Accounts of China and India. Abu Zayd al-Sirafi

      INTRODUCTION

      This is a book about an ocean and the lands that lie on its shores, about the ships that cross it and the cargoes they carry. In its own words, it is a book about

      the Sea of India and China, in whose depths are pearls and ambergris, in whose rocky isles are gems and mines of gold, in the mouths of whose beasts is ivory, in whose forests grow ebony, sapan wood, rattans, and trees that bear aloewood, camphor, nutmeg, cloves, sandalwood, and all manner of fragrant and aromatic spices, whose birds are parrots and peacocks, and the creeping things of whose earth are civet cats and musk gazelles, and all the rest that no one could enumerate, so many are its blessings.¹

      It might have been the inspiration for John Masefieldʼs quinquireme of Nineveh in his poem “Cargoes,” with its

      cargo of ivory,

      And apes and peacocks,

      Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

      (And, yes, there is sweet white wine in this book too, made from the sap of the toddy palm.) But it is about more than that, for there is a whole human landscape: ships’ captains and customs men, kings and courtiers, princes and paupers—and a few cannibals and kidnappers, to add spice.

      What’s more, the book describes a real, live world, almost palpably real, despite the passing of eleven centuries. It is built from facts, not sailors’ yarns. As the author says in his closing words, “I have avoided relating any of the sort of accounts in which sailors exercise their powers of invention,”² sailors, according to his illustrious predecessor al-Jāḥiẓ, not being “respecters of the unvarnished truth. The stranger the story the more they like it; and, moreover, they use vulgar expressions and have an atrocious style.”³ Reality and solidity are what are implied by the first word of the title: akhbār, accounts, are reports from credible witnesses. And each khabar, each account, fits in with the others to be assembled into a jigsaw picture of a world not unlike our own, a world on the road to globalization.

      It is a short book, but it has a sweeping perspective, from the Swahili coast to a rather mistily glimpsed Korea. It is therefore one of those books that seems bigger than it is. And, like the ports of that immense Afro-Asiatic littoral, its pages are busy with people and piled with goods, not just with the luxuries listed above but also with a priceless cargo of information, especially on China. Here are the first foreign descriptions of tea and porcelain, and a whole panorama of Chinese society, from the Son of Heaven and Confucian ethics down to toilet paper and bamboo urinals.

      And all this marvelous, mundane world is contained in the compass of a novella. As its own last words say, wa-in qalla awlā:⁴ Less is more.

      DATING AND AUTHORSHIP

      If Accounts of China and India is good value in its geographical and material coverage, there is a bonus: it is, in fact, two books.

      Book One, according to the author of Book Two, dates to the year 237/851–52.⁵ There is no reason to doubt this date, and internal evidence supports it.⁶ The author of Book One, however, is unknown. It does not help that the first pages are missing from the only manuscript copy known to have survived; these might have given an author’s name. Nor does it help that another writer, Ibn al-Faqīh, a writer much closer in time to the composition of Book One than we are, quoted some of its text with an attribution to one Sulaymān al-Tājir.⁷ This Sulaymān the Merchant was undoubtedly one of the informants for Book One; he is the only one mentioned in it by name.⁸ Commentators in search of authors have therefore leapt on Sulaymān and credited him with the whole book. It is perfectly usual in Arabic books of the time for their authors to appear in the text, as Sulaymān does, in the third person, as if I were to interject suddenly, “And Tim Mackintosh-Smith said …” This is, in itself, no obstacle to the attribution of authorship to Sulaymān, but it is likewise not an argument for it. Much ink has been shed over the question, but, in the end, we have no incontrovertible evidence for Sulaymān or anyone else being the author of Book One.

      There is a further possible element of mystery: the author of Book One may have been unknown even to the author of Book Two. It is certainly strange that the latter, in the evaluation of Book One that forms the preamble to his own work,⁹ does not say who wrote that earlier book. Later on, when he has another chance to name the author of Book One, he seems intentionally to avoid doing so: he calls him merely “the person from whom that First Book was taken down.”¹⁰ To me there seems to be only one entirely cogent reason that the author of Book Two did not mention his predecessor’s name, which is that he himself did not know it.

      About the author of Book Two there is no doubt. He is there at the outset, staking his third-person claim to authorship in the book’s opening words, “Abū Zayd al-Ḥasan al-Sīrāfī said …”¹¹ If we knew nothing else about him, we would know from his surname that he was from—or at least had some connection with—the city of Sīrāf on the Iranian shore of the Gulf, which for much of the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries was the most important port for long-distance trade across the Indian Ocean. But we do know a little more, from no less an authority than the great historian–geographer al-Masʿūdī: he met Abū Zayd in Basra and says that he “had moved there from Sīrāf in the year 303 [915–16].” Al-Masʿūdī then gives a lineage for Abū Zayd (in which the names of earlier ancestors show an Iranian ethnic origin) and adds that he was “a man of discrimination and discernment,” that is, that he was a man of learning, with a well-developed critical sense.¹²

      In contrast to Book One, in Book Two it is the date that is the problem. It was obviously being written well after the end of the Huang Chao rebellion in China, suppressed in 271/884, and some considerable time into the ensuing decades of anarchy; these events are reported near the beginning of the book.¹³ Book Two was finished, as will become clear below, by the time al-Masʿūdī was working on his own Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems (Murūj al-dhahab wa-maʿādin al-jawhar) in 332/943–44. But that still leaves a wide range of possible dates. We will return to the question.

      There is another question to ask and to return to. Immediately after declaring his authorship, Abū Zayd says, “I have examined this foregoing book (meaning the First Book), having been commanded to look carefully through it, and to verify the information I find in it,” and moreover to supplement it “with other reports … known to myself but not appearing in the book.”¹⁴ These supplementary accounts grew into Book Two. Abū Zayd undoubtedly wrote Book Two, but who was its instigator, the mysterious figure who commanded or instructed him to do so? If he was some important literary patron, why not commemorate him by name? Why hide him with a passive verb, the “anonymous” voice of the Arabic grammarians? Throughout Book Two, that nameless presence peers over the author’s shoulder.

      Then again Abū Zayd and his predecessor, the writer of Book One, were, strictly speaking, compilers, not authors. The material of both books came from the informants who contributed their akhbār, their eyewitness accounts. Other than Sulaymān the Merchant and a certain Ibn Wahb, whose report of his visit to China is incorporated into Book Two,¹⁵ they too are nameless. But these two suggest identities for the anonymous