THE SINBAD VOYAGE

by John Lawton

ONCE UPON A TIME there really was a man called “Sindbad the Sailor” – at least according to the crew and captain of the Sohar, a replica of a ninth-century Arab dhow that they sailed from Oman to China.

The point of the voyage was to prove that Sindbad’s legendary voyages are rooted in historical fact – and they certainly proved that the voyage itself is possible. In a hand-built craft stitched together with coconut string, and navigating with medieval navigational instruments, British author-explorer Timothy Severin and a crew of 25 sailed the dhow 9,600 kilometers (6,000 miles) between Muscat and Canton.

Severin and his crew, of course, did not have to cope with the innumerable monsters that plagued Sindbad’s voyages, but they did face other hazards. On several occasions they were nearly crushed by giant tankers; another time their mainsail spar broke; and for almost a month they were becalmed with little food and water. Finally, as they raced the monsoons across the South China Sea, they faced the threat of pirates.

In all, the voyage took just under eight months. In addition, however, Severin spent some three years in research, travel and construction during which he traced the history of Arab seamanship back to Egypt and followed its development in places like Oman, China and India.

The first people known to have used the sail were the ancient Egyptians; the earliest record of a sailing boat – a drawing of a ship with a mast amidships and a broad square sail hung from it – dates back to about 3900 B.C. And it was an Egyptian who provided the first known mariner’s tale: an anonymous first-person account of a shipwreck in the Red Sea around 2000 B.C. – in which the mythical embellishments of the Sindbad period are instantly obvious.

“I had set out for the mines of the king in a ship 180 feet long and 60 feet wide; we had a crew of 120, the pick of Egypt. A storm broke and we flew before the wind. The ship went down; of all in it only I survived. I was cast upon an island… then I heard the sound of thunder and thought it was a wave; trees broke and the earth quaked. I uncovered my face and found a serpent. It was 45 feet long and its beard was two feet long. Its body was covered with gold and its eyebrows were real lapis lazuli.”

The serpent’s looks, it turns out, were deceiving; it was a most considerate creature. It took the sailor tenderly up in its mouth, carried him to its lair, listened sympathetically to his story and then comforted him with the news that one of the Pharaoh’s ships would soon come along and take him back home. When the rescue ship, as prophesied, did come along, the serpent sent the sailor off with a cargo of incense, and two months later he was safely home.

Later, and farther east, the people living on the shores of the Arabian Peninsula also learned to sail and in time discovered that they could earn a profit by risking their lives on the sea. Among them were the boat builders and sailors of Makkan (or Magan) – today’s Oman – who traded copper and ivory with Mesopotamia. Copper was mined in Makkan itself, but the ivory could only have come from India – or Africa and the implication seems clear: Omani traders, even in 1000 B.C., probably ventured beyond the Arabian Gulf and sailed the open waters of the ocean.

About 500 B.C. these seamen – the early Arabs – also introduced the dhow: a broad-beamed, shallow-draft vessel with lateen-rigged sails, ideally suited for the coastal waters of the Arabian Gulf and the comparatively mild waves of the Indian Ocean. Although relatively flimsy, it was light and maneuverable and could speed quickly out of the path of threatening weather. Its triangular sails, moreover, were designed to catch even the slightest breeze.

The key to their success, however, was the ancient secret of the monsoon winds: the fact that they could rely on prevailing winds to carry them eastward in winter and westward in summer across the Indian Ocean. They could not explain these “monsoons,” but this is not surprising since even today there are mysteries about them. One theory is that when the summer heat of India causes the air to rise over the subcontinent, winds from the Indian Ocean rush into the vacuum left by the rising air; by the same token, the comparative coolness of Indian winters causes a reverse movement of winds from India to Africa. Whatever the cause, by the first century A.D. the south Arabian merchants were riding the monsoon winds eastward as far as Ceylon, and by the sixth Century according to one geographer, had established a monopoly of the sea trade with China.

In that era, the 6,000-mile voyage from the Arabian Gulf to China took at least 120 days and was then the longest sea trading route in the world: the ocean equivalent of the old Silk Road. It was probably the most dangerous too, with corsairs from theHadhramaut prowling the Indian Ocean and Vietnamese pirates preying on shipping in the Gulf of Tonkin. Those that survived, or bought off the pirate threat, might still disappear without trace: sunk to the bottom of the sea, wrecked on some lonely, hostile coast or blown completely off course into the Pacific where, the Chinese believed, the drain spout of the world’s ocean sucked the unwary sailor into oblivion.

For those who did succeed, however, profits were high. Because no European power had ever found a sea route to China, the Arabian role as intermediary in East-West trade grew and flourished. By the middle of the eighth century the flow of such precious goods as gold, ivory and gems from India, and silk and fine porcelain from China, had made Baghdad the most important commercial center in the world, and for the next 500 years Muslim dominance of East-West trade continued.

In the 13th century, however, the Mongols appeared and, in conquering China, razed the great port towns. As a consequence, Far East trade waned, and though it continued sporadically for some time – with Arab merchants meeting their Chinese counterparts in Ceylon and Malaya – the heyday of Arab trade with China was over – partly because of the Mongol destruction, but mostly because, 200 years later, Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese explorer, rounded the Cape of Good Hope and opened a new trade route between Europe and the East.

This voyage, completed in 1448, effectively ended more than 700 years of Arab domination of Eastern trade. Ironically, though, it was an Arab seaman, the great navigator Ahmad ibn Majid, who guided the Portuguese on the last vital leg of the voyage.

By then, of course, the Arabs had left an indelible mark on Southeast Asia; their dhows had not only carried merchandise, but had also spread Islam and Islamic culture as far as Indonesia and China. By then, too, the intrepid Arab sailors, roaming through 9,600 to 16,000 kilometers of unknown territory (6,000 to 10,000 miles), had brought back endless tales of mishaps and adventures – as well as reports of exotic kingdoms bordering the Indian Ocean and China Sea. These stories-repeated, embroidered, expanded and exaggerated – were the basis of the epic of Sindbad the Sailor, as immortalized in A Thousand and One Nights.

Until recently, the consensus among scholars was that Sindbad, the world’s most famous sailor, never actually existed. The scholars said that the fables spun around him may have been versions of actual exploits and gave examples. One was Sindbad’s method of collecting diamonds from a serpent-filled canyon: by dropping chunks of raw meat into the canyon and retrieving the meat – with gems stuck to them – through the use of large birds. This story, they said, was first told by troops of Alexander the Great returning from India.

Another example was a story of an island that turns out to be a great fish. This tale, as Severin had cause to know, also figures in the life of the Saint Brendan, the medieval navigator-monk; on his voyage to Newfoundland, Saint Brendan and his Irish sailors did exactly what Sindbad and the Arab seaman did: they aroused the huge creature by lighting fires on its back.

In Oman, however, where the modern Sindbad voyage was launched, some Omanis firmly believe that Sindbad was real. “We believe,” said Musalam Ahmad, one of the nine Omanis on Sohar, “that there really was a sailor called ‘Sindbad’ who had some adventures.”

Severin agrees. “The Sindbad chroniclers took one captain and added other adventures to his own,” he said, adding that it was this embellishment and expansion of his exploits, that eventually turned Sindbad from a man – “who came from Sohar but operated out of Basra” – into a myth. Severin and the Omanis, in fact, believe this so strongly that they named the dhow that they planned to sail to China Sohar, after the town in Oman where they say Sindbad was born.

In a sense, Severin, a tea planter’s son born in India, is the ideal man to explore aworld where fact and fantasy mingle. While an undergraduate at Oxford, he rode a motorcyle along Marco Polo’s route to China – a trip resulting in his first book Tracking Marco Polo. This was followed by Explorers of the Mississippi – for which he navigated the length of the river by canoe and launch – and four other books on the history of exploration.

Those journeys, however, were just practice for his first major success: sailing an open leather boat across the North Atlantic to show that Irish monks could have been the first Europeans to reach North America, as medieval legends about Ireland’s sixth-century Saint Brendan suggested. In a boat of oxhide – a type used by medieval Irish sailors – Severin survived fierce storms off Greenland and a puncturing caused by a small iceberg and then wrote a book about it: The Brendan Voyage which became an international best seller translated into 16 languages.

The Saint Brendan voyage, Severin says, also led to the Sindbad voyage. “We were sitting off the coast of Newfoundland, when I suddenly realized I had a winner: building and sailing replicas of ancient boats.”

But to create public interest, he went on, he also had to have a character like Saint Brendan. “Suddenly/’ he says, “the figure of Sindbad appeared in my mind”.

