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]

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]

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!

Names of Knowing

Wrapping up the chapter on the Pleiades, speaking of their fame and importance, Ibn Mājid reports a remarkable couple of verses which he calls “the best I have ever heard on this matter”:

We are the Pleiades and Orion, we are Arcturus, and Spica and Betelgeuse,
While you are the contemptible stars, seen in the sky and yet unknown.

It is certainy striking that some of the brightest stars in the sky speak and boast about their status, but let us focus instead on the underlying epistemological subtlety.

What appears to make the lesser stars unknown, and perhaps even unknowable (lā tu‘lam), is their lack of name; the Pleiades and the others boast because they have proper names. In fact, even today most stars do not have proper names, and are simply called by a Greek letter and their constellation, e.g. Alpha Centauri. We can ask ourselves, what difference does it make in the way we know them?

In our times, the greatest example of a nomenclature enabling knowledge is perhaps Linnaeus’ binomial system, which in a way was a systematic and comprehensive baptismal rite, in the footsteps of Adam who named things in Paradise: it is just a human trait, and this is why some have spoken of man as homo nominator. Linnaeus himself quoted a remarkable legal maxim:

Nomina si nescis perit cognitio rerum.
If you ignore the names, the knowledge of things perishes.

The Animal Kingdom, 
from Linnaeus’ 1735 Systema Naturae.

Arabic ‘ilm (as in tu‘lam above), Greek episteme, Latin cognitio—names of knowledge; names of a knowledge that depends on names. But as craftsmen and mystics show through the ages, there is another “tacit” knowledge, the trade secrets closer to taste, saber, sapere, dhawq, and more related to the senses and movement in general: an embodied skill proper to art and ecstasy, like Greek gnosis and Arabic ma‘rifa. To a certain extent, the two can thrive without each other, but the burning longing is always there, among scientists, technicians, artists and mystics, for the realization of knowledge, when understanding is embodied and the secrets are illuminated. [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]

The Magic Circle

Being didactic is a notable trait of Ibn Mājid’s style. These are not cold, detached manuals. Instead, you find throughout his works series of imperatives exhorting the “seeker”, the “questioner”: “understand and know, strive and realize your knowledge,” because “the cases and causes of the sea are many.”

Now, the first thing on the list is “the actual knowledge” of “the magic circle of the rhumbs and mansions (mandal al-akhnān wa-al-manāzil).”

When Ibn Mājid elaborates on the details of the relation between the thirty-two rhumbs and the twenty-eight lunar mansions, on how to lay them upon the circle of the compass in order to plot your course, the immediate and unexpected analogy coming to mind is that of the Far Eastern luopan. This geomantic compass, or Feng Shui compass, is an outright “magic circle” where a central magnetic needle is surrounded by the concentric sequences of signs in spheres of knowledge. “Ponder and ask for advice, and wake the night and be resolute.” Every time, the navigator is virtually at the centre of the universe to perform his task. [JA]

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]

The Missing Lions

This week we were led to wonder about the earliest Arab nautical texts. That Ibn Mājid was not the first author is evident, for he himself mentions three earlier authors famously known as the “three lions of the sea.” Were they the first to write about navigation? How far back does this tradition go?

We have been looking at Aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʿrifat al-aqālīm (The Best Division for Acquaintance with the Lands), by al-Maqdisī (=al-Muqaddasī). According to this 10th century geographer, there are only two seas in the polity of Islam: the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. It is remarkable that the Red Sea, instead of being perceived as a separate entity, is considered part of a unity with the North Indian Ocean. This is in perfect continuity with the Ancient Greek notion of the “Red Sea” (Eruthre Thalassa), practically from Suez to at least the west coast of India.

This 11th century map shows the two seas (south is up!):
the Mediterranean on the right and the “Indian Ocean” on the left.

Even more interesting for our research, al-Maqdisī speaks with admiration of the seamen he met: captains, navigators and merchants, “… and I saw they have notebooks (dafātir) from which they learn, and on which they rely and act.” In other words, al-Maqdisī alerts us as clearly as possible to the existence of a widespread nautical literature, already in the 10th century. From then to the earliest texts known today (15th century), we have five centuries of lost navigational texts! We wonder about the physical format of those notebooks, their resilience, their destinies… and we keep on the lookout, hopeful for bibliographical surprises. [IB]