oral reportage, a secular parallel to the literature of hadith, which records the sayings and doings of the Prophet Muhammad and his Companions. And although a full-scale science of akhbār never developed as it did for hadith, there was some attempt at classification. Al-Masʿūdī, for example, identifies two types of oral report, those that are on everyone’s tongues and those that have been passed down a chain of narrators.27 He also neatly defines akhbār by what they are not: his own book is one of khabar, not of baḥth and naẓar—that is, it presents facts as they are reported but does not analyze them through research and investigation.28 In other words, akhbār, like journalism today, were seen as the first draft of history—and, in the case of Accounts of China and India, of geography, ethnology, economics, zoology, and much else besides.
All this means that there is an immediacy to the information. Particularly in Book Two, there are snippets of “writerly” commentary that stitch together the patchwork of accounts, but most of the text has the feel of having been told and taken down directly. An example is the account, mentioned above, of the aggrieved merchant. First, Abū Zayd has his word as literary anchorman—“The Chinese used to monitor their own system, in the old days, that is, before its deterioration in the present time, with a rigor unheard of elsewhere”—but he then gives the nod to his informant, who launches straight into his tale: “A certain man from Khurasan … came to Iraq …”29 And the tale spools out spontaneously, occasionally getting lost in its own subordinate clauses as we all do when we speak. To listen to these accounts is to hear the unedited voice of oral history.
“Unedited” does not mean “unrehearsed”: as with all travelers’ tales, the accounts had no doubt already acquired a polish in the telling and retelling. Nor is it likely to mean “verbatim,” for Abū Zayd and his anonymous predecessor probably further burnished their informants’ grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Despite this, some of the language is slightly wayward. It is not bad Arabic, as the French scholar Ferrand claimed;30 rather, it preserves features of the spoken Arabic that it represents on the page—even today, actual spoken Arabic is nearly always standardized before it goes down on paper. The multiplicity of contributors and the duality of compilers also make for occasional repetitions and very occasional contradictions.31 Geographically and thematically, too, although the compilers did their best to organize the material, the book as a whole is no disciplined Baedeker—it has more in common, in fact, with the online, interactive travel websites of our own age—nor, of course, does it have the neatness of a discrete journey by a single traveler. Instead, it weaves the threads and fragments of many journeys together into a text that, for its size, must be one of the richest in all the literature of travel and geography.
There is a danger, with all this richness and denseness, of losing one’s audience. The leaps from India to China and back, the excursions to Sarbuzah and the Islands of Silver, the sidetracks into the lives of Shaivite saddhus and devadasi prostitutes could all be too disorienting for readers back in Basra or Baghdad. But there are always cultural “navigation aids.” Inevitably, some of them do not work for us, the readers of more than a millennium later: who, for example, were the Kanīfiyyah and the Jalīdiyyah, to whom rival Indian gangs are compared?32 Perhaps the Sharks and the Jets of fourth/tenth-century Iraq; the precise reference seems to be lost. But there is also the enduring cultural compass of Islam and Arabdom.33 It orients the traveler to what he sees, how he sees it, and how he reports it, and the reader to how he receives the report. It works on many levels, from the way the Chinese urinate (standing, not squatting) and why,34 to interpretations of Buddhist iconography.35 This constant guiding presence not only enables the traveler–traders—merchants in musk and silk and porcelain, but also in knowledge—to make cultural translations for their immediate audience back home. For us, their audience removed in time, it points not just to where those travelers got to but also to where they came from.
It also may explain a few cases in which the informants’ vision is apparently distorted. An example is that of Ibn Wahb’s audience with the Tang emperor. Assuming the meeting did in fact take place—and Abū Zayd, that scholar of discrimination and discernment, accepted that it did—would the emperor, in his palace at the heart of the Middle Kingdom, the navel of the civilized earth, really have viewed Baghdad, the barbarian Bangda, as the center of the world and the Abbasid caliph as above him in the international order of precedence?36 Perhaps he (or his interpreter) was being exceedingly diplomatic. Or perhaps Ibn Wahb was doing what later, European, writers were to do, notably the author of the travels of Sir John Mandeville, in that dubious knight’s even more dubious audience with the Mamluk sultan:37 using the figure of the wise infidel king to make a point about one’s own society.
There was certainly a point to be made in the third/ninth century—that the still young Arab-Islamic civilization of the West had not only joined the club of Asian cultures but had also outstripped its ancient fellow members in global importance. If this is indeed the subtext of that strange imperial pronouncement, then it is made more subtly and more eloquently, not by emperors but by unknown merchants, on every page of this book: for it is a book that tells us, by reflex, so to speak, as much about the energy and enterprise of Islam in that age as it does about China and India.
ABŪ ZAYD AND AL-MASʿŪDĪ
Al-Masʿūdī, the Herodotus of the Arabs, as he is often and aptly called, was quoted above on Abū Zayd and on the meaning of akhbār. Those quotations are from his main surviving work, Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems. But there is more to be said on the relationship between the two authors and their works, for significant portions of the material in Accounts of China and India appear also in the pages of al-Masʿūdī. Who got what from whom?
There is, of course, no question about matter taken from Book One, finished some eighty years before al-Masʿūdī was working on his Meadows of Gold. Regarding information appearing in our Book Two and in Meadows of Gold, however, the picture is more complicated. Commentators have homed in on the meeting between the two authors, which they have placed in the years soon after Abū Zaydʼs move to Basra in 303/915–16; the meeting, in Miquel’s analysis, enabled Abū Zayd to pass on to al-Masʿūdī the information contained in the full and finished Accounts.38 This looks at first like a reasonable assumption, and it would, if correct, give a rough date of the early 310s/920s for the compilation of our Book Two. Certainly as regards the flow of information, it appears to be from Abū Zayd to al-Masʿūdī: the latter’s language is the more polished, his organization of the material much better planned; Abū Zayd’s work is the raw original from which he has drawn.39 The only snag is that in the case of one khabar, the macabre story of an Indian who cuts pieces off his own liver before burning himself to death, al-Masʿūdī states that he himself witnessed the scene in India in 304/916–17.40 If we take al-Masʿūdīʼs bona fides as read, and if we accept that the details of the stor y are so bizarre and precise that it is unlikely that another witness would independently have given the story to Abū Zayd, then it seems possible that al-Masʿūdī himself is one of the anonymous informants of the Accounts.
To those two pending questions, concerning the date of Book Two and the identity of its patron or instigator, there are no firm answers to be drawn from all this, but there are some comments to be made:
1. The meeting between al-Masʿūdī and Abū Zayd, whenever it happened, does not provide a fixed terminal date for the Accounts. The final version of the book might have been put together at any time up until 332/943–44, the year in which al-Masʿūdī was writing his Meadows of Gold.
2. There seems to have been a two-way exchange of information between the two men at their face-to-face meeting. Ultimately, however, by far the greater flow of material was from Abū Zayd to al-Masʿūdī.
3. Al-Masʿūdī was a busy writer: Meadows of Gold, which runs to over 1,500 pages of Arabic in the edition I have, is the smallest