It was a natural. The legendary voyages of the world’s best known mariner, never seriously studied before, “were ripe for investigation.” On publication of The Brendan Voyage? therefore, Severin began to pore over ancient trading documents, maps, shipwrights’ plans and museum exhibits. Later, when his research led him to Oman, he also began to walk the coastline – measuring and sketching the rotting rib-cages of long-abandoned dhows half buried in the sand.

At first, the Omanis took little notice of the stranger poking around their beaches. “I had written to tell them about my project but apparently they had forgotten,” says Severin. But then, on the eve of his departure, he was asked by the Ministry of National Heritage and Culture to give a lecture and showed his audience, which included the minister himself, a film he had made of The Brendan Voyage.

Severin, of course, thought he had finally attracted some attention, but though he was presented with an old Omani sword in appreciation, nothing more was said. Hardly had he returned to his home in County Cork, Ireland, however, when he received a telegram asking him to return immediately to Oman. There the ministry, with approval of His Majesty Qaboos bin Said, Sultan of Oman, offered to sponsor Severin’s Sindbad project.

“I never actually asked them to sponsor it,” says Severin, “they simply decided to do it themselves”.

At that point, the research phase ended and the construction phase started. With the help of Omani shipwrights, Severin set about building an authentic replica of the kind of boat Sindbad might have sailed to China over 1,000 years ago. Based on early Arab and Persian sketches and written descriptions of ninth-century, deep-sea trading vessels, he and the shipwrights designed a ship 26 meters long (87 feet), with a 6.4 meter beam (21 feet), and two meter draft (six feet). It was built of hand-sawn wooden planks sewn together with hand-rolled coconut rope – no nails – and was powered by two Triangular cotton sails-no engine. They quickly found out, however , that both the materials for such a craft – and the craftsmen were scarce. To find both, Severin had to scour the most backward and remote places of the region – where traditional boat – building methods still survive. He found some shipwrights in Oman, for example, But to recruit the resst also had to go to Laccadive Islands, a territory of India off India’s western coast. For timber for the hull he had to go to the forests of southern India ; there Arab shipweights of long ago had found and selected their timber and had it hauled out by elephants. The coconut rope,also from India, was far more difficult to find. As it would be the only thing holding the ship together,it had to be very strong, but most Indian rope makers had long since abandoned the practic eof socking it in seawater- a process once used to give it the strength Severin needed . For weeks, therefore, Severin roamed the west coast of India chewing rope – literally. “People thought I was mad, but it was the only way I could tell it had been soaked in salt water,” says Severin .

Finally, form the island of Agatti, came some coconut rope soaked in seawater. But as he was forbidden by government restrictions to go there himself, Severing had to remain on the mainland “tasting” coils of rope sent over by the islanders until he had enough: in all 640 kilometers (400 miles).

At last, however , Severin was able to assemble his men, his wood and his rope at Sur, on the southeast tip of the Arabian Peninsuula. Once one of the busiest boat building and trading towns of the Gulf, Sur, when Severin arrived, was a ghost town in which declining trade with India and East Africa, had forced its traders to sell their boats,and had compelled its famous shipwrights to put away their tools .

The arrival of Tim Severin, his 45-man work force and their tons of materials and supplies soon revived Sur. Spurning modern accommodation, for example, the boat builders chose as their headquarters a 300-year-old, sea front home, empty since the drowning of the owner and his six sons in a sea tragedy 30 years before. Severin and his “green shirts” – so called because of the green smocks his Arab shipwrights wore – gave the rambling, two-story house a fresh coat of whitewash, moved in and set to work building the Sohar.

The first step was to shape and lay the single 16-meter keel log (52 feet). Next, hand-shaped planks were placed edge-to-edge and sewn into position with criss-cross stitches of coconut rope. Then wadding, from 75,000 coconut husks, was packed into the seams; when wet they would swell and make the hull watertight.

Those steps, of course, are only the basics; in addition, the finished dhow would require four tons of rope for rigging, hawsers to carry its 23-meter-long main spar (76 feet) and four tons of sail. Nevertheless, the Sohar was completed in a record seven months – two years before western shipwrights had predicted – partly, says Severin, because of the dedication of the workmen. “It seems to have touched a chord,” he said, “some appreciation of their heritage.”

Next, Severin and his crew had to learn to sail their ship – as well as test it. They took a shake-down cruise across the Arabian Sea to practice ancient Arab sailing techniques and methods of navigation; their aim, after all, was to live and sail as Sindbad might have done 1,000 years before, not simply retrace his route. Apart from scientific apparatus and essential safety gear, the Sohar had no modern equipment aboard. There was no auxilary power, all meals were prepared on a charcoal fire on deck, and their only guide to China were the stars – plus an early Arab navigational aid known as the kamal.

The oldest known instrument for latitude observation at sea, the kamal dates back to before the 10th century and is still in use in some Arab dhows even today. It is a rectangular board with a cord running to its center point and with knots in the cord – or wooden tablets strung from it – corresponding to the latitudes of the ports of call.

To use it, the navigator holds the selected knot or tablet to his eye – the board in front of him at the full stretch of the string – aligns the star with the top edge of the board and the horizon with the bottom edge and measuring degrees of latitude in isba, the width of one finger; the depth of the board is four isba and 224 isba were considered to equal 360 degrees.

Ingenious though it was, however, the kamal was but one of a number of navigational instruments developed by Arab mariners. Indeed, says Severin, “the Arabs invented astral navigation.”

This is not just rhetoric. Arabs, for example, wrote navigational treatises in the form of poems to make it easier to memorize the immense amount of data – and one, by Ibn Majid, has 1,082 verses containing such data as Pole Star altitudes for places on the coasts of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, “compass” bearings, sailing dates and distances. The poems on record today date from the 15th century, but the tradition dates back to 1000 A.D. and possibly earlier.

The Arabs were not only master navigators, but also experienced meteorologists and geographers – true scientists of the sea. In keeping with this tradition the Sohar carried three marine scientists, who carried out numerous experiments during the voyage, along with a film crew, an artist, a photographer, a driver, a radio operator, a doctor and a cook.

On November 21, 1980 – almost three years after Tim Severin first conceived the Sindbad project – the Sohar set sail from Sur. As its departure coincided with celebrations marking the 10th anniversary of Sultan Qaboos’ accession to the throne, the dhow was given a rousing send off and was escorted to international waters by ships of the Omani navy. Severin’s last words, shouted back across the waves as the Sohar headed out to sea were: “Thank you Green Shirts” – a heartfelt tribute to the men who built his boat.

At first the ship was a brute to handle. “It didn’t sail well at all,” says Peter Hunnam, the expedition’s scientific leader.

One of the problems was that the European and American scientists and technicians, who had also to double as crew, were not experienced sailors like Severin and the Omanis. “We had to teach them,” says Musalam Ahmad. To raise the enormous mainsail, for example, was a tremendous task; hauling it and its 23-meter spar to the top of the mast (76 feet) took at least eight men. “The Omanis,” says Severin, “would break into old sea chanties and continue until the task was done.”

With experience however, the performance of crew and boat greatly improved. “Things got much better as we went along,” says Hunnam. “Lashings improved and you got to know which rope was going to be a ‘pig’ and which wasn’t.” And soon, says Severin, the Sohar was sailing “like a witch.” With a good wind behind her, he said, she “rose out of the water like a high-speed train.” In fact, added Ahmad, a former merchant seaman and officer in the Omani navy, the Sohar proved a “better ship” then any of the modern ones he had ever sailed in.

From Sur, the Sohar had headed east across the Arabian Sea, then south down India’s Malabar Coast to the Laccadive Islands and the expedition’s first landfall was Calicut, on the south-west coast of India, just before Christmas, 1980. Here the crew gave the Sohar a “1,000 mile service check” – removing and cleaning her ballast, and checking the coconut rope stitches that held the ship together. “She was in remarkably good shape and had stood up to the first leg of our journey in a way that made us all truly proud of her,” said Severin.

It was at Calicut too that Severin learned that three weeks after the Sohar left Sur, a French archeological expedition had dug up in Oman a porcelain Buddha astride a Chinese lion – establishing, beyond doubt, Oman’s long trading links with the Far East. “And there we were,” said Severin, “on our way to China.”

On January 10,1981, the Sohar resumed its journey in what turned out to be the most pleasant leg of the voyage – sailing down the coast of India to the southern tip of Sri Lanka. The wind pattern led them to the port of Galle, and there, says Severin, “not 500 meters from our anchorage (1,600 feet) was the first Islamic shrine ever to be built on Sri Lanka.”

This indicates he says, that “this was the area the first Arab sailors came to all those hundreds of years ago on their way to the East,” adding that the now-famous gem mines of Sri Lanka may have been Sindbad’s “Valley of the Diamonds.”

