

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]

Between Heaven and a Vast Place

Just a pause for thought as we prepare to start a new chapter of the Fawā’id. Last week we completed the longest chapter, on the twenty-eight lunar stations (manāzil al-qamar), and now we move on to a chapter on the thirty-two stellar rhumbs (akhnān). We shall soon have occasion to go into more detail regarding the rhumbs, but for now it may be useful to consider the connections between the two topics.

The path of the lunar stations goes roughly along the inclined red line. The 32 stellar rhumbs are laid out on the horizontal of the equator, one rhumb each 11 1/4°.

The system of lunar stations is—schematically—an equal division of the sky. The system of stellar rhumbs is an equal division of the entire circle of the horizon, based—schematically—on the rising points of a set of sixteen stars. In theory, their rising points and their diametrical opposites define the compass points. Interestingly, in the Mediterranean, the same division of thirty-two compass points was “based” on the winds, and there were quite complex names of the winds!

So we have one “vertical”, or at least celestial, positioning system, and one horizontal system. Between them, as if availing himself of the possibilities of this conjunction, is the master pilot, a tiny dot with his vessel in the middle of the ocean: so small and insignificant, and yet, thanks to his knowledge (scientia), in command of the situation, following an invisible path through the deep water. Stay tuned for many more details over the coming weeks, digging into the facets and subtleties of the knowledge and practice of the stellar rhumbs. [JA]

Forms of Knowledge in the Heart

From our reading last week, this is how Ibn Mājid speaks of the purpose of his astronomical descriptions and teachings,

…for the discerning pilot to find his way through the expanse and the compact of the heavenly spheres… to advance to the ultimate degree and thus picture the sciences in his heart; and to comprehend the turning and dimensions of the spheres through the stars as they rise and set.

The original of this curious “picturing the sciences in the heart” is well worth a closer look. It may be said that the Arabic wording, yusawwiru al-‘ulūm fī qalbihi, is medieval epistemology in a nutshell, particularly in relation to technoscientific knowledge. In describing an accomplished pilot and the perfection of his art, this formula has three components: 1–an object, what is acquired or obtained, al-‘ulūm—plural of ‘ilm, knowledge, often translated as “sciences” or “techniques”; 2–a manner of acquisition, or a process, the verb yusawwiru—a root (s-w-r) we had found used for the “shapes” of constellations, and which has to do with forms, and in particular the Platonic ideas/forms/shapes (suwar aflatuniyyah); 3–a recipient or container for the knowledge acquired, qalb—the “heart” as a centre of consciousness sometimes distinct and sometimes overlapping with ‘aql, “intelect” or “mind”.

So, let’s for now leave aside the first component, and let’s unpack the formula by making explicit some of its implicit nuances. First, like those brilliant shapes in the night sky, the Platonic ideas, or objects of real knowledge, had acquired in Arabic a certain tridimensionality; the root s-w-r has to do with sculpture and pottery: the “ideas” were more like bodies of concrete knowledge. Second, their locus was not so much a breath-like, airy subtance like spiritus, ruh, anima, etc., or an abstract ethereal intellectus or mens, but the liquid/solid fixed centre of the body and the seat of vitality, the heart.

I think we might now rephrase and appropriately paraphrase Ibn Mājid’s formula: “the ultimate degree of your craft is when the knowledges acquired take shape like concrete constellations in the life-giving centre of your existence.” It may sound a bit grandiose, but it does express quite well something that takes place in the day-to-day practice of artisans everywhere: embodied knowledge is not just in the muscles and tendons that know the habitual movements, but also deep down in a central locus from where springs (like blood) the existential knowing joy of a work well made. [JA]

Sewing Paterns in the Sky

In the beginning of this journey through Kitāb al-Fawā’id, we dedicated one of our very first posts to the idea of mimesis. We were reading about navigation history in the first fā’idah, and about how Noah’s ark resembled the Big Dipper. Now, nearly two chapters later, this same idea reappears in relation to the 26th and 27th lunar mansions, al-far‘ān.

In ancient Bedouin tradition, the stars of the great square of Pegasus were imagined to be the upper open end of a well bucket, from which water would be poured. Seen in the night sky, its shape resembles a square where two parallel sides—one southern, the other northern—are the two lunar mansions called al-far‘ān.

