Accounts of China and India. Abu Zayd al-Sirafi

lives of Shaivite saddhus and devadasi prostitutes could all be too disorienting for readers back in Basra or Baghdad. But there are always cultural “navigation aids.” Inevitably, some of them do not work for us, the readers of more than a millennium later: who, for example, were the Kanīfiyyah and the Jalīdiyyah, to whom rival Indian gangs are compared?³² Perhaps the Sharks and the Jets of fourth/tenth-century Iraq; the precise reference seems to be lost. But there is also the enduring cultural compass of Islam and Arabdom.³³ It orients the traveler to what he sees, how he sees it, and how he reports it, and the reader to how he receives the report. It works on many levels, from the way the Chinese urinate (standing, not squatting) and why,³⁴ to interpretations of Buddhist iconography.³⁵ This constant guiding presence not only enables the traveler–traders—merchants in musk and silk and porcelain, but also in knowledge—to make cultural translations for their immediate audience back home. For us, their audience removed in time, it points not just to where those travelers got to but also to where they came from.

      It also may explain a few cases in which the informants’ vision is apparently distorted. An example is that of Ibn Wahb’s audience with the Tang emperor. Assuming the meeting did in fact take place—and Abū Zayd, that scholar of discrimination and discernment, accepted that it did—would the emperor, in his palace at the heart of the Middle Kingdom, the navel of the civilized earth, really have viewed Baghdad, the barbarian Bangda, as the center of the world and the Abbasid caliph as above him in the international order of precedence?³⁶ Perhaps he (or his interpreter) was being exceedingly diplomatic. Or perhaps Ibn Wahb was doing what later, European, writers were to do, notably the author of the travels of Sir John Mandeville, in that dubious knight’s even more dubious audience with the Mamluk sultan:³⁷ using the figure of the wise infidel king to make a point about one’s own society.

      There was certainly a point to be made in the third/ninth century—that the still young Arab-Islamic civilization of the West had not only joined the club of Asian cultures but had also outstripped its ancient fellow members in global importance. If this is indeed the subtext of that strange imperial pronouncement, then it is made more subtly and more eloquently, not by emperors but by unknown merchants, on every page of this book: for it is a book that tells us, by reflex, so to speak, as much about the energy and enterprise of Islam in that age as it does about China and India.

      ABŪ ZAYD AND AL-MASʿŪDĪ

      Al-Masʿūdī, the Herodotus of the Arabs, as he is often and aptly called, was quoted above on Abū Zayd and on the meaning of akhbār. Those quotations are from his main surviving work, Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems. But there is more to be said on the relationship between the two authors and their works, for significant portions of the material in Accounts of China and India appear also in the pages of al-Masʿūdī. Who got what from whom?

      There is, of course, no question about matter taken from Book One, finished some eighty years before al-Masʿūdī was working on his Meadows of Gold. Regarding information appearing in our Book Two and in Meadows of Gold, however, the picture is more complicated. Commentators have homed in on the meeting between the two authors, which they have placed in the years soon after Abū Zaydʼs move to Basra in 303/915–16; the meeting, in Miquel’s analysis, enabled Abū Zayd to pass on to al-Masʿūdī the information contained in the full and finished Accounts.³⁸ This looks at first like a reasonable assumption, and it would, if correct, give a rough date of the early 310s/920s for the compilation of our Book Two. Certainly as regards the flow of information, it appears to be from Abū Zayd to al-Masʿūdī: the latter’s language is the more polished, his organization of the material much better planned; Abū Zayd’s work is the raw original from which he has drawn.³⁹ The only snag is that in the case of one khabar, the macabre story of an Indian who cuts pieces off his own liver before burning himself to death, al-Masʿūdī states that he himself witnessed the scene in India in 304/916–17.⁴⁰ If we take al-Masʿūdīʼs bona fides as read, and if we accept that the details of the stor y are so bizarre and precise that it is unlikely that another witness would independently have given the story to Abū Zayd, then it seems possible that al-Masʿūdī himself is one of the anonymous informants of the Accounts.

      To those two pending questions, concerning the date of Book Two and the identity of its patron or instigator, there are no firm answers to be drawn from all this, but there are some comments to be made:

      1. The meeting between al-Masʿūdī and Abū Zayd, whenever it happened, does not provide a fixed terminal date for the Accounts. The final version of the book might have been put together at any time up until 332/943–44, the year in which al-Masʿūdī was writing his Meadows of Gold.

      2. There seems to have been a two-way exchange of information between the two men at their face-to-face meeting. Ultimately, however, by far the greater flow of material was from Abū Zayd to al-Masʿūdī.

      3. Al-Masʿūdī was a busy writer: Meadows of Gold, which runs to over 1,500 pages of Arabic in the edition I have, is the smallest of three compendious works that he wrote (the other two seem to be lost),⁴¹ quite apart from at least one other singlevolume book. He would 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