The Sohar’s average speed during the two-month voyage from Sur to Galle was between three and a half and four knots-its fastest speed in a storm was seven knots. After leaving Sri Lanka, however, their progress slowed; caught in the Doldrums or Equatorial Trough, renowned throughout history as a serious sailing hazard, the Sohar was becalmed, in merciless temperatures, for nearly a month. Eventually, as a result, food and water began to run short and the 25 men on board had to exist on a diet of Omani dates, rice and fish caught from the sea and to catch rain water in hastily rigged tarpaulins during the occasional rain storms. As undoubtedly happened during the original Sindbad voyages, tensions developed among the crew. “Trivial things,” says Hunnam, “became major issues.” As the days crept by with nothing to do but keep watch, read, play cards and listen to cassettes – one of their few modern comforts aboard – one British biologist developed a “longing for cream cakes,” while another lamented later: “We couldn’t even make a cup of tea.”

Finally, however, the wind rose and the Sohar set her sails again for Sumatra. But hardly had the ship escaped from the Doldrums when she was once more crippled – this time by too much wind. At 4 a.m. one morning, when most of the crew were sleeping, a sudden gust caught the mainsail on the wrong side of the mast, sending the 23-meter horizontal spar (76 feet) holding the sail crashing into the upright and snapping it in two. Fortunately no one was injured in the incident, but it led to further delays, and only by jury-rigging a spare sail was the crew able to continue. Finally, nervous and exhausted, the crew and their crippled ship limped into Sabang, on the northern tip of Sumatra, on April 19th.

Their problems, however, were not yet over. They were now in a main shipping lane, and sailing through the narrow straits between Sumatra and Malaysia they were nearly run down several times at night by giant freighters.

“One ship came within 50 feet of us,” says marine biologist Andrew Price, a former Aramco consultant. “We flashed lights against our sail to attract attention but there seemed to be no one on watch. We changed course by 90 degrees but they still kept coming at us. Then at the very last moment they saw us and veered away?’

After that incident, the crew fixed a powerful strobe, used for light while filming, to the top of the Sohar’s mast. “It was so bright,” says Hunnam, “that one ship actually took us for a lighthouse and stopped.”

Sharks proved bothersome too. Once, when the diver went overboard to renew frayed ropes lashing the rudder to the hull, a particularly vicious White Tipped shark suddenly appeared close to him. But the diver turned around and growled at it – a personal technique he had developed for scaring off sharks – and it swam away. On the other hand, sharks also provided food while they were becalmed. “We once caught 15 sharks in 15 minutes,” says Musalam Ahmad proudly. Grimaced Severin: “It was shark for breakfast, shark for lunch and shark for dinner”.

The Sohar crew was also on the lookout for whales – but for a very different reason. One of the marine surveys they carried out was a “whale watch” to chart their types, numbers and positions in the Indian Ocean. The fact that they saw very few, says Hunnam, should provide further ammunition for conservationists fighting to protect whales.

Hunnam also hopes that information collected by the Sohar will prompt some action to save the dugong or sea cow – whose nursing breasts may have given rise to stories of “mermaids.” Sea cows are an even more seriously endangered species than whales. “We sighted only two dugongs in 750 square kilometers (300 square miles) of prime habitat off Sri Lanka, which indicates they are now almost extinct,” says Hunnam.

Yet another Sohar survey focused on barnacles. The purpose of this study was to collect information which may help chemists develop a barnacle repellant paint for ship’s hulls.

Curiously, the Sohar, although a replica of a 1,000 year old craft, proved far more suited for some types of marine research than many modern vessels. Because the boat was relatively small and slow moving, it provided an excellent platform near the sea surface from which scientific observations and recordings could be made.

Because fair winds in the Strait of Malacca enabled Sohar to make up some of the time it had lost in the Doldrums, it sailed into Singapore on June 2, only two weeks behind schedule.

Again, though, there was danger. Entering the third-largest port in the world, and one of the busiest, was terrifying. “We came at night under full sail the wrong way (against outgoing traffic),” said Severin. “We went right under the anchor chain of a super-tanker. My hair was going white.”

Finally, though, Severin dropped sail and waited for a tug to tow them into harbor, where they were greeted on the quayside by a traditional Chinese dragon dance welcome. “When I was small I saw an Indian movie about Sindbad the Sailor and grew up thinking he was Indian,” said a cheery Port Authority official watching the arrival. “Later I saw an English movie about Sindbad and thought he must be English. Now after all these years I finally learn the truth – he was an Arab.”

Correcting Western and Eastern misconceptions about the Arabs is one of the main purposes of Severin’s voyage. “Most people consider Arabs people of the desert,” said the tanned and bearded explorer as he relaxed at Singapore’s famous Raffles Hotel after landing. “But they are also people of the sea. I want to prove that the Arabs are a people who have not only come to prominence recently because of oil, but also have great seafaring history.”

Evidence of this abounds in Singapore’s old Arab quarter – you can still buy Omani dates in “Muscat Street” – although it is fast disappearing as developers bulldoze the old parts of town to put up new multi-story buildings.

The last leg of the voyage, from Singapore to Canton, was the one that worried Severin most. “There are still pirates in the South China Sea and we could run into storms,” he said before leaving Singapore.

For this reason, one British scientist said, they were “armed to the teeth,” and had aboard an Omani “weapons expert” and an ex-member of the famous British Special Armed Services.

As it turned out, however, there were neither pirates nor storms in the South China Sea, and the Sohar reached the mouth of the Pearl River in the last days of June, well ahead of schedule. In fact, they had to cool their heels for more than a week at Whampoa before sailing triumphantly up to Canton, on July 6, for the official Chinese welcoming ceremony that, some thought, probably equalled the reception given Sindbad.

From Canton, Severin sailed the Sohar to Hong Kong for transportation, via the Omani navy, back to Sur, where, perhaps, the gallant dhow may become either a tourist attraction or a training ship. Whatever happens to it, the story of its epic voyage will certainly go down in the annals of Arab seafaring history -alongside “The Adventures of Sindbad the Sailor.”

The Sindbad Voyage
‘an extraordinary’ explorer independent
Putnam Adult; 1st American ed edition, (February 15, 1983)
ISBN: 0091505607

The Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun

Arnold Toynbee, one of the most distinguished modern historians, called Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (“Introduction to History”) “undoubtedly the greatest work of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or place.” Yet neither the Muqaddimah, nor the universal history that followed it, made any impact on European scholarship until the 19th century, when western scholars suddenly discovered that Ibn Khaldun had anticipated many of their theories of social and historical development by nearly 500 years.

What Ibn Khaldun did was to recognize, before anyone else, that history was “more than information about political events, dynasties and occurrences of the remote past, elegantly presented and spiced with proverbs.” History, he wrote, was a “new science” that should uncover an “inner meaning” and find “the causes and origins of existing things and deep knowledge of the how and why of events.”

To find this inner meaning, Ibn Khaldun developed a rational, analytical approach in which he discarded clichés and conventional ideas and rejected superstition and unsupported data. Too often, he commented, history had been written without a critical attitude, without thorough research, without knowledge of politics, custom, civilization and social organization. Figures were exaggerated – armies, revenues, wealth – and stories were accepted without any examination of their probability, or with errors of interpretation.

As one example, Ibn Khaldun pointed to the Arabian Nights tale about the famous Caliph al-Ma’mun that had been repeated in many histories. “One night, on his rambles through the streets of Baghdad” Ibn Khaldun wrote, “al-Ma’mun is said to have come upon a basket that was being let down from one of the roofs by means of pulleys and hoisted cords of silk thread. He seated himself in the basket and grabbed the pulley, which started moving. He was then taken up in to a chamber of extraordinary magnificence. Then a woman of uncommonly seductive beauty is said to have come out from behind the curtains. She greeted al-Ma’mun and invited him to keep her company. He drank wine with her the whole night long. In the morning he returned to his companions… He had fallen so much in love with the woman that he asked her father for her hand.”

To Ibn Khaldun this tale was utterly unacceptable as history. “How does all this accord with al-Ma’mun’s well-known piety and learning, his emulation of the life of his forefathers…? How could it be correct that he would act like one of those wicked scoundrels who muse themselves by rambling about at night, entering strange houses in the dark, and engaging in nocturnal trysts…? And how does that story fit with the position and noble character of al-Hasan ibn Sahl’s daughter, and with the firm morality and chastity that reigned in her father’s house …?” Such stories were always cropping up in the works of the old chroniclers, he said, adding that the true historian must distinguish silver and gold from dross and base metals.