However, neither Ibn Mājid nor Indian craftsmanship considered the four stars to form a perfect square. In fact, the difference between the lengths of the southern and northern sides was a crucial one, for it was the pattern upon which were cut the leech (al-dāmān) and the luff (al-jūsh) of a ship’s sail. Following Ibn Mājid, in Indian traditional craft, such a proportional resemblance was no coincidence. The cutting of the sails (tafsīl) was taken directly from the relative positions of these stars—that is, from the lines imagined in al-far‘ān or the great square of Pegasus. [IB]

Masters of One Language

Speaking of poetry, Ibn Mājid regaled us last week with a demanding passage in verse, though certainly not technical this time. It was a poem introduced as a “a riddle” (lughz), and purportedly about how nobility is related to elevation—we are still on a mainly astronomical section of the book, you see. It had some of the signature boasting of the author: “My name is like the radiant sun to which you entrust the direction of your way,” and yet it also played on quite a different level.

At the end of the cryptic verses, Ibn Mājid gives a hint and also issues a stern caveat: “This riddle is about that name which can only be understood by him who reads it with morphological knowledge, for it contains a fine point of language on the name Ahmad.” The hint about this name is welcome, because it is certainly not apparent in the text! and it has a double meaning: Ahmad is Ibn Mājid’s first name, but it is also recognised immediately by Muslims as an inner name of the Prophet, based on the same three letters h-m-d, from which derives Muhammad.

Ottoman calligraphy: between the names of God and Muhammad, the name Ahmad takes shape.

The caveat given is precious: it points to the fundamental need for thorough training in one canonical language. A pilot and a sailor of the 15th century could boast of his grammatical subtlety because mastery of a classical language was a given in a normal education.

Perhaps in our days we have reached a nadir of linguistic proficiency in academia, when the question of the need to learn languages other than one’s own is even asked. At all times and everywhere (like still in most of the world today), the rule was to move at ease between languages, because the living contact with ancient sources guaranteed a direct and profound experience of “grammar.” Even today, unlettered peasants in India can recite Vedic verses in Sanskrit, like Arab nomads the Qur’an or any Chinese villager Confucius’ Analects—so the anomaly is ours, and the relevant questions are Eliot’s questions: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” [JA]

Be Practical: Learn Your Poems!

Once again, starting from a minimal astronomical excuse, Ibn Mājid takes us on a major literary digression about Arabic proverbs, including the horrible story of the poor milkmaid—well above the content rating allowed to our younger blog readers… and in any case bringing us again to the serious question of audience: who were these “Commentaries” written for? what for?

It is obvious that if you are a pilot in need of directions and practical nautical references, you won’t have time to read the lengthy excursus fancied by Ibn Mājid. You need straightforward data, concrete information to arrive safely to your harbour. In that case, what you need is to read Ibn Mājid’s poems.

In an interesting reversal of our contemporary views, this early nautical literature, or at least Ibn Mājid as its preeminent representative, used verse as the preferred medium for strictly technical contents. If you wanted to use metaphors and all the panoply of belletristic effects, and to ramble on in stories and anecdotes, then write prose. If, on the contrary, you wanted to convey highly technical and indeed vitally precise information, then write poems!

Still in our days, some old pilots on the shores of the Red Sea and the Gulf do remember their nautical verses for this or that orientation detail. It is a striking survival of a medieval and ancient tradition of “artisanal poetry”, of which the famous pre-Christian example is Aratus’ astronomical Phaenomena. It is also a testimony to the discreet relation between “music” in a broad sense and scientific and technological endeavours.

Einstein and Planck at the piano.

We can picture the old sea dogs, retired at home after a lifetime of sailing, and now enjoying the crazy stories told by Ibn Mājid. They had all their music of science and skill inside their minds, and now they could sit back and enjoy the Fawā’id. [JA]

Razor’s Edge Precision in Transmision

We are so used to having international standard measures, printing machinery, and recording devices, that we lose sight of how many practical complications did arise when they did not exist. If you have a navigation instrument, which makes the difference between landfall and shipwreck, or the recipe for a medicine, which becomes deadly poison in an overdose, how do you ensure a fail-safe transmission of the necessary knowledge? The answer is simple: you only rely on direct transmission, “by word of mouth,” viva voce. Learning by the eye and by the hand has no substitute in practical arts. Nonetheless, those who know are driven to write ever-imperfect, intrinsecally flawed, or simply hopeful and well-meaning instructions for later generations.

