Download PDF | Masudi, Paul Linde, Caroline Stone - The Meadows of Gold_ the Abbasids-Routledge (2010).
471 Pages
INTRODUCTION
Mas'udi was born in Baghdad about 896 AD, during the Caliphate of Mu'tadid and died in Egypt some time around the year 956, eleven years after the Buwaihids, a Shi'a dynasty of Iranian origin, had occupied Baghdad and taken control of the Caliphate. His full name was Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Husain ibn Ali ibn Abd Allah al-Mas'udi, which we have simplified to Mas'udi. Almost everything known about this most readable of Muslim historians is gleaned from the pages of his two extant works, The Meadows of Gold (Muruj al-Dhahab) and the Book of Notification (Kitab al-Tanbih). Later entries in the Arabic biographical dictionaries are meagre, and add almost nothing to what Mas'udi himself tells us. Aside from mentioning that he was born in Baghdad and therefore peculiarly fitted to write the history of the Abbasid dynasty, Mas'udi scarcely refers to his early life and education. We know more about his travels, which were extensive.
When he was nineteen, Mas'udi travelled widely in Persia, visiting the Zoroastrian fire temples of Nishapur and Istakhr and examining Pahlavi books still in possession of the Zoroastrian community. He went on to India, via Sind, getting as far as the Western Deccan and making first-hand observations of flora, fauna and religious beliefs and ceremonies - this last a subject that interested him very much. He returned to Iraq by sea in 917, after an absence of two years, stopping in Yemen and Oman on the way. During this first long trip out of his native land, Mas'udi met Abu Zaid al-Sirafi, a learned merchant from Siraf on the coast of the Persian Gulf, who gave him a long and interesting account of China and the way thither which he incorporated in his Meadows of Gold.
The year of his return to Iraq was at least partly spent in Basra studying under Abu Khalifa al-Jumahi, a noted philologist of the day, whose name occurs occasionally in the pages that follow. In 921 Mas'udi went to Syria, visiting the frontier towns between Islam and Byzantium. He talked to soldiers, merchants, priests and government officials. He met Leo of Tripoli, a Byzantine admiral who had converted to Islam, who was able to tell him a good deal about naval warfare, and Abu Umair, from Adana, who had taken part in a number of diplomatic missions to Constantinople. Much of the information about Byzantium in the Meadows of Gold was gathered during this trip. Mas'udi's interest in Islam's hereditary enemy was unusual; he is one of the few Muslim historians, whose work has survived, who deals with Byzantium in any detail.
Five years later, in 926, Mas'udi was in Palestine, spending some time in Tiberias in the company of the Jewish scholar Abu Kathir Yahya ibn Zakariya, an authority on the Torah which he was at the time engaged in translating. (Abu Kathir was not the only Jewish scholar consulted by Mas'udi; later in Egypt he befriended the famous Sa'adia Gaon.) In Palestine Mas'udi visited Jerusalem and Nazareth, examining the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the first and the house where Christ was born in the second. He also went out of his way to collect information about the Samaritans, whose scripture and beliefs he describes. The next year found Mas'udi in Damascus, examining Hellenistic and early Islamic monuments, then in Palmyra, whose ruins he describes. He talked with members of the Jewish community of Raqqa; and in Harran, two day's march from Raqqa, in what is now Turkey, he was able to interview the elders of a community of pagan star-worshippers, the Sabians, still surviving in a sea of monotheism.
This ancient town, said to be the birthplace of Abraham, still maintained a tradition of Greek scholarship and supplied Baghdad with a number of translators of Greek scientific works during the reign of Ma'mun. It is said that the last teachers from the medical school at Alexandria were transferred there by the Umayyad Caliph Umar II. Mas'udi returned to Baghdad by sailing down the Euphrates, and was present at the siege of Hit by the Qarmatians. He profited from the ocasion by gathering information about this militant equalitarian sect from the lips of its leaders. Sometime in the 930s, Mas'udi travelled in the Caspian area, collecting information about the Caucasus and the peoples who lived beyond them - Khazars, Slavs and Bulgars. He made a number of original observations in these regions and was able to correct certain false geographical notions inherited from antiquity. The last years of his life were spent in Egypt, with occasional visits to Syria.