Furthermore, Ibn Khaldun wrote, historians must be aware that conditions and customs do not remain constant. Earlier, for example, al-Mas’udi, one of the great historians of Islam, had described the conditions of the world, the sects and customs, the countries and the dynasties—and his work had become a basic reference for historians. But in the intervening centuries the face of the earth had changed. Populations had shifted. Climatic conditions had altered. The Black Death had swept the inhabited world, weakening tribes and dynasties, laying waste cities, emptying villages. In sum, the world had changed, and in his new history of it Ibn Khaldun traced the extent and searched for an explanation of these changes.

History, Ibn Khaldun explained, was information about human social organization. Man was distinguished from other animals by his sciences and crafts; by his need for restraining influence and authority; by his economic activities; and by civilization—in other words, by his need to live in villages and cities with other human beings “for the comforts and companionship and for the satisfaction of human needs, as a result of the natural disposition of human beings toward cooperation in order to be able to make a living.” The ability to think, and therefore cooperate, was given to human beings to compensate for their lack of the fangs, claws, horns, thick hides and powerful muscles that protected the animals.

Human social organization, he went on, was necessary to provide food, shelter and clothing, as well as defense against other animals and against men own natural aggressiveness. And once civilization had been achieved, the authority of a ruler also became necessary as a restraint against injustice and aggression.

According to Ibn Khaldun’s theory of history, social organization developed in two fundamentally different environments: desert, or Bedouin, and town, or sedentary. In the first setting, rural people—sometimes nomads, sometimes villagers far from the great population centers—lived a simple existence, restricting themselves to the bare necessities. They were governed by their natural leaders and bound together by ‘Asabiyah group solidarity stemming from blood ties and family traditions—a term traditionally used to describe narrow bias, clannishness and atavism, but used by Ibn Khaldun in a positive sense.

From this reservoir of civilization, Ibn Khaldun explained, sedentary society developed. As population increased and created a surplus of labor, crafts and sciences developed and, in turn, provided better and more varied food, more comfortable houses, more elaborate clothes and other luxuries. As population increased, so did ‘Asabiyah, and with it the Mulk, the worldly or practical rule of a leader; he at first was merely the Ra’is, or chief, but his simple political organization anticipated the state proper.

Social organization, Ibn Khaldun believed, arose from this beginning and followed a predictable cycle in which, over the generations, dynasties rose and fell. Nonetheless, civilization’s better qualities were preserved because succeeding generations tended to maintain the civilized customs of the past. In sum, political and cultural life move in never-ending circles of decline and re-birth, but civilization remains. The only occasions when the cyclical movement is interrupted are when certain turning points in history occur; in his own era these were the Black Death and the Mongol invasions.

To this cyclical movement of states and dynasties Ibn Khaldun admitted but one exception: the rule of the first four caliphs of Islam, the successors of Muhammad the Prophet. To Ibn Khaldun the formative period of Islam, pure and unworldly was the ideal state.

Many of Ibn Khaldun’s concepts and attitudes, in fact, had their sources in Islamic theology and philosophy. Yet he was a profoundly original thinker, as well—in many ways the first modern historian. In addition to being the first to take an analytical view of human society, he was the first to perceive the importance of economics in political history, to draw distinctions between the impact of rural and urban life and to stress the role of the city in the emergence of civilization and of the state. His other striking contribution was the idea of ‘asabiyah group solidarity—as the driving force of political action.

The Muqaddimah is the best-known part of Ibn Khaldun’s universal history, but the volumes that followed this introduction were great accomplishments in themselves. The first four dealt with the pre-Islamic world and with Arabia and eastern Islam; the last two were devoted to the history of the Berbers and the Muslim dynasties of northwest Africa—Maghrib—and concluded with Ibn Khaldun’s own autobiography. The chapters on the history of the Maghrib—much of which Ibn Khaldun himself had witnessed—is, even today, the most important sources of information about northwest Africa of that era.

Shalah al-Din Yusuf bin Ayub (Arabic: صلاح الدين الأيوبي, Kurdish: Silhedînê Eyûbî, Turkish: Selahaddin Eyyubi) (c. 1138 – March 4, 1193)as he is popularly known was born in 1138 C.E. and was of Kurdish descent. The meaning of his Arabic name is “righteousness of the faith” As a child Saladin was a scholar who studied the Quran as well as poetry and his scholarly ways would continue through his life even when the thoughts of Holy War (Jihad) consumed his focus.

At the young age of fourteen, he entered into the service of his uncle Nur ed-Din another great and respected Arab warrior. Another mentor of the young Saladin was the Saracen chief Zenghi who in 1144 overthrew the city of Edessa, an outpost of Western world for many years prior because of its proximity to Antioch. Saladin learned his military lessons well and soon began to stand out among Nur ed-Din’s forces. In several campaigns between the years of 1164 and 1169 C.E. he had made a lasting impression on his peers.

In 1169 Saladin served with another uncle named Shirkuh as second to the commander in chief of the Syrian army. Shirkuh died only two months after Saladin received his new position. Despite his humble position and due to the fact that he held little regard for the Fatimid ruler of Cairo, Saladin turned Egypt into an Ayyubid powerhouse. He used many Kurds in important positions in his army and in no time he had improved the Egyptian economy and trained an army ready to take on the Frankish Crusaders. In just two years Saladin suppressed the rulers for which he had little regard and thus united Egypt with the Abbasid Caliphate. When Nur ed-Din died in 1174, Saladin began his expansion of territories. In just twelve years he had Damascus, Syria, Alleppo, Mawsil and Iraq. After a three-month battle he captured Jerusalem in 1187 at the Battle of Hattin. In February of 1193 Saladin rode out to meet some pilgrims returning from Mecca. That evening he became bed ridden due to pain and fever and in a number of days fell into a coma from which he never returned. Saladin died March 3rd 1193 at the age of 55.

Story of a Hero: Into the Holy Land he rode, to lead the Arabs in their Crusade.

In the year 1095, Alexius Comnenus, Emperor of Byzantium, sent a series of frantic messages to Pope Urban II in Rome. Couched in the elaborate style of the time and dwelling at length on Comnenus’ troubles, the messages could have been summarized in one word: “Help.” Asia’s fierce Seljuk Turks had conquered the vast Anatolian reaches of the Emperor’s domain and were almost at the gates of Constantinople. Without help, Comnenus told the Pope, Byzantium’s undermanned army could not hold out and Constantinople, the bastion of Christendom in the East, would surely fall to the Turks.
Urban went Comnenus one better. At the Council of Clermont in France in November, 1095, in what historian Philip Hitti has called “probably the most effective speech in history,” he not only rallied troops to save Constantinople but set in motion a series of “holy wars” to free the Holy Land and Jerusalem from 400 years of Muslim rule. They were wars that would later be called Crusades and which would call forth onto the stage of medieval history some of that period’s most remarkable figures, One of them, a hero to both Islam and Christianity, was Al-Malik al-Nasir al-Sultan Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, better known as Saladin.
By the time Saladin made his appearance, Urban’s exhortations had succeeded beyond his most extravagant hopes. The crusaders had saved Constantinople, conquered the Holy Land, and had ruled what they called the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem for 70 years. The crusaders being a tiny minority in a sea of hostile Muslims, their rule was not an easy one. On the other hand, with Islamic power fragmented among the Seljuk-dominated caliph of Baghdad, the rival Fatimids of Cairo and a semi-independent warlord in Syria called Nur al-Din, crusader rule also seemed permanent.

Saladin, son of a high-ranking Kurdish officer in Nur al-Din’s army, was an Arab by culture, language and inclination. Born in Tikrit, Iraq, in 1138, he was called Yusuf ibn Ayyub (Yusuf son of Ayyub) but later assumed the additional name of Salah al-Din (Rectifier of the Faith). From these beginnings, he became one of the few Muslims of the times famous enough to win a westernized version of their names. The crusaders, and later all of Europe, shortened Salah al-Din to Saladin?the name under which he was later romanticized in the West in countless poems and legends.

Late in the year 1168, Saladin took part in an expedition commanded by his uncle and sent to Egypt by Nur al-Din to head off a Frankish take-over. Nur’s soldiers eluded the Franks and entered Cairo as liberators. Saladin’s uncle died two months later and in March, 1169, Saladin, at 31, was appointed Sultan of Egypt. Arab chroniclers relate that at this time Saladin gave up wine and other pleasures and made a vow to deliver the Holy Land from the Franks.