In the context of Indian Ocean navigation, as mentioned last week, we know that it was not simply about an instrument or a set of instruments, but that a sophisticated system of combined and counterchecked observations came into play with the methods transmitted from pilot to pilot—also, symbolically, “from father to son,” as we had found earlier in Ibn Mājid. Last week we found in the Fawā’id a passing detail on the accurate usage of the altitude measuring instrument, the khashbah or “piece of wood” called kamāl in some specialised literature.

“When positioning the wood to make your measure, there must be a thread’s width between the wood and the star you are measuring, and also a thread, fine as a knife’s edge, between the wood and the horizon.”

Immediately after that, Ibn Majid dedicates a few lines to explaining the “intellectual” (‘aqlī) nature of early nautical science, which comes from “the time of the prophets.” The astrolabe comes up as a token of those times, and its invention is attributed to Lāb, son of Idrīs, the archaic and enigmatic prophet, originator of the crafts and identified with Enoch and with Hermes Trismegistus. Ibn Mājid dares not criticise this prophetic knowledge, but the import of his text is clear, and partly explicit: a person needs to have arrived safely ashore many times, and to have faced disaster, before engaging in any pompous discourse about nautical matters. Caveat nauta!

Shapes and Letters in the Sky

The sixth lunar station brought with it a mention of an early classic by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi (d.986), the Book on the Shapes of Stars (Kitāb suwar al-kawākib), a harmonization between Ptolemaic and Arab lore, adding to the Greek heritage, and describing in detail forty-eight asterisms. The word sūrah (sing. of suwar) is commonly used to refer to a constellation: a shape, an image in the sky. It is also one of the common words used to translate the Platonic forms or ideas, the suwar aflātūniyyah. There is in this shared term more than a hint at the fundamental cognitive status of those shapes in the sky: it is a visual/aesthetic equivalent of their having a name by which we know them.

In late antiquity, constellations were also called stoicheia, the Greek word which meant at once “letters” and “elements”, and thus the zodiac was, accordingly, a circle of twelve celestial letters. In the picture above we can see Taurus in an illustration of al-Sufi’s work. The shape of the Bull may not be there when we look at the night sky, but the stars are articulated in a particular way to make it visible, to realise it. In the picture below, a sample from digital font design, we can see how letters are articulated along and around “control points”, to reveal the shapes we are intimately familiar with.

Iconology of the sky, whereby asterisms are readable as letters, conveyors of logos; and iconography of the alphabet, whereby letters are contemplated as images, objects of beauty. Inseparable mysteries of mimesis and language, of representation and meaning, and at the heart of both, the essence of craft (ars) and every technique: articulation—that oh-so-simple joining of the dots. [JA]

The Spherical Wisdom of the Turner

As we plough on, degree by degree, through the details of the lunar mansions, which means coming to terms with the subtleties related to the intersection of synodic and tropical moon cycles, Ibn Mājid throws us yet another unexpected glimpse into a comprehensive cosmological vision underpinning the science of navigation—as every other medieval artisanship: “Understand this wisdom, only comparable to what is effected by the one who makes the spheres turn” (dawwār al-adwār).

All the rotating precision which makes orientation possible is thus devolved to its ultimate cause, the prime mover who, like a turner or a potter (a traditional Biblical image), keeps giving shape to the universe through the motion of a cosmic lathe—or revolving in his divine mind the archetypal ideas.

Astronomicum Caesareum, 16th century

It is little wonder that the ups and downs of sublunary existence are under the sway of a wheel, Fortune’s, which at times is like a tornado, and at times an immovable mover like the Ka‘bah (one of whose epithets is, precisely, dawwār). Same idea in India with the King of the World, the chakravartin, “through whom the wheel is moving” or “he who controls by means of a wheel.”

The Arabic divine name of al-Dawwār is quite uncommon in Islamic sources, but it’s all about the tornator—tornado and turner at once—qui tornavit coelum et terram, et sphaerica solis et lunae cunctarumque corpora stellarum torno suo, “who with his lathe turns heaven and earth, and the sphaeric bodies of sun, moon and all other stars”—or more concisely and familiarly: amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle. [JA]

Do You Have What it Takes?

What does it take to be an Arab pilot in the fifteenth century? According to Ibn Mājid’s second Fā’idah, a great deal. It is not enough to master the astronomical and geographical knowledge needed to plan and to make a voyage in the Indian Ocean. Before all that, a pilot should be a person of great character. Learned and accepted among the people, he “should know patience from slowness, distinguish between haste and movement… moderate the words in his speech; be just, righteous and harming no one.” Otherwise —if he fails to meet such values— he is not a pilot in principle.

