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22 ARAB NAVIGATION THE NAVIGATORS AND THEIR WORKS 23
Finally there are the three poems found in a manuscript in Lenin theoretically navigational point of view, it deals specifically with
grad and translated into Russian and edited by L. Shumovsky. the area west of India, and is obviously a more up-to-date and
These are: ^ condensed Hawiya—perhaps never finished. Also dated, we have the
38. al-Sofaliya, a long rajaz poem of 805 verses (ff. 83r-96r) on two specialist works in the poems numbered 3 and 4 dated 1485
the route from India to Sofala etc. It is the latest of all the works, and 1488 respectively. These show that even while contemplating
bearing a date of 920/1514 which must certainly have been after the larger works Ibn Majid was still turning out poems of a limited
the death of Ibn Majid. (The latest date mentioned in the poem aspect. By 1487-8 when he produced no. 4 on the Qibla, Ibn Majid
itself is 906/1500.) It is the most interesting of the works from a was about to begin, if not already writing, both the Dhahabiya .
European standpoint for it deals with the coming of the Portuguese and the Fawa'id for he states that he was writing these in 1488.
to India and their relations with the rulers of India and their effects Apart from this the Dhahabiya is not dated, but the Fawa'id was
on the Arab trade. finished in 1490. Immediately before the Dhahabiya in date we must
39. al-MaTaqiya another rajaz poem dealing with the route to the place the duet in r nos. 14 and 15 and nos. 9 and 12 which are all
Far East. It is undated and consists of 273 verses (ff. 97v-104r). poems of great weight and all quoted by each other or by the
40. al-Ta'iya a qa$\da in t dealing with the routes in the Red Sea. Dhahabiya. No. 21 is also mentioned in the Dhahabiya. There is no
It consists of 54 verses (ff. 104v-105v) and is undated. doubt that Ibn Majid was very proud of the Dhahabiya; it is probably
So we see this astonishing output of material written over the the greatest of his navigational poems, being not only written at
whole period of Ibn Majid’s working life. There are poems on life the time of his greatest reputation as an active navigator (he must
in general as well as navigational poems on general and special have been in his early sixties) but also being the crowning achieve
subjects. It is clear that the poems on general navigation were ment of his poetical efforts. Whether he ever wrote the commentary
regarded by Ibn Majid as his really great works and the others were to it which he often mentions is doubtful. The Fawa'id on the other
only produced in between times. hand is the only attempt of Ibn Majid to write a long prose work.
It is important, for apart from his early Hawiya it is the only work
(d) The Dating of Ibn Majid's works which aims at completeness. Presumably for this great effort—the
The dating of all the poems cannot be done but we have enough complete record of his long experience as a navigator—Ibn Majid
material at hand to see how this literary output was produced over decided to use prose and the style of this work shows clearly how
the years. The earliest of the dated poems is the Hawiya written in unused he was to the prose medium. He seems to have intended
1462, a great effort giving a complete encyclopaedia of navigational this work to be not only the greatest achievement in navigational
science in rajazpoetry. Ferrand has pointed out that this is the literature so far produced but also his own greatest literary achieve
work of a navigator well versed in his science and Ibn Majid must ment. In composing it, he packed it with all the navigational material
have had at least twenty years experience at sea to have felt con that he could muster and padded it out with all the miscellaneous
fident to produce this work.- This would have made him nearly literary matter that he could possibly introduce. Ibn Majid’s earlier
forty when this was written. Ibn Majid himself regards this as a work works do not contain anything like this amount of padding. In the
of his inexperienced youth. There is no doubt that he must have poems the padding is usually limited to rhyming or filling out the
written many poems before he attempted the Hawiya and many of lines for purposes of metre, although occasionally in these too he
the small works mentioned above may have been written before it. loses track of the subject. The important difference between this
However, no other dated work appears for twenty years and it is work and the Hawiya is that the latter was presumably written as a
possible that most of the extant undated works came from the mnemonic for navigators—whereas the Fawa'id written in prose
period 1460-80; especially those poems thought worthy to be quoted was most likely to be an attempt at something more lasting. Meant \
in the Fawd'id e.g. nos. 7, 11, 13, 17, perhaps also 18 and the prose basically for navigators as a kind of encyclopaedia of navigation, it
pieces of 19. It is possible that this was-the period when the non- seems likely that Ibn Majid had at the back of his mind that he was
navigational poems were written. The next dated work is the Sab'iya, writing yet another of those “Great Books” (al-kutub al-kubbar)
written in 1483; a general work shown to be important by the which he is continually mentioning—like the 'Kitab al-mubadi wa'l-
constant references to it in the Fawa'id. Although general from a ghayat of al-Marrakeshi or the Taqwim al-buldan of Abu’l-Fida.
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