Two years later, the last Fatimid caliph died, September-October, 1969, and Saladin founded his own dynasty, the Ayyubids. Using Egypt as a power base, he also began the long task of unifying Islam in order to fulfill his vow. There followed an 18-year period during which Saladin put his Egyptian base in order, his two chief rivals?King Amalric of Jerusalem and his erstwhile suzerain, Nur al-Din?died, and Saladin unified the country between the Nile and the Tigris under his rule. This was a period of sporadic clashes with the forces of the Leper King, Baldwin IV of Jerusalem and his successor, King Guy of Lusignan, of truces almost invariably broken by the Franks and restored, thanks to Saladin’s legendary tolerance. But open warfare was carefully avoided. Then, in 1186, the treacherous Reginald of Chatillon, bandit-knight and master of the Castle of Kerak in Jordan, who had previously made it known that he intended to conquer Mecca itself, attacked a large caravan traveling through the desert beneath his mountain eyrie. For Saladin this was the last straw. He proclaimed a holy war against the crusaders and vowed to kill Reginald with his own hand.

In July 4, 1187, a vast force under Saladin’s banner defeated the Frankish army in the battle of the Horns of Hattin?in which Saladin struck down the captured Reginald as promised. Then on October 2, almost 90 years after the first crusaders took the Holy City, came the supreme moment of Saladin’s career?the capture of Jerusalem. This momentous event, however, sent ripples of indignation across Europe and brought on the Third Crusade, led by Richard the Lion Hearted and King Philip II of France. Five years later, after a period of battles, sieges, counter-sieges and diplomatic negotiations, Saladin and Richard signed a peace treaty under which the Muslims kept Jerusalem and the interior and the crusaders were permitted to retain, for a short while longer, their tenuous hold on the coastal towns. Saladin, having fulfilled his oath, withdrew to Damascus where, at the age of 55, he died, already a hero and soon to be a legend.

The legend, of course, was embellished after his death with such myths, half-truths, superstitious beliefs and romance, that the real Saladin nearly vanished. Fortunately, Arab historians who were his contemporaries and the Latin chroniclers who lived in the Holy Land preserved a more realistic picture. It seems that Saladin was a slender man of medium height with a dark complexion, dark hair, eyes and beard, and a rather melancholy expression. He had tremendous endurance and simple tastes in food. He liked fresh fruit and sherbet, drank barley-water when he was suffering, and enjoyed boiled rice. When not in the field he liked nothing better than an evening surrounded by scholars, friends and poets, discussing theology and law or listening to readings of the Koran, which if well rendered could move him to tears. He kept a small book in his pocket in which he wrote down quotations from his favorite authors, and he would often read aloud from it to illustrate a point in his conversation. Saladin liked chess, but his favorite pastime was polo?largely because it involved horses. Horses were his weakness and he offered them frequently as special gifts. He could reel off the pedigree of an Arabian mare without a moment’s hesitation.

Although Saladin had all the wealth of Egypt and Syria at his disposal, the trappings of power had no attraction for him. When he became supreme ruler of Egypt after the death of the Fatimid caliph, for instance, he preferred a small simple house to the caliph’s fabulous palace (4,000 rooms, a 120,000-volume library and sackfuls of jewels). Knowing that others liked ostentation, however, he gave away most of the contents of the palace.
Unlike the colorfully-dressed crusaders, Saladin usually wore a simple wool or linen cloak. As a youth, as a concession to the treachery that lurked behind every Egyptian curtain, he wore a coat of mail under his robes. His personal retinue?loyal men who were willing to die for him, and often did?followed his example. In his later years he wore a padded coat while on horseback to keep off the chill.

In contrast to the deference shown to other autocrats, there was no need to fawn in Saladin’s presence. Ignoring protocol, he commanded loyalty by his personal bearing and example, his gentle character and his magnanimity. During audiences for example, the jostling petitioners often trod on the very cushion where the Sultan sat smiling.
More important, perhaps, was his relationship with his officers and principal emirs. During one long tour of inspection, his friend Baha al-Din, who later wrote a history of Saladin, was riding in front of the Sultan and inadvertently splashed mud all over him, ruining his clothes. “But he only laughed and refused to let me go behind,” the historian related. Discussion was free and unrestrained by any need for flattery. At one officers’ meeting the Sultan asked for a drink but nobody paid any attention. He had to repeat his request several times, a secretary recounted, before he was served. For his followers to have felt so free in his presence, Saladin must have inspired a trust which was unthinking.

Little is known about Saladin’s wife, except that he married her in Egypt and that she stood by him through thick and thin and gave him 16 sons. There is no record that Saladin ever took on the four wives allowed by Islam. It is evident that his campaigns were a personal sacrifice, since he had to leave his wife and children for long spells, and it was well known that nothing pleased him more than sitting in the cool gardens of his palace in Damascus, playing with his younger children. His eldest son, al-Afdal, became one of his principal lieutenants, but there is more than one hint in the chronicles that his favorite was his third eldest, al-Zahir.

If Saladin was an unusual sovereign, he was a more unusual? even unique? general. In addition to his talents as commander, strategist and planner, Saladin was chivalrous to a fault, a trait that made him famous in the West. Although he could be inflexible and even cruel when the occasion demanded, he genuinely disliked bloodshed. In fact, the only stain on his record was the execution of about 300 knights of the two main military orders, the Templars and the Hospitalers, at Tiberias a few months before he captured Jerusalem. And even that act when considered in the context of those unsettled times, was no awful crime. When the crusaders first occupied Jerusalem in 1099 they killed thousands, including women and children. When Saladin recaptured the city, there was no killing and no desecration of holy places, and Christian pilgrims were allowed free access to their places of worship.

The Sultan, far from becoming drunk with power, seemed to feel that his new responsibilities demanded more and more restraint. At the famous siege of Acre several years later the most colorful of Saladin’s adversaries, Richard the Lion Hearted, violated an agreement and slaughtered the city’s entire 3,000-man garrison. Saladin apparently forgave Richard this villainy: during a later skirmish in front of Jaffa, Richard’s horse was killed under him and Saladin sent him a steed to replace it, with the message: “It is not right that so brave a warrior should have to fight on foot.”

Saladin always preferred negotiation and diplomacy to fighting. War to him was a necessary means of reaching certain objectives?a last resort when arbitration had failed. Over-lenience to his enemies and a somewhat naive faith in their oaths were considered faults, and he repeatedly found himself in difficulties because of his efforts to wage a humane war. Although he was pictured in the West as the death knell of Christendom and its worst enemy, he appeared to have a two-level approach to the Christians. He never wavered in his zeal to drive the Franks out of the Holy Land and restore the banner of Islam over Jerusalem. But when dealing with individual Christians he showed respect and even admiration for their beliefs, as can be seen in his decision not to tear down the Church of the Holy Sepulchre but, on the contrary, to allow priests to hold prayers there and receive pilgrims from across the sea.

Saladin was especially chivalrous towards women and children. Once he was besieging a castle near Aleppo and after protracted and costly efforts, managed to capture it. Then, a little girl, the sister of Aleppo’s ruler, came to his camp and Saladin received her with gifts and kindness. As all little girls will, she asked for one thing more: the castle which he had just captured. Without a moment’s pause, Saladin gave her the fortress which had cost him a siege of 38 days.

During one of his periodic attacks on the Castle of Kerak, Saladin learned there was a wedding party underway inside. He politely inquired in which wing it was being held, and then directed his catapults elsewhere. (The bride sent out cakes and other samples from the wedding feast.) After the capture of Jerusalem, the widow of his treacherous enemy, Reginald of Chatillon, asked Saladin to release her imprisoned son. He agreed, providing she ordered the garrison of Kerak to surrender the castle, which had so far remained out of his grasp. To show his good faith, Saladin released the prisoner and returned him to his mother?in advance. The widow failed to persuade the garrison to surrender, and sent her son back to Saladin. When the garrison of Kerak was finally starved into surrendering, Saladin returned the son to his mother, and to top it all rewarded the garrison for its bravery in fighting without its commander: he bought back their wives and children from the Bedouin of the area who had taken them in exchange for food.

French romances of the 14th century try to make out Saladin as being in love with the Lady Sibylla, wife of the Prince of Antioch, Bohemond III. In fact, there is no evidence that Saladin ever actually met the lady, but there was at least indirect contact, Some chroniclers say she acted as Saladin’s spy in the crusader camp, providing him, with valuable information about internal rivalries and disputes among the Frankish kings and barons. Her motives remain obscure. She was a native daughter of the land and her reputation was said to have been less than spotless; there is a suggestion that Bohemond was forced into marrying her after divorcing his first wife, Perhaps she had more sympathy for the Muslims than for her husband’s people. Imad al-Din, an historian of the times and the Sultan’s chancellor, reports that Saladin rewarded her information with beautiful presents.

