A Traveller in Thirteenth-Century Arabia: Ibn al-Mujawir's Tarikh al-Mustabsir.
Author | Kruk, Remke |
Position | Book review |
A Traveller in Thirteenth-Century Arabia: Ibn al-Mujawir's Tarikh al-Mustabsir. Edited and translated by G. REX SMITH. The Hakluyt Society, Third Series, vol. 19. Aldershot, U.K.: ASHGATE, 2008. Pp. xix + 341, illus. [pounds sterling]50.
Ibn al-Mujawir's travel account about his journeys in Southwestern Arabia is one of the most curious and intriguing specimens of Arabic travel literature. Nothing is known about the author, apart from what can be deduced from the text itself; he focuses on matters that rarely receive attention in other medieval sources; and he has a predilection for the bizarre, often giving the impression that he does not take his own information very seriously. Yet his work is one of the most valuable sources that we have on the place names, commerce, and economy of medieval Yemen and adjacent regions.
Rex Smith's translation of Ibn al-Mujawir's travelogue, the first into English, is based on Oscar Lofgren's edition of 1951-54, which was based on the Istanbul and the Leiden manuscripts of the Tarikh al-Mustabsir. These are the only manuscripts known of the text. As he notes in the preface, Smith was allowed to make use of the copious notes that the late R. B. Serjeant, his Ph.D. supervisor and a renowned South Arabia specialist (d. 1993), had over the years made on the text. The transition now published is, as be says, the result of twenty years of "chewing the cud and operating on all stomachs" about the interpretation of this fascinating but often baffling text. Anyone who is familiar with the text will know what he is talking about, and we can only be full of admiration about what has been achieved here. Not that this is Smith's first publication on the Tarikh al-Mustabsir--his various articles on specific aspects of the text have already given the public a taste of what the text has to offer.
Ibn al-Mujawir's account of his travels in Southwestern and South Arabia was written in the beginning of the thirteenth century C.E. As Smith's introduction tells us, information about his person can only be gleaned from the account itself. Ample proof is provided there that he was familiar with the eastern parts of the Islamic world, and he mentions that Khurasan was his home. Therefore, Arabic was very likely not his mother tongue, and the fact that he regularly quotes Persian poetry suggests, as Smith notes, that he was a native speaker of Persian. While this does indeed seem likely, we should not forget that it was not all...
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