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44 ARAB NAVIGATION THE NAVIGATORS AND THEIR WORKS 45
at all. One feels that in his old age Sulaiman has dropped the role of whiled away the time by producing a book on Indian Ocean navi
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| his younger days of scientific navigator and has turned literary gation in Turkish entitled al-Muhif of which two manuscripts survive
dilettante, for he has developed this commentary in the same way one in Vienna and one in Naples. This is the most recent work extant
ii
as the classical commentators developed their commentaries round on the methods of navigation used in the Indian Ocean in the Ibn
the Quran or some legal work. The difference being that Sulaiman Majid tradition. In actual fact it is a compilation translated from
in expanding his Tuhfat to five times its length has nothing else to l the Arabic of the preceding authors and rearranged. Sidi Qelebi
say. Thus he repeats a sentence from the Tuhfat prefixing it with the | mentions that he had before him six works of Ibn Majid and Sulai
word qultu (I said) and then after the word aqulu (now I say) he man al-Mahri, i.e. the Fawa’id, Hawiya, Tuhfat al-fuhul, 4Umda,
expands it often stretching out phrases to great length which were Minhaj and the Qiladat al-shumush t but his plan seems to have been
perfectly clear before. Rarely does he really clear up any obscure I to translate the 4Umda and add to that anything else from the other
point; occasionally he adds something that he has omitted in the I | works which he thought necessary. Finally he added a considerable
Tuhfat but which occurs in the 4Umda or perhaps in one of Ibn number of comments of his own, mainly on the dating or general
Majid’s works, but with the other works in one’s possession, the chronology and smatterings from classical authors about products
commentary on the Tuhfat is quite unnecessary. or peoples of places mentioned. When one has taken notice of the
Only one other work of Sulaiman al-Mahri exists. This is a short mistakes in his translation one can only come to the conclusion
treatise, entitled Qiladat al-shumush wa'stikhraj al-usus which gives that Sidi Qelebi had no real knowledge of what his texts were dealing
the mathematics necessary for calculating the date according to the I with. One feels that his work is that of a literary connoisseur or an
Muslim, Solar, Byzantine, Coptic and Persian years. As the seasons antiquary whiling away his time in Gujerat with something topical,
for sailing—in fact all navigational dates—are usually given in days attempting to deduce something logical in the various obscure texts
after the Persian (Yezdigirdian) Nairuz, this treatise has a very he had in front of him and perhaps attempting to find out exactly
practical advantage. It consists of just over two folios of important what they meant. Although he says he had Ibn Majid’s Fawa'id in
formulae written clearly after the manner of the 4Umda and it is front of him, he nowhere shows any attempt to solve the many
i possible that it dates from roughly the same time. Sulaiman never questions posed by that text.
repeats this information. iv-* The Muhit therefore as we have it reads mostly word for word
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from the 4 Umda. The first chapter however consists of sections from
(b) Sidi Ali Qelebi the 4Umda interspersed with sections from the Tuhfat al-fuhul, but
•f the sections on the instruments used for measuring qiyas is original
i Unlike the two preceding writers the life of Sidi Qelebi is fairly
well-known for he was a writer and Ottomati civil servant and not a and it is obvious that Sidi Qelebi must have had this explained to
' mere Indian Ocean Pilot. Details of his life are given by Ferrand him and had taken careful note of it. His second chapter is a trans
i: i
in his Instructions nautiques and by Toinaschek in his introduction lation, with his own notes, of the Qiladat al-Shumush and the third
to the German translation of the “Topographischen Capitel” of his returns to the same sources as the first. His fourth chapter is a
f
work the Muhi\. It will suffice to state here that he came from a straightforward translation of chapters 3 and 4 of the 4Umda with
family of civil servants connected with the Ottoman marine and an added section of his own—very European compared with the
after campaigning in several areas with Sultan Sulaiman, was given rest—on the Americas. Of his 5th, 6th and 7th chapters large parts
command of the Turkish Indian Ocean fleet after it had been have not been published, but those parts of them that have show
abandoned in Basra by Piri Reis. His orders were to conduct the them to be mainly translations from the 4Umda (Ch. 5) and the
fleet back to Egypt, but the' fleet was attacked at the mouth of the Tuhfat al-fuhul. Chapters 8, 9 and 10 are merely translations of
Persian Gulf by the Portuguese fleet and then scattered by a storm, chapters 6 and-7 of the 4Umda. Only one section here may be of
which drove Sidi Qelebi’s ship onto the Gujerati shore. He then interest for section 4 of chapter 7 is on the compilation of maps and
spent a year in Gujerat, in 1554 returning home over land. How charts, for nowhere in the works of the earlier writers are charts
much of an admiral in the modern sense he was and how much civil mentioned although we know from the Portuguese that the Arabs
servant is doubtful, but he was certainly, no navigator in the sense used them. I am inclined to see however in this section of Sidi
that the earlier writers were; However while in Gujerat in 1554, he Qelebi’s work only knowledge taken from European sources; his
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