The use of such a highly-placed female spy indicates Saladin’s good generalship, but there is further proof of this quality. Although he was supreme commander of the Muslim armies, which at times counted up to 70,000 men, he was often overruled in the councils of war by his officers and had to bow to their will. Such free discussion gave scope for initiative, and Saladin was always open to suggestions. A humble coppersmith from Damascus once came forward and claimed he had discovered a chemical compound which could destroy the supposedly fireproof Frankish siege-towers near the walls of Acre. Saladin allowed the young man to try out his discovery, and sure enough, to the surprise of the Franks, the discovery?a preparation of naphtha–brought the towers down.
Besides providing a focal point for Islam at a time when it was threatened from without and within, Saladin helped his people in more fundamental ways. He encouraged the establishment of institutes of higher learning in Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem. He also set up courts of law. Unlike other potentates, before and since, Saladin did not set himself above the law. A merchant once filed a lawsuit against the Sultan, claiming Saladin had seized the property of a former slave of his on the pretext that the slave actually belonged to him. The merchant produced documents in support of his claim, and demanded that Saladin give back the property. If AI-Malik al-Nasir al-Sultan Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub were not the man he was, the merchant would have disappeared from the face of the earth for such seeming impudence. But Saladin hired a lawyer and himself appeared in court, where he sat beside the merchant and testified that the slave had always belonged to him until he had been freed, and that therefore the property had passed on to his heirs. Then the lawyer took over and produced witnesses who proved the merchant’s documents were forgeries, and the merchant lost the case.

Saladin, as usual, took pity on the defeated. He gave the merchant a robe and enough money to cover the expenses of the trial and his journey home?just to show there were no hard feelings. After peace with the Franks was achieved Saladin gave up plans for a pilgrimage to Mecca to turn his attention to affairs of state which had been neglected during the wars. This champion of Islam never had the supreme satisfaction of performing the hajj to Mecca, which countless thousands of his subjects had been able to enjoy, thanks to his protection.When all the accounts of the Sultan’s life and times are weighed, it seems that in his own sphere of activity, Saladin was a man of real greatness, with nothing Low or vain or petty about him. All his life he had impressed others by his example and even his enemies the crusaders (who often praised him) could console themselves that they had been vanquished by no ordinary adversary.

Saladin’s epitaph might well have been his parting words to aI-Zahir shortly before his death. “I commend thee to Almighty God,” he said, placing his hand on his son’s head. “He is the source of all good. Do the Will of God, which is the Way of Peace. Beware of bloodshed; de not trust in that, for spilled blood never sleeps. Strive to gain the hearts of thy subjects and watch over all of their interests, for thou art appointed by God and by me to look after their welfare. I have become as great as I am because I have won the hearts of men by gentleness and kindness. Never nourish iii feeling toward any man, for Death spares none. Be prudent in thyself. God will pardon the penitent, for He is gracious.”

The Life of Saladin
From the Works of Baha Ad-Din and Imad Ad-Din
Saqi Essentials, 2006
ISBN: 0863569285

The Remarkable Account of Ibn Fadhlan

More than a millennium ago, as fleets of Viking raiders were striking fear into the hearts of coast- and river-dwellers throughout western Europe, other Norsemen of more mercantile inclination were making their way east. With no less boldness and stamina, bearing luxurious furs and enticing nodules of amber, they penetrated the vast steppes of what is today Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and entered Central Asia. There they met Muslim traders who paid for Norse wares with silver coins, which the Vikings themselves did not mint, and which they coveted.

Their routes were various, and by the ninth and 10th centuries, a regular trade network had grown up. Some Norsemen traveled overland and by river, while others sailed over both the Black and Caspian Seas, joined caravans and rode camelback as far as Baghdad, which was then under Abbasid rule and populated by nearly a million souls. There, the Scandinavian traders found an emporium beyond their wildest dreams, for their fjord-rimmed homelands had only recently seen the emergence of a few rudimentary towns.

To the Arabs of Baghdad, the presence of the Norsemen probably did not come as much of a surprise, for the Arabs were long accustomed to meeting people from different cultures and civilizations. They were also keen and literate observers. Abbasid historians and caliphal envoys put to paper eyewitness accounts of the roving Scandinavians, leaving a historical legacy that is shedding new light both on Viking history and on a little-known chapter of early Islamic history.

From the time of the first Viking attacks on England in the late eighth century, the 300-year epoch known as the Viking Age found the Scandinavians venturing farther afield than any other Europeans. They colonized nearly the entire North Atlantic, even establishing a short-lived settlement in North America about the turn of the millennium. It was largely the Vikings from Norway and Denmark who made these western voyages, but waves of so-called “Eastern Vikings,” predominantly Swedes, headed southeast to establish trading centers at Kiev and Novgorod, where the elite among them became princes and rulers. It was in these lands that they were observed by several Muslim historians.

The Arab writers did not call the tall, blond traders “Vikings,” but by the ethnonym Rus (pronounced “Roos”). The origin of this term is obscure, and though some claim it stems from the West Finnic name for Sweden, Ruotsi, there is little agreement. Yet consistently, Byzantine and Arab writers referred to the Swedish traders and settlers, as well as the local populations among whom they settled and intermarried, as Rus, and this is the source of the modern name of Russia.

This name was applied only in the East. In France and Sicily, the Vikings were known as Normans. An elite guard of the Byzantine emperors, composed of eastern Scandinavians, was known as Varangians, but that term never came into widespread use outside the region. In al-Andalus, or Islamic Spain, they were known as al-majus, or “fire-worshipers,” a pejorative reference to their paganism.

Besides the Scandinavians themselves, only the British called the marauders “Vikings,” and this word may come from vik, or bay, and Viken, as Oslo Fjord was called, from which the earliest Viking ships emerged. Other authorities maintain that the name came from the Old Norse term i viking, which is the equivalent of “a-raiding,” as in “they went a-raiding down the Atlantic coast.” But “Viking” was never a blanket term for the whole people of the region until it became a popular, modern misuse. “We can refer to Viking-Age society, but not all Scandinavians were Vikings,” says Jesse Byock, who is professor of Old Norse literature at the University of California at Los Angeles. “They themselves used the term to refer to raiders from the region, but it certainly didn’t describe the local farmers who were back on the land.”

In western Europe, journal entries about Viking raids were often penned by monks and priests whose interests lay in painting them in the darkest, most savage colors. But in the East, the story was different. There the Rus were primarily explorers, colonizers and tradesmen, and although they were well-armed, Muslim accounts describe them as merchant-warriors whose primary business was trade. The Rus were after the Abbasid-issued dirhams flooding the region, and though at times, in the more remote regions, they procured these by exacting tribute, they largely traded with Muslims who had themselves ventured north and west to find opportunities for commerce.

We would in fact know little about these Rus, these Norsemen in the East, were it not for Muslim chroniclers, Ibn Fadhlan, whose ninth-century Risala (Letter) is the richest account of all, kept a journal that details his encounters with the Rus along the Volga, as well as with many other peoples. A century later, al-Tartushi, a merchant from Córdoba, described a Danish market town, passing down to us a rare glimpse of the Norsemen in their domestic setting. Other accounts, such as al-Mas’udi’s Meadows of Gold, written in 943, and al-Mukaddasi’s The Best Organization of Knowledge of the Regions, composed after 985, were briefer in their mentions of the Rus, but collectively they were all trailblazers in what was then the flourishing field of Islamic geography, a response to the thirst for knowledge about the vast Islamic world and the regions beyond it.

Unlike Europeans, Arab chroniclers bore no grudge against the Rus, and thus the Arab reports are more detached and, in the eyes of many scholars today, more credible. Most experts acknowledge that the Vikings were, in general, victims of a medieval “bad press,” for the military excursions of Charlemagne and other Europeans of the time were no less ruthless than theirs. Yet the Norsemen had only a runic alphabet, suited for no more than inscribing grave-stones and place-markers, and were hardly in a position to set the record straight themselves. Their oral sagas of heroes and gods would not be written down until the 12th century.

Many of the Muslim accounts have been translated into European languages over the past two centuries, and they are proving valuable in interpreting archeological evidence that continues to emerge. Hundreds of Viking Age graves and buried hoards, it turns out, contain caches of still-gleaming Arab dirhams, “the coin that helped fuel the Viking Age,” according to Thomas S. Noonan of the University of Minnesota. Noonan is one of the world’s leading experts on medieval Scandinavian ties with the Muslim world, and a specialist in Viking numismatic history.

It was largely the dirham that had lured the Scandinavians eastward in the first place, says Noonan. Silver had become their favored medium of exchange, but with no indigenous sources of the precious metal in the northern forests, they went in pursuit of it far and wide. Arab merchants had started circulating silver coins in the Volga region in the late eighth century, and Scandinavian traders, intent on finding the source of the lucre, set a course across the Baltic in their shallow-draft longboats.

