Page 8 - Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean (before portuguese)_Neat

4 ARAB NAVIGATION THE NAVIGATORS AND THEIR WORKS
of the measurement of Pole Star altitudes, a practice known as
qiyds to the navigators. He says that the Arabs did not use the
compass in his time—definitely an erroneous statement. Marco
Polo tells us that the Arabs had good charts and in sailing up the
west coast of India he gives the height of the Pole Star above the
horizon at all the well-known ports. We can therefore be quite
certain that qiyds measurement was practised by the navigators of
the Arabian Sea in his day.
This is about the sum total of our knowledge of Arab navigational
theory and practice from texts dated earlier than the time of Ibn
Majid but, as we shall see, by his time the science was extremely
well developed.
In his Fawa’id Ibn Majid himself gives a history of Arab navigation
as he knows it. Navigation began with the Ark, although the sciences
of astronomy and calculation were invented according to the general
Muslim tradition by Idris who produced the astrolabe before the
time of Noah. The magnetic properties of lodestone were dis­
covered says Ibn Majid by David, for the maghnatis was the stone
used by him to kill Goliath. With the setting of the year in a fixed
relationship with the Zodiac—i.e. the discovery of the first point of
Aries, attributed to Alexander the Great, the stage was set for
navigational science as Ibn Majid knew it. According to him, Arab
navigation began when the Abbasids were in Baghdad and this
agrees with what I have said before: that this was the time of the
revival of Indian Ocean trading with the Arabs playing an important
part. At this time he says, “there were three well-known men”.
However the date he gives them can be no earlier than the end of
the 11th century or the beginning of the 12th and by this time the
long dynasty of the Abbasids had ceased to exist. Sauvaget however
in the Journal Asiatique in 1948s argues that Ferrand’s date for this,
taken from the Fawd'id, is wrong and that instead of a.h. 580
(1184-5) as Ferrand (this work follows his dating) has stated, “580
years ago” should be read i.e. 895 — 580 = a.h. 315 (a.d. 927-8).
This would bring these three men back to the time of the Abbasids
and to the great days of Siraf from which port they are said to have
sailed. This theory does not seem possible, for in the next paragraph
it will be seen that these men took information from a man who
wrote and sailed about a.h. 400 and the general impression seems
to be that manuscripts from the 12th century were still available to
practical navigators in the fifteenth; hence the detailed knowledge of
this period. Manuscripts six hundred years old rarely survive out­
side collector’s libraries especially if they are in the hands of someone
6 Vol. 236, pp. 11-20.
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5
who is going to use them daily. Sauvaget’s other proof of this theory
—that he can fit two of these early navigators into the genealogical
set-up of the Sirafi pilots mentioned in the 'Aja'ib al-Hind—is 1
ingenious but far-fetched; it rests entirely on the appearance in this
text of the names Sahl and Shadhan which he identifies with the two
persons with the same names from Ibn Majid’s text.
In actual fact the earliest dated pilots according to Ibn Majid are
Ahmad ibn Tabruya (or Tabrawaih) and Khawashir b. Yusuf b.
Sabah al-Arikl (both with Persian names) and the latter sailed
around a.h. 400 (1009/10) on an Indian ship. These two wrote ?■
navigational works which were used by the “three well-known men”
who came approximately 100 years later.
These “three” were Muhammad ibn Shadhan, Sahl b. Abban and
Laith b. Kahlan, the same men who were given by Sidi (Jelebi as
his first three sources. They were presumably writers on navigational
topics and not actual navigators. Their works were apparently i
in the hands of Ibn Majid for he draws his readers attention to them
often, although he rarely quotes them. One of the manuscripts he
mentions was in the handwriting of the grandson of one of these
men and was dated a.h. 580 (a.d. 1184-5). This was a Rahman! lb
jDb, or pilot guide beginning with the words “Inna fatihnd lak”.
The passage sounds as if this grandson was of Laith b. Kahlan, but t
later (f. 38v.) he mentions a manuscript in the hand of Isma’il b.
Hasan b. Sahl b. Abban. This may have been the same one or
another.6 As in this second passage he says that this manuscript
mentioned all of the three it is possible that Ibn Majid only had one
early navigational manuscript which gave him all this information
about the early writers. Contemporary with these three appear the
names of Ibn {Abd al-{Aziz b. Ahmad al-Maghribi, Musa ibn al-
Qandarani (Fandara’inl?) and Maimun b. Khalil but it is not said ■
whether these wrote works or not. Perhaps they were only mentioned
as sources in the manuscript of Isma’il b. Hasan. They are all
described as pilots ma'aUmah, whereas Ahmad b. Muhammad b.
‘Abd al-Rahman b. Abu’I-Fadl b. Abu’l-Mughaira, another con­
temporary, is described as a ndkhdda. :
This is all Ibn Majid tells us historically about the 11 th—12th
century navigational literature. Critically however he has much more
to say. The three writers whom he terms the “three lions” (luyuth, .
8 Sauvaget (J.A. 236, 1948, pp. 12-13) gets over this by reading
oU jpo- instead of. . . i\tm jj This would make
reasonable sense and Isma’il b. yasan could be identified with the grandson
■
of Laith b. Kahlan and only one manuscript exist.