This exile - perhaps self-imposed - may have been the result of the political upheavals in Iraq that accompanied the coming to power of the Buwaihids. The first certain year of his stay in Egypt is 942. In 944 he visited Antioch in Syria and once again went to towns along the frontier with Byzantium, talking with men who had fought on both sides. Information gathered on this trip appears in the Meadows of Gold, the first version of which was completed shortly after his return to Egypt. At the very beginning of the Meadows of Gold, Mas'udi makes the point that a man who stays at home and relies on information that happens to come his way cannot pretend to the same authority as the man who has travelled widely and seen things with his own eyes. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Mas'udi tried to visit the places and countries about which he wrote, and this points to the most original feature of the Meadows of Gold — the placing of historical events in a geographical context. This is most noticeable in the early chapters of the book, which contain long excursuses on the geographical features of the known world, both within and without the borders of Islam.
This interest in the non-Islamic world is another characteristic that distinguishes Mas'udi from other Muslim historians. One of the major motives of his travels seems to have been to gather as much information as possible about the peoples who lived beyond the borders of Islam, in particular about their religious beliefs, which he recounts with a notable lack of distortion. He was curious, for example, about the history of the Franks, only vaguely known to his contemporaries, and he gives a list of their kings from Clovis to Louis IV, based on a Latin king-list drawn up by a bishop in Andalusia. He found a copy in Egypt in 947. At the other end of the world, he gives a list of Chinese emperors and describes the Huang Ch'ao rebellion that brought down the T'ang dynasty. Here he is speaking not from first-hand knowledge, but from interviews with travellers, merchants and some written sources. Nevertheless, he was the first Muslim historian to treat the history of China at any length and it was not until the time of Rashid al-Din in the thirteenth century that another historian took up the subject.
His account of India is based on his own observations, however, and is precious for being written just before Mahmud of Ghazna's destructive invasion. It is maddening not to know more about Mas'udi's background and motives. There is no evidence that he ever occupied a government post, either under the Abbasids in Baghdad or the Ikhshidids in Egypt. Although it is obvious, especially in the early portions of the Meadows of Gold, that Mas'udi was a Twelver Shi'a, there is no evidence that his travels had anything to do with spreading the tenets ofthat sect, as has been suggested. There seems to be no valid reason for supposing that he travelled for any other reason than to satisfy his curiosity and to collect first-hand information for his books. How he financed his travels is a mystery; perhaps, like other travellers of the time, by trading. Besides the Meadows of Gold and the Tanbih, Mas'udi wrote some thirty-four works of varying length on a wide variety of subjects -jurisprudence, comparative religion, polemics, philosophy, political theory, astronomy, medicine and history. This range of interests was not untypical of the time; Mas'udi's contemporary, al-Farabi, wrote more than one hundred works on just as bewildering a number of subjects. All but the Meadows of Gold and the Tanbih have perished.
The most regrettable losses are two of his previous historical works, the Historical Annals (Akhbar al-Zaman) and the Intermediate History (Kitab al-Awsat). Both are frequently referred to in the pages of the Meadows of Gold, often with the intention of titillating the reader's interest so that he will rush out and buy them. The Historical Annals was Mas'udi's longest work, which may explain why it has not survived. It dealt with history and geography. From the many references to it in the Meadows of Gold, we know that it was divided into thirty chapters, many of them dealing with non-Islamic peoples. It contained detailed descriptions of peoples and places that in the Meadows of Gold are mentioned only in passing.
The Intermediate History was shorter than the Historical Annals but longer than the Meadows of Gold. It contained material not found in either. The Tanbih (Book of Notification) is different again. It is a concise historical handbook about a fifth of the length of the Meadows of Gold and carefully organized. Digressions are kept to a minimum and although the result is drier the material is presented more fully and logically in many cases - for example in the treatment of the Byzantines - than in the Meadows of Gold. The Tanbih contains information not found in Mas'udi's previous works and corrects previous errors, showing that Mas'udi was continually revising. This constant revision of his previous works is relevant to the Meadows of Gold. All the surviving manuscripts of the text are of a first, unrevised version completed in 947, nine years before the completion of the final version of the Tanbih, which also went through a number of revisions. We know from the Tanbih that Mas'udi subsequently revised this first version of the Meadows of Gold, added much new material and increased the number of chapters from 132 to 365. This final revised version has not survived. Readers must bear in mind that the book before them is a draft, and that many of its faults in organization were probably corrected in the final edition. At the beginning of the Meadows of Gold Mas'udi gives a list of eighty-five books which he consulted.