In Russia, they braved the uncharted river systems, portaging from one tributary to another, shooting rapids and fending off hostile nomads until they reached the first eastern trade centers, those of the Turkic Khazars. The Khazars had become the dominant power in the Caucasian steppe by the middle of the seventh century, and they played a major role in trade between the region and the Islamic world for the next 300 years. Here, in the network of trading stations along the mighty rivers, the Swedes would have carried on active commerce with Arabs, Persians and Greeks. From there, some of the Scandinavians sailed down to the Black Sea, toward the regions they called “Sarkland,” a name that may refer either to the lands of the Saracens (today Azerbaijan and northern Iran); to the Khazar fortress of Sarkel, at the mouth of the Don on the Black Sea coast; or to serk, the Norse word for silk, which was widely traded in the region at the time.

The earliest reference by Muslim writers to the roving Norsemen was made at the beginning of the ninth century by Ibn Khurradadhbih, a Khurasani bon-vivant who headed Caliph al-Mu’tamid’s postal and intelligence-gathering service. In 844 he wrote about the travels of the saqalibah, a term generally used for fair-haired, ruddy-complexioned Europeans. They came in their boats, he wrote, “bringing beaver-skins, and skins of black foxes, and swords, from the furthest part of the Slav lands down to the Black Sea.” Rus traders, he wrote, transported their wares by camel from Jurjan, a town at the southeastern end of the Caspian Sea, to Baghdad, where saqalibah servants, who had learned Arabic, acted as interpreters.

Baghdad, then a circular city about 19 kilometers (12 mi) in diameter, was lavishly embellished with parks, marble palaces, gardens, promenades and finely built mosques. The Arabian Gulf trader, geographer and encyclopedist Yakut al-Rumi describes how both sides of the river were fronted by the palaces, kiosks, gardens and parks of the nobles, with marble steps leading down to the water’s edge, where thousands of gondolas festooned with little flags sailed by.

This was a far cry from the settlements occupied by the Rus. Astronomer and geographer Ibn Rustah, writing between 903 and 913, noted that “they have no villages, no cultivated fields.” Ibn Rustah described the Rus as sporting excellent swords, and wearing baggy trousers that were tight below the knee—a style which reflected the Eastern influence in their wardrobes. They were, in his estimation, heroic men who displayed great loyalty to each other. But their primary interest in the region was acquisitive: “Their only occupation is trading in sable and squirrel and other kinds of skins, which they sell to those who will buy from them,” he observed. “In payment, they take coins, which they keep in their belts.”

The Vikings paid little attention to the face value of the coins; rather, they used an Arab system of weights to measure the silver on portable balance scales. When it suited them, the coins were hewn into smaller pieces, melted down into ingots or fashioned into arm-rings for subsequent “hack-silver” transactions. The amount of Islamic silver reaching the region increased dramatically in the 10th century, when vast silver deposits were discovered in the Hindu Kush. This enabled the Khurasan-based Samanid dynasty to mint large numbers of coins and to become, numismatic evidence shows, the main supplier of dirhams.

The Arabs, for their part, were eager to have caps and coats made of black fox, the most valued of all the furs, according to al-Mas’udi. Al-Mukaddasi noted that from the Rus one could obtain furs of sable, Siberian squirrel, ermine, marten, weasel, mink, fox and colored hare.

Other wares traded by the Rus, as inventoried by several Muslim observers, included wax and birch bark, fish teeth, honey, goat skins and horse hides, falcons, acorns, hazelnuts, cattle, swords and armor. Amber, the reddish-gold fossilized tree resin found along the Baltic shoreline, was highly prized in the East and became a mainstay of Scandinavian trade. Also valued in the East were the slaves that the Rus captured from among the Eastern European peoples—Slavs, from which English has derived the word slave. According to the itinerant geographer Ibn Hawkal, writing in 977, the Rus slave trade ran “from Spain to Egypt.”

But the most important eyewitness account of the Rus is of Ahmed ibn Fadhlan, a writer about whom little is known, but whose Risala has been translated into several languages. Key segments of it are universally cited in modern books about Vikings. It was his account that inspired author Michael Crichton’s 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead, the basis of this year’s film The Thirteenth Warrior by Touchstone/Disney. “Ibn Fadhlan was unique of all the sources,” says Noonan. “He was there, and you can trace his exact path. He describes how the caravans traveled, how they would cross a river. He tells you about the flora and fauna along the way. He shows us exactly how the trade functions. There is nothing else like it.”

Ibn Fadhlan was a faqih, an expert in Islamic jurisprudence, who served as secretary of a delegation sent by Caliph al-Muqtadir in 921 to the king of the Bulgars, who had requested help building a fort and a mosque, as well as personal instruction in the teachings of Islam. The Bulgars were a Turkic-speaking branch of the people whom the Khazars had split in the seventh century. One group migrated west, where they assimilated with Slavs and founded what became modern Bulgaria, west of the Black Sea; the others turned north toward the middle Volga region, where they continued to chafe under the rule of the Khazars, whose domination of the north Caucasus and Caspian region marked the northern limits of Abbasid power. In seeking assistance from Baghdad, the king of the Bulgars was seeking an alliance against the Khazars.

Presumably in order to avoid Khazar lands, the caliph’s delegation took a lengthy and circuitous route to the Bulgar capital, passing east of the Caspian Sea. Once there, it was Ibn Fadhlan who gave religious instruction to the Bulgar king, so impressing him that the king gave him the kunya, or nickname, “al-Siddiq,” “the truthful”—the same kunya that had once been earned by Abu Bakr, the first caliph of Islam.

All told, the delegation covered some 4000 kilometers (2500 mi). In his Risala, Ibn Fadhlan described the numerous peoples he encountered, and roughly one-fifth of his account is devoted to the Rus. “I have never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blond and ruddy,” he wrote. “Each man has an axe, a sword, and a knife and keeps each by him at all times.” The men, he observed, were tattooed with dark-green figures “from fingernails to neck.”

Viking arts of jewelry and bodily ornamentation were well-developed, and Ibn Fadhlan described the Rus women as wearing neck rings of gold and silver, “one for each 10,000 dirhams which her husband is worth; some women have many. Their most prized ornaments are green glass beads of clay, which are found on the ships. They trade beads among themselves and pay a dirham for a bead. They string them as necklaces….” They also wore festoons of colored beads, large oval brooches from which dangled such items as knives, keys and combs, and what Ibn Fadhlan described as “breast-boxes made out of gold, silver and wood.”

He had harsh words, however, for Rus hygiene: “They are the filthiest of God’s creatures,” he observed, and although he acknowledged that they washed their hands, faces and heads every day, he was appalled that they did so “in the dirtiest and filthiest fashion possible” in a communal basin of water, an ancient Germanic custom that caused understandable revulsion in a Muslim who typically performed ablutions only in poured or running water. (In the same year, Ibn Rustah, however, commended the Rus he observed as being “clean in their dress and kind to their slaves.”)

Their contact with Islam led some among the Rus to embrace the religion, though Ibn Fadhlan astutely noted that old habits still had their pull: “They are very fond of pork and many of them who have assumed the path of Islam miss it very much.” The Rus had also relished nabith, a fermented drink Ibn Fadhlan often mentioned as part of their daily fare.

Yet most of the Rus continued to observe their own religious practices, which included the offering of sacrifices. Ibn Rustah makes mention of a professional priesthood of Rus shamans (whom he calls attibah) who enjoyed very high status, and who had the power to select as a sacrifice to their gods whichever men, women or cattle they fancied.

Witnessing a band of Rus merchants celebrating the safe completion of a Volga voyage in 922, Ibn Fadhlan described how they prayed to their gods and offered sacrifices to wooden figures stuck into the ground, and they begged their deities to send merchants with plentiful silver coins to buy what they had to sell.

He also witnessed, along the Volga, the dramatic funeral of a chieftain who was cremated with his ship. His oft-quoted description of this rite is one of the most remarkable documents of the Viking Age, filled as it is with grim details of the dead leader laid out in his boat amid a treasury of expensive items, rich foods and strong drink, as well as a dog, horses, oxen, and poultry, and accompanied by the body of a slave girl who had volunteered for the honor of being slain and burned with her master.

Beyond this, Ibn Fadhlan was privy to scenes of drunkenness and lewd behavior that were clearly shocking to a pious, erudite scholar from Baghdad. But he was no moralizer: After making note of the conduct, he moved on in his narrative without condescension.

Other Muslim writers found some Rus traits praiseworthy, particularly their prowess in battle. The philosopher and historian Miskawayh described them as men with “vast frames and great courage” who carried an impressive arsenal of weapons, including swords, spears, shields, daggers, axes and hammers. He noted that their swords “are in great demand to this day for their sharpness and excellence.”

