Ibn 'Asim, Kitab al-Anwa' wa-l-azmina, al-Qawl fi l-suhur (Tratado sobre los anwa' y los tiempos; Capitulo sobre los meses).

• Author: Varisco, Daniel Martin

One of the more valuable compilations of pre-Islamic and early Islamic meteorological lore in Arabic is the anwa text of the Andalusian scholar Abu Bakr Abd Allah b. Husayn b. Ibrahim b. Husayn b. Asim (d. 403/1013). A unique manuscript copy from A.D. 1104 is preserved in the Ahmet III section of the Topkapi Saray Library in Istanbul and was published in facsimile by Fuat Sezgin in 1985. Nogues, in this important volume, turns his attention to the almanac chapter, which he edits, translates and annotates. As the editor notes, Ibn Asim is a compiler who sifts through a variety of folk astronomical and almanac lore such as is contained in the similar azmina work of Abu Ali al-Marzuqi and the famous tenth-century Calendar of Cordoba (published by Dozy and revised by Pellat in 1961). As a compiler, the author is fluent both in the classical texts describing Arabian Bedouin and local agricultural and environmental conditions in the Andalusia of his day. However, this mixing of information makes the text all the more difficult to understand properly. It will continue to be so until we have a definitive study of the contents of the earliest anwa books on which this text is based.

The bulk of the volume is a valuable commentary both on Ibn Asim's text and the range of almanac lore contained in it. Nogues begins with a discussion of the genre of anwa texts (pp. 19-33). He builds on my earlier analysis of the origin of the anwa system as a mixing at the dawn of Islam of indigenous Arabic star lore with an Indian lunar zodiac. Unfortunately, he has consulted only a draft conference paper published without my knowledge or proofing in the Journal for the History of Arab Science 9 (1990): 69-100, rather than the revised analysis published in Studia Islamica 74 (1991): 5-28. Nogues' proposal that the earliest Arabic variant of the 28 anwa asterisms stems from Yemen is interesting, but difficult to prove. For example, the association of such a calendar of 28 asterisms by Ibn Kunasa (p. 179) with the Bani Shayban of Yemen is assuredly a political rather than an ethnographic statement. The evidence for such a system in the Yemeni Hadramawt (based on Serjeant's work) is quite recent and references in Ibn Majid to these asterisms are far too late to prove such an origin. I tend to doubt Yemen was the point of contact with the Indian lunar zodiac; more probably initial exposure came through the Sassanian context in Iran.

Next follows a discussion of the author...