The list is only partial, for in the course of the book he directly or indirectly refers to many more. He lived at a time when books were readily available and relatively cheap. Aside from large public libraries in major towns like Baghdad, many individuals, like Mas'udi's friend al-Suli, had private libraries, often containing thousands of volumes. The prevalence of books and their low price was the result of the introduction of paper to the Islamic world by Chinese papermakers captured at the Battle of Talas in 751. Very soon afterwards there were papermills in most large towns and cities. The introduction of paper coincided with the coming to power of the Abbasid dynasty, and there is no doubt that the availability of cheap writing material contributed to the growth of the Abbasid bureaucracy, postal system and lively intellectual life. Mas'udi's constant exhortations to his readers to consult his other works presumes a world where these were available, in libraries if not in bookshops. Ibn al-Nadim, who wrote an annotated bibliography of all the books that passed through his hands, which he 'published' in 987, lists thousands of titles. Amusingly, all the information he supplies about Mas'udi and his works is wrong.
One has only to think of a European contemporary of Mas'udi - say the compiler of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle — to guage the immense advantages the Muslim historian enjoyed. Not only did he have access to books by previous writers - even Greek and Persian in translation - but he was able to travel freely and even at times gain access to official archives. It was not until the Renaissance that European historians were able to work under the sort of conditions Mas'udi took for granted. He also had the advantage of working within a recognized tradition that already enjoyed a wide audience. The sophisticated reading public of Baghdad and Cairo could appreciate Mas'udi's lively blend of dynastic history, anecdote, and general encyclopedia. Although the Golden Age of Abbasid literature was over, the spirit of Jahiz and the scholars associated with the translation of Greek science into Arabic lives on in Mas'udi. He is intellectually part of that world; the pages of the Meadows of Gold are pervaded with the tolerance, humour and intellectual curiosity of early Abbasid times. At the same time, in this volume, Mas'udi chronicles the slow decline of the dynasty under which Baghdad had become the intellectual capital of the world.
The Caliphs become increasingly shadowy, pawns in the hand of ambitious viziers and the Turkish guard and finally, with the coming of the Buwaihids, they lose whatever fragments of personal power they had. It is a sad and moving tale, but the decline in the political power of the Abbasids did not as yet coincide with a decline in cultural life. It rather led to a shift away from Iraq towards Syria, Egypt, North Africa and Spain, where other dynasties attracted ambitious scholars and writers. Historical writing among the Arabs had reached a high level in the generation just before Mas'udi's own. The traditional form of Arabic historical writing had grown out of a concern to record the sayings and doings of the Prophet and his companions. The technique employed was to transcribe, usually without comment, a number of varying traditions (hadith) about the same event, giving a careful list of the transmitters of the tradition as a guarantee of its accuracy: A told me that he heard from B that he heard from C that one day the Prophet, may blessings and peace be upon him, said . . . Criticism was confined to the names in the chain of authorities. Could B really have heard C recite this tradition? Was he old enough to remember it accurately? Was his memory good, bad or indifferent?
The most famous exponent of this type of history is Tabari, who died in 923, when Mas'udi was twenty-seven years old. Tabari's history, published last century, fills fifteen large volumes and extends from the pre-Islamic period down to the year 910. Variant versions of the same event follow one another and allow the reader to form his own judgement, with little or no guidance from the author. It is in a sense a collection of source material, rather than a conventional history. Although a mine of information, the total effect is stupefying and Tabari can scarcely be read for pleasure. Mas'udi expresses great admiration for Tabari and makes liberal use of his work, but chooses to follow the 'modernist' rather than the traditional school of historiography. Two men, both of whom died at just about the time Mas'udi was born, exemplify this school. They were Dinawari and Ya'qubi, both of whom, probably influenced by Persian models, chose but one version of an event from the often bewildering number of variants, arranged the events in chronological order and produced narrative histories. They made little attempt to stick to the original wording of the sources they used (the reproduction of the exact words of the hadith was of paramount importance for the traditionalists) and aimed at succinct readability.
