Accounts of China and India. Abu Zayd al-Sirafi

has said, “a century … [is] an eternity by British standards, a flicker of the eye by Chinese.”⁴⁴

      Perhaps above all, the Accounts shows us a world—at least an Old World—already interconnected. It is composed of meshing economies, in which, even if communications were slower, repercussions of events were no less profound. Because of a rebellion in China, not only does a Tang emperor lose his throne, but the ladies of Baghdad, a 12,000-kilometer journey away, lose their silks,⁴⁵ and the brokers and merchant skippers of equally distant Sīrāf—the men who make the cogs of the economy turn—lose their jobs.⁴⁶

      Shades, or foreshadowings, of subprime-mortgage default in the United States and real-estate agents fleeing distant Dubai.

      A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

      The Arabic of the Accounts is often compressed, especially in Book One. In a translation that aims for clarity and ease of reading, interpolations are needed. Many are of a minor nature, for example, conjunctions (in which Arabic tends to be poor) and clarifications of whom or what a pronoun refers to. Interpolations of greater substance have at times been necessary to help the text make sense. English versions of two short quotations from the Qurʾān are this translator’s own.

      The only other English version of the Accounts was published in London in 1733 as Ancient Accounts of India and China by Two Mohammedan Travellers, Who Went to Those Parts in the Ninth Century; the translator’s name does not appear on the title page. It has been reprinted as recently as 1995, in New Delhi. This version was done, however, not from the Arabic but from a French translation of 1718 by Abbé Eusèbe Renaudot. Sauvaget judged Renaudot’s version to be good for its period though marred by “too many errors in reading and interpretation.”⁴⁷ Despite improvements on the translations of both Renaudot and Reinaud, a new French version published in 1922 by Ferrand was also deemed by Sauvaget to include erroneous readings and interpretations, particularly in the field of geography.⁴⁸ This is, therefore, the first new English translation of the Accounts in nearly three centuries and the first made directly from the Arabic.⁴⁹

      NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

      1 2.15.3.

      2 2.19.1.

      3 Pellat, The Life and Works of Jāḥiẓ, 172–73.

      4 2.19.1.

      5 2.1.1.

      6 Cf. Sauvaget, Relation de la Chine et de lʼInde, xxiv–xxv n. 8.

      7 Sauvaget, Relation, xix and n. 7.

      8 1.3.2.

      9 2.1.1.

      10 2.15.1.

      11 2.1.1.

      12 Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar, 1:145.

      13 2.2.1.

      14 2.1.1

      15 2.4.1.

      16 1.10.11.

      17 Al-Ṭabarī, quoted in Mackintosh-Smith, Landfalls, 170.

      18 Quoted in Zhang, “Relations between China and the Arabs in Early Times,” 93.

      19 2.9.1.

      20 Yule and Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary, s.v. “Monsoon.”

      21 2.2.1.

      22 On excavations at Sīrāf, see Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times, 140–41.

      23 2.2.1.

      24 2.2.2.

      25 Adūnīs, Al-Thābit wa-l-mutaḥawwil, 4:269 n.12.

      26 For example, «Go about the earth and look at how He [God] originated creation.» Q ʿAnkabūt 29:20.

      27 Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj, 2:228–29.

      28 Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj, 2:299.

      29 2.9.1.

      30 Cf. Sauvaget, Relation, xxi.

      31 E.g., do Indian kings pay their troops (1.7.2), or not (1.10.8)?

      32 2.10.2.

      33 Miquel (Géographie humaine du monde musulman, 1:121) used a different metaphor, of Islam as the watermark running through the pages of the book, “l’Islam y est toujours vu en filigrane.” That does not seem to give it enough prominence.

      34 2.9.6.

      35 2.4.3.

      36 2.4.2.

      37 Moseley, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 107–8.

      38 Miquel, Géographie, 1:121–22 n. 4.

      39 Occasionally, there are additional details of substance in al-Masʿūdīʼs renderings of information in the Accounts, such as the term balānjarī applied to the suicidal courtiers in India (Murūj, 1:211), and the number of Turkic troops fighting against Huang Chao, said to be 400,000 (Murūj, 1:139).

      40 Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj, 1:210–11. Cf. 2.10.1.

      41 Al-Masʿūdī, Murūj, 1:7–8.

      42 Al-Bīrūnī, Albêrûnîʼs India, 424.

      43 Miquel, Géographie, 1:126.

      44 Morris, Hong Kong, 230.

      45 2.2.1.

      46 2.2.3.

      47 Sauvaget, Relation, xvii.

      48 Sauvaget, Relation, xvii.

      49 Some of the material on India also appears in English in the first volume of H. M. Elliot and J. Dowson’s The History of India as Told by its Own Historians, pp. 3–11.

      ACCOUNTS OF CHINA AND INDIA

      ACCOUNTS OF CHINA AND INDIA: THE FIRST BOOK

       1.1.1 The Sea of Lārawī ¹

      … like a sail.² It often raises its head above the water, and then you can see what an enormous thing it is. It also often blows water from its mouth, and the water spouts up like a great lighthouse.³ When the sea is calm and the fish shoal together, it gathers them in with its tail then opens its mouth, and the fish can be seen in its gullet, sinking down into its depths as if into a well.⁴ The ships that sail this sea are wary of it, and at night the crews bang wooden clappers like those used by the Christians, for fear that one of them will blunder into their ship and capsize it.⁵

       1.1.2

      In this sea there is also a kind of fish that reaches twenty cubits in length.⁶ We caught one of these and split open its belly. Inside it was another fish of the same genus. We took this second fish out then split its belly open too—and there inside it was yet another fish of the same type! All of them were alive and flapping about, and they all resembled each other in form. This great fish is called the wāl. Huge though it is, there is another fish called the lashak, about a cubit in length, and if the wāl fish becomes so excessively greedy as to endanger the survival of the other fish in the sea, this small lashak fish is sent to overcome it. This it does by entering the inner ear of the wāl and not letting go until