Page 12 - Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean (before portuguese)_Neat

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12 ARAB NAVIGATION
on navigation which he called Majid-kitab. Whether this was one of
Ibn Majid’s works we shall never know, but the sailor says that this
work is the John Hamilton kitab of the Arabs, implying rather a
survival of Ibn Majid’s name as a general term for a book of sailing
directions. Again Sir Richard Burton in his First footsteps in East
Africa13 mentions that when he sailed in a native boat from Aden
in 1854, the sailors repeated the Fatiha prayer before venturing into
the open sea, in honour ofcSheikh Majid, the inventor of the
Mariner’s compass. Although Burton says that Sheikh Majid is a
Syrian saint, it is most certainly the same Ibn Majid, the mu'allim,
' who has become a holy man in the sailor’s hagiography. So we see
that Ibn Majid’s reputation lasted for 300 years at least, and there
,1 may still be places where his name is on the lips of sailors. When
Ferrand14 instigated some researches into this problem in Zanzibar
and Mascat in 1913 he could find no trace of the Ibn Majid legend,
although Alan Villiers’ dhow captain on the Zanzibar route in 1939
seems to have heard of him and connected him with the coming of
the Europeans.15
(b) His style and literary genius
Everything else that we know of Ibn Majid comes from his own
pen; he lays himself bare before us in his works. One wonders when
one reads his book whether the calm, calculating person which a
navigator ought to be, lay behind the hotchpotch of navigational
lore of which his works consist and which is so obvious in the
Fmva'id. His style, if it may be called a style, seems to be very much
the unpolished work of a literary amateur. One/nay frequently find
passages dropped quite suddenly before the point is reached, while
the common phrase—now let_us return to the original subject—
shows the innumerable places where he has rambled on down some
completely foreign and dead end track. In spite of this his works
whether poetical or prose have a plan. There is no doubt that the
chapter headings of the Hawiya and the Fawa'id were thought out
before the book was produced, and the plan was adhered to to such
an extent that some chapters fail completely because there was so
little material to put under the relevant head. There is a considerable
amount of planning visible in the Fawa'id for not only does each
- fa’ida have its own plan, i.e. the manazil in order round the heavens,
or the geographical arrangement of the monsoons: even under each
manzil we find three or four sub-sections, i.e. origin of the name, stars
12 London, 1856, pp. 3-4.
14 Instructions nautiques, v. 3, p. 228.
18 Sons of Sindbad, p. 159.
V- K
THE NAVIGATORS AND THEIR WORKS 13
used for measuring at the basin of that manzil, uses of the group of
stars that form the manzil and so on. Thus in spite of the amateurish
way in which Ibn Majid strings his material together, the works show
that he has put quite an amount of successful preliminary sketching
into them. Therefore one can believe he is sincere when he states
that his works are well thought out—the material selectively edited
for conciseness and at the same time comprehensive, written with an
eye to clarity.18 For these words occur throughout the Fawa'id.
“I have done it concisely so that the reader will not be tired by
excessive verbosity17 and I have not left out a thing that will be of
use.”18
Thus Ibn Majid writes on, forever boasting of his prowess as a
writer and a navigator. When he lays down the rules for the perfect
navigator, he leads one to believe that he is that man. Then he states
that the best of all navigators is the navigational writer,19 for although
a man may be a great navigator his experience more or less dies
1, when he dies unless he has written a book which persons can pick
up when he is dead and still learn of his experience. This is the force
which spurs Ibn Majid on in his writing. The fact that his books will
still be there when he is gone is continually in his mind.20 “Thus I
write this here, so that persons may profit from it even after my
death.” Because of this he has Consciously done his best “lest after our
death the book will be lost to posterity”.21 Thus he states, “It is
most fitting if this measurement is the one that is most remembered
of all my works after my death.”22 And of course he excuses himself
stating that if anything is wrong then the blame is on him—living
or dead.23 One of his constant fears, obviously groundless, is that his
work will be plagiarised after his death or even before that and he
likens the inferior scholar who takes a better man’s work for his
own to a thief who usually gets found out eventually.24 He takes
comfort in this that the good scholar will survive in the end. Good
1 work will always proclaim the good man and although there are
many incapable rogues in the navigational treatise business, a good,
honest, and above all, accurate writer like himself will finally
I triumph. There is no doubt that even as he writes there are people
14 f. 3Ir; trans. p. 130. Folio numbers given alone always refer to the text of the
i Fawa'id in MS 2292.
17 f. 88r, 1. 11; trans. p. 267.
18 f. 77v, 1. 6, f. 86v, 1. 8; trans. pp. 239, 263.
18 f. 67r, 1. 13 ff.; trans. p. 215.
20 f. 50v, 11. 17-18; trans. p. 177.
21 f. 27v, 1.4; trans. p. 120.
21 f. 50v, 11. 17-18; trans. p. 177.
23 f. 17r, 1. 16; f. 35v, 1. 5; f. 49r, 11. 9-10; trans. pp. 100, 139, 173.
24 ff. 67r-67v; trans. p. 215.