Dinawari's Extended Histories (Akhbar al-Tiwal), despite its title, fills only a single volume although it covers almost as long a period as Tabari. Dinawari's choice of what version of an event to follow is primarily literary rather than historical; he chooses the most dramatic or affecting. Like Mas'udi, he uses non-Islamic sources, in his case principally Persian, and is influenced by Greek ideas. Ya'qubi, who died in 897 when Mas'udi was one year old, was a geographer as well as an historian and heavily indebted to Hellenistic thought, of which he provides a summary in the first volume of his two-volume history. But unlike Mas'udi, Ya'qubi made no effort to combine history and geography in a single work, but treated them separately. His history however is narrative, like that of Dinawari, and also includes the history of some non-Islamic peoples. Mas'udi was more ambitious than his predecessors. He combines a number of previously independent genres of Arabic literature - chronicle, biography, geographical handbook, literary anthology, encyclopedia - into a single work. He is writing for the same audience addressed by Dinawari and Ya'qubi - the educated urban reading public - rather than the narrow audience of scholars addressed by Tabari. He had learned from Jahiz that this sort of reader quickly wearied of a dry recital of events, and so breaks up his narrative with all sorts of digressions, anecdotes, jokes and poems. Serious historians have often regarded these as intrusions in the text, and Charles Pellat, in his revision of Barbier de Meynard's nineteenth-century edition, goes so far in both the French and the Arabic editions as to set these 'digressions' apart from the purely historical narrative by printing them in a smaller typeface. But they are an integral part of the work.
They almost always reveal something interesting about the people in the historical narrative - their character, taste, sense of humour or even the way they dressed. They give something of the social and material background against which these men and women lived their lives. The digressions form a kind of counterpoint to the main text. The cumulative effect is a clear and remarkably detailed picture of Abbasid court society, often illuminated by glimpses of the lives of ordinary people - the black cook with a passion for music who hides Ibrahim ibn al-Mahdi, the woodcutter whose donkey is helped out of a ditch by Mu'tasim. Without Mas'udi's digressions, how would we know that one of the amusements of Abbasid Caliphs was holding cooking contests? These digressions should therefore not be looked upon as intrusions into the text but as an integral part of it; they are what give the book much of its flavour. They have also been chosen with considerable art. Mas'udi's gifts as a story-teller will be immediately apparent to the reader. The events that led the Abbasid dynasty to power and the feelings of the supporters of the old regime are brilliantly alluded to in the opening pages of the book, where Mansur himself recounts his meeting with the blind poet who had served the Umayyads.
The misdeeds of the Umayyads, rather than being merely listed, are put in the mouth of the King of Nubia, reproaching a survivor of the dynasty. This technique is extremely effective and even when Mas'udi has lifted his anecdote from a predecessor he almost invariably improves it in the telling. Anyone familiar with the vast ocean of similar anecdotes in Arabic literature can only admire Mas'udi's sure eye for the dramatic and the effects he obtains by juxtaposition. He is particularly effective in his account of the civil war between Amin and Ma'mun, where the long confused series of hadith in Tabari are pruned to an unforgettably tragic tale, with the blind poet of Baghdad's comments on the action and how it affects ordinary people as fateful as anything in Greek tragedy. Most Arabic historical writing is impersonal. It is impossible to get any sense of Tabari the man - aside from a sense of his enormous industry - from reading his history. Mas'udi's use of the first person is unusual and as one reads one gradually forms an idea of the sort of man he was - curious, warm-hearted, tolerant, vain, a man who disliked lawyers. He writes fluent, unmannered Arabic and uses a wide vocabulary. Although he was interested in the sciences of his day, he was no pedant. Much has been made of his credulity - he was criticized for this by no less than Ibn Khaldun. It is true that Mas'udi liked a tall tale but naive to suppose that he himself believed everything he related.
The Arabic text of Mas'udi's Meadows of Gold was first published in full, together with a French translation, by Barbier de Meynard and Pavet de Courteille. This edition was published in nine volumes by the Société Asiatique in Paris between 1861 and 1877. The French translation is printed below the Arabic on each page, which allows the reader to compare the translation with the original. This edition and its accompanying translation have been the standard text for almost a hundred years. In our translation, the Roman numeral at the bottom of the page stands for the volume number of this edition; the Arabic numeral for the page. Between 1966 and 1974 the French Arabist Charles Pellat revised the Arabic text of Barbier de Meynard's edition, in the light of the scholarship of the past hundred years, and this was published in Beirut by the Université Libanaise in five volumes. In this edition, the text is divided into 3,661 numbered paragraphs for ease of reference. These are the numbers following the paragraph sign (§) at the bottom of the pages. Thus readers who have one or the other edition can quickly find the Arabic original. It should be noted that both Barbier de Meynard's edition and the revision of it by Pellat are not easily found outside the major libraries. Beginning in 1967, Pellat began the publication of his revision of Barbier de Meynard's French translation. So far three volumes of this have appeared, published by the Société Asiatique, covering the period up to the end of the Umayyad dynasty.
