ABSTRACT
Tārīkh al-Mustabṣir (TM) is a 7th/13th century text which has been readily available to the scholarly world since its publication by the Swedish scholar, Oscar Löfgren, Leiden, 195–4. The name of the author of the TM is undoubtedly Abū Bakr b. Muḥammad b. Masʿūd b. ʿAlī b. Aḥmad Ibn al-Mujāwir (IM), not the well known Damascene, also Ibn al-Mujāwir, whose full name appears on the title page of the printed version of the text. The true author hailed from the east of the Islamic world, not from Damascus. He appears to have had business interests, or at least he writes from the point of view of a businessman, and the TM is a description of the west and south of the Arabian Peninsula. IM begins by singing the praises of what he calls fann al-tārīkh, which I can only translate ‘historical geography’, and the basic layout of the work is a route list – from A to B is x parasangs (where, incidentally, a parasang, farsakh, is in all probability the distance that one can walk in one hour 2 ). Fortunately, however, the text is much more than a route list, for it is frequently punctuated at some length with all manner of digressions. As we might expect from someone interested in business, prices, customs dues, taxes, coinage, weights and measures, commodities, agriculture etc., all these are dealt with, often in great detail. Also our author is interested in the people whom he meets on his travels: their dress, their food, their habits and mores – in particular their sexual mores – their houses, their water supplies, their rulers and their history – though he often falters on the latter – and all these pass under his scrutiny. The text too is replete with amusing and sometimes bizarre anecdotes, as well as with passages packed with information concerning the early 7th/13th century Arabian Peninsula. I have elsewhere discussed other aspects of the work: the author’s treatment of Dhofar and the island of Socotra, 3 the humorous and the bizarre in the text, 4 the eastern connection of the author, 5 an interpretation of some ‘anthropological’ passages 6 and more recently concerning the author as a story-teller. 7