Such praise for a good character is not an innovation of Ibn Mājid. In Arabic literature on navigation, it is sometimes found linked to the pilots’ responsibility for maintaining a safe voyage. Writing in the tenth century, Buzurg ibn Shahriyār tells the story of a great oceanic storm and how the pilots were even then bound by oaths to preserve the well-being of his ship: “we pilots live with its peace and die with its ruin.”

Man overboard!
British Library Ms. IO Islamic 843, Folio 42v

Following the second Fā’idah, the secret to meet such responsibilities is the combination of two factors: mastery of technical knowledge and possession of a great character. Holding such a combination, a pilot would be prepared to face the challenges posed by oceanic voyages. Thus —Ibn Mājid suddenly concludes—, if one is in possession of a great character, then he should begin to learn the twenty-eight Mansions of the Moon (manāzil). And so, we move to the third Fā’idah! [IB]

Nautical Silsilah

One, two, three, four… following directly from our latest post, and in an amazing diachronic echo, our latest reading sessions brought us to the passage in the Fawā’id where Ibn Mājid speaks of his genealogy, his chain (silsilah) of succession of nautical masters, and of how he saw it —the resemblance to al-Maqdisī’s passage is uncanny— written on a rutter (rahmānaj) handed from father to son, and dated AH 530 (about AD 1135). Last time we were left with a gap of about 500 years between al-Maqdisī and Ibn Mājid, and now we seem to have a teasing glimpse of intermediary links in the transmission.

Ibn Mājid keeps a fine balance between criticism and praise of earlier pilots, and he has a striking awareness of two things. First, the value of his knowledge, a “technoscience” properly, variously mentioned as ‘ilm, knowledge, fann, art, ikhtirā‘ah, invention, tajribah, experimentation, and qualified as muṣaḥḥaḥah mujarrabah, authenticated by experience. Second, the unbroken continuity (istimrārīyah) in the transmission of his experiential knowledge, encapsulated in his catchy sentence: nihāyat al-mutaqaddim bidāyat al-muta’akhir “the end point of the ancestors is the starting point of the successors.”

This principle is found in earlier books of Islamic jurisprudence, as a crucial guarantee in the dialectics between preservation and innovation, between circumspect veneration and daring creativity. And the very title of our book is at play here: every chapter is just a fā’idah (singular of fawā’id), an accrual, something added to a previous treasure, almost like a dividend, welcome as a benefit, and yet entirely depending on the existence of the previously accumulated riches. This is also, it will be noted, perfecly in tune with Ibn Mājid’s insistence on referring to himself, humbly and proudly, as “the fourth of three.”

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Please note that our Wednesday reading sessions are now online, and we welcome new readers (check the details here!). [JA]

Noachian Musings

The opening chapter of Ibn Mājid’s Fawā’id starts right at the beginning of navigation, explaining that “the first one to ride the sea, and the first one to deal systematically with its concerns (rattaba asbābahu) and the first one to craft a ship” was Noah. This is perfectly in tune with the Abrahamic view of history, finding echoes in the textual traditions of Judaism and Christianity.

What is not so common and I have kept pondering after our first reading session (and while we contemplate moving our meetings to the cyberspace) is the relation between the stars of Ursa Major and the parts of the ship.

According to this very ancient and fundamental idea, master craftsmen on earth are always imitating a heavenly model. This is what is called mimesis in Greek, a word of subtly metaphysical reach, of ritual liturgical meaning, and quite simply the reason why “imitation is the best way to be original.”

“Noah builds the Ark,” from a 13th century English Psalter at St John’s College, Cambridge.

From another angle, this correspondence between the ship design and the constellations bespeaks yet another aspect of mimesis: since number comes directly from the observation of the stars (Plato, Epinomis), and given that artistic (meaning here also technical) design is in practice based on number, it will only be normal that the design of the prototype of all ships is patterned after the order of Heaven.

16th century Persian miniature (from Wikimedia Commons).

Noah has particular rights to our attention these days, since he must rank somewhere there first among the patron saints and precursors of quarantine: he spent forty days and forty nights on a floating zoo, with bleak prospects, without internet, but, we can surmise, with a trusting heart. Let us keep Noah afloat in our minds! [JA]