This, like his edition of the Arabic text, follows the division of the text into numbered paragraphs. It should be noted that Pellat's revision is not based on a fresh examination of the manuscripts, of which a large number survive. On the other hand, it seems that variants in these manuscripts are few. Barbier de Meynard's translation is superb. The French is elegant, readable and generally accurate, given the state of Arabic studies at the time it was done. Pellat's corrections are overwhelmingly to personal and geographical names, which are often distorted or just plain wrong in Barbier de Meynard. In our translation we have followed Pellat's readings, so when the names in our text conflict with those in Barbier de Meynard, readers may assume that those in Barbier de Meynard are incorrect.
As a supplement to his edition of the Arabic text, Pellat also published two volumes of comprehensive indices. These contain a wealth of biographical and historical information, and in them even the minor figures in Mas'udi's text are identified and bibliographical references given. Unfortunately these two invaluable volumes exist so far only in Arabic. The volume before the reader contains the history of the Abbasids, from Mansur, the second Abbasid Caliph, to Mut'i. It thus covers the classical period of the Islamic state, and many of the names will be familiar to readers of The 1,001 Nights. After much thought we decided to begin with the Abbasids, and to deal with the pre-Islamic period and the Umayyads in two subsequent volumes. This is not as eccentric as it sounds. Pellat has not yet published his revision of Barbier de Meynard's translation of this portion; only the revised Arabic text has yet appeared. We thought readers interested in the classical period of Islamic civilization who do not know Arabic should have this volume first, rather than continuing to rely on Barbier de Meynard's French translation which contains so many incorrect personal and place names. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to translate the entire text. Our selection represents about three-quarters the original.
The reader may form some idea of the omitted portions from the summaries at the end of each chapter. The selection has been guided entirely by our own taste: we have translated the bits that interested us, although the choice was often difficult. The interminable quarrels of the Turkish guard have thus received rather short shrift; on the other hand we have tried to include something from each reign, although of course Mas'udi's treatment of the Caliphs ranges from almost a hundred pages down to only a few. We hope we have not distorted his intentions. We have simplified the spelling of Arabic names in order not to disfigure the page with diacritical points. We have not been entirely consistent in this, however. The definite article al- has been omitted from the throne names of Caliphs (thus Mutawakkil, not al-Mutawakkil) and from some other names that occur frequently. Initial hamza and 'ain have been omitted, although retained in the middle of a word, and 'ain at the end (al-Rabi', not al-Rabi). We hope that those who know Arabic will forgive these liberties, and after their initial revulsion, find the loss of accuracy compensated by the gain in aesthetic pleasure. We have taken another small liberty with the text. Where possible we have chosen a single version of a name and tried to stick to it, unless the point of a story or its effect turns on the use of a nickname.
It is customary in Arabic to use a variety of names when addressing someone, depending on occasion, relative status and so on. People from Caliph to peasant are typically known as the father or mother of their eldest son, or sometimes their favourite child, but may also be called by a nickname, or by an adjective deriving from their place of origin - quite apart from their 'real' names. Thus the Caliph Mansur was called Abu Ja'farFather of Ja'far - although his given name was Abd Allah. We have tried to spare the reader the exasperation that can result from suddenly realizing that when he thought he was reading about three different people he was in fact reading about one.
When referring to himself in the Meadows of Gold, Mas'udi uses the editorial 'we'. This we have rendered as T' in almost all cases. Although we have had to leave out some of Mas'udi's text we have only once, by omitting a description of a particularly disgusting torture, made any abridgements in the episodes we have chosen. We hope Mas'udi, who ritually curses any who curtail his text, would have forgiven us in return for reaching an audience he could never have imagined. An asterisk (*) within the text refers to the editors' notes, pp. 439-50.
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