While the usual relationship of the Rus with Baghdad, Khazaria and other Muslim lands was one of peaceable trade, this was not always so. Along the shores of the Caspian Sea, Rus tribes turned their prized weapons against Muslims twice in the 10th century, once attacking Abaskun on the eastern Caspian in 910, and then penetrating the oil country around Baku in 912, taking rich spoils and killing thousands. Of this latter campaign, al-Mas’udi wrote that when the people of the Khazar state heard of this, about 150,000 of them were joined by Christians from the town of Itil, and this joint force marched to the Volga, where the Rus fleet had returned, and decimated it. The few Rus who escaped were later finished off by Bulgars and others.

Ibn Hawkal tells how in 943 another large Rus armada reached the prosperous trading town of Bardha’a on the Caspian’s south shore, where the Rus slaughtered 5000 inhabitants. But their occupation of the town broke down within months, apparently as the result of a dysentery epidemic induced among them by a secret “cup of death” offered to them by the women of the city.

Other than Ibn Fadhlan, few if any Muslims from the Middle East or Central Asia made the trek to the Norsemen’s distant homelands. However, Muslims in al-Andalus, in the southern two-thirds of the Iberian Peninsula, could travel to Scandinavia relatively easily by sea, and several appear to have done just that, probably to trade. In the mid-l0th century, a Córdoban merchant named al-Tartushi visited the Danish market town of Hedeby. He was none too impressed, for although, at 24 hectares (60 acres) in area, Hedeby was the largest Scandinavian town of the time, al-Tartushi found it a far cry from the elegance, organization and comfort of Córdoba. Hedeby was noisy and filthy, he wrote, with the pagan inhabitants hanging animal sacrifices on poles in front of their houses. The people of Hedeby subsisted chiefly on fish, “for there was so much of it.” He noted that Norse women enjoyed the right to divorce: “They part with their husbands whenever they like.” Men and women alike, he found, used “an artificial make-up for the eyes; when they use it their beauty never fades, but increases.”

But such scant contact did not do much to help bridge vast cultural gaps. Toledo jurist Sa’id reasoned that the pagan Norsemen were affected by their wintry origins: “Because the sun does not shed its rays directly over their heads, their climate is cold and the atmosphere cloudy. Consequently their temperaments have become cold and their humors rude, while their bodies have grown large, their complexions light and their hair long.”

From the early years of the Viking Age, the Arabs of al-Andalus had referred to the Scandinavians as al-majus, a word which meant “fire-worshiping pagans” and was usually directed at Zoroastrians. That these two groups were lumped into the same term leads some modern scholars to speculate on early contacts among Norse traders and Zoroastrians in Persia and Mesopotamia.

Andalusia was not spared the Viking attacks that the rest of Europe had experienced. Historian Ahmad al-Ya’qubi, writing in 843-844, tells of the attack on Ishbiliyya (Seville) by “the Majus who are called Rus.” Ibn Qutiya, a 10th-century Córdoban historian, wrote that the attackers were probably; Danish pirates who had sailed up the Guadalquivir River. They were repelled by the Andalusian forces, who used catapults to hurl flaming balls of naphtha that sank 30 ships. Amir ‘Abd al-Rah-man II then managed to arrange a truce. The following year, legend has it, he dispatched as envoy to the king of al-majus a handsome poet, Yahya ibn Hakam al-Bakri, known as al-Ghazal (“the gazelle”) for the grace of his appearance and his verse, who carried a gift for the king and his wife, Queen Noud. The voyage supposedly took al-Ghazal either to Ireland or Denmark, where he wrote that the queen “stays the sun of beauty from darkening.” In fact, al-Ghazal’s mission was not to the Norsemen at all, but to the Byzantine emperor, and the survival of the legend to this day indicates how large the Vikings loomed in the popular imagination of the time.

Despite the truce, the Danes returned to attack Spain again in 859 under the command of Hastein and Bjorn Ironsides, two of the most famous Viking leaders. But their 62 dragon ships were no match for the Umayyad forces. After the rout, the survivors slipped through the Straits of Gibraltar to raid along the Moroccan coast, which prompted another Muslim observer to record that “al-Majus—may God curse them!—invaded the little Moroccan state of Nakur and pillaged it. They took into captivity all the inhabitants with the exception of those who saved their lives by flight.” The marauding fleet then went on to harry the south of France and Italy, where they sacked the town of Luna on the northwest coast, believing it to be Rome. Some Arab sources say they reached Greece and even Egypt. When they returned to the Iberian coast two years after their first attack, they were defeated again, and Vikings never returned to the Mediterranean.

So it was also in the East. The Viking Age, so dependent on Arab silver, did not survive the dwindling of the stream of dirhams in the late 10th century as the Samanid state collapsed, its silver mines near exhaustion. Noonan points out that the silver coins were increasingly debased as time went on: “A silver content of approximately 90 percent in the year 1000 had declined to a silver content of about five percent half a century later. Understandably, Rus merchants no longer wanted such coins.”

The silver-seeking Rus retreated west. Those who had not fully established their lives among the local populations of Russia sailed home, where their crystallizing nations became today’s Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark.

A millennium later, scholars would turn to Ibn Fadhlan, al-Tartushi, al-Mas’udi and the other Arab writers to trace their sojourns and to seek out in burial hoards and mounds the dirhams the Norsemen had carried home. According to Noonan, some 100,000 dirham coins, most deposited between the years 900 and 1030, have been unearthed to date in Sweden alone, and there are more than a thousand recorded individual hoards of five or more coins recorded throughout Scandinavia, the Baltic countries and Russia. In addition to inscriptions, the Muslim coins bear the year and place of minting—vital details for modern numismatists and archeologists. One excellent find in Uppland, Sweden contained a mixture of coins minted in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Isfahan and Tashkent.

Soon more of this knowledge will be widely available. Noonan’s catalogue of dirham hoards from throughout western Eurasia will be published by the Numismatics Institute of the University of Stockholm. His first book on the subject, a collection of articles titled The Islamic World, Russia and the Vikings, 750-900: The Numismatic Evidence, was published by Ashgate in 1998 (ISBN 0-86078-657-9).

Similarly, in Norway, former University of Tehran archeologist and numismatist Houshang Khazaei has completed an English-language catalogue of Kufic silver coins found in Norway, many of which are currently on display at the University Museum of Cultural Heritage in Oslo. “We are beginning to see new interest in this subject,” says Khazaei, whose work will soon be published. Other relics of Viking-Arab trade have been found in Scandinavia as well: fine beads of rock crystal or carnelian, Persian glass, silks, vessels and ornaments. In addition, the trade with Arabs left its mark on Nordic languages, with cognate words such as kaffe, arsenal, kattun (cotton), alkove, sofa and kalfatre (asphalt, used for boat caulking). One historian even suggests that the inspiration for the sails of Viking ships came from the Arab dhows that the Norse traders first observed on the Black Sea.

But the greatest debt Scandinavians owe the Muslims lies in the time-worn pages of the manuscripts. There, long-silent voices rise to help historians, archeologists and linguists clarify a much-maligned past. Haakon Stang, in his 1996 University of Oslo dissertation The Naming of Russia, thanked the Arabs who “on their way, let us hear and see and sense what once happened—and was past, otherwise irretrievably lost.”

Ahmad ibn Fadlān ibn al-Abbās ibn Rašīd ibn Hammād (Arabic: أحمد إبن فضلان إبن ألعباس إبن رشيد إبن حماد) was a 10th century Arab Muslim writer and traveler who wrote an account of his travels as a member of an embassy of the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad to the king of the Volga Bulgars, the Kitāb ilā Malik al-Saqāliba (كتاب إلى ملك الصقالبة).

Judith Gabriel is a Norwegian-American journalist who writes about the Middle East as well as Scandinavia. She is a contributing editor of both the Los Angeles quarterly Al Jadid and the New York weekly Norway Times.

Eaters of the Dead: The Manuscript of Ibn Fadhlan, Relating His Experiences With the Northmen in A.D. 922

The story is about a 10th-century Muslim writer who travels northward with a group of vikings to their settlement. Crichton explains in an appendix that the book was based on two sources. The first three chapters are a retelling of Ibn Fadhlan’s personal account of his actual story journey northwards and his experiences with and observations of the Rus’, the early Russian people. The remainder is based upon the story of Beowulf.

Michael Crichton has sold a zillion books, mostly by sticking to one simple formula–take a relatively stable social system and introduce some threatening variable, most often technology based, that proceeds to wreak havoc. The vital subtext, particularly for an author who appeals mainly to the frequent flyer crowd, is that these threats play on the many fears of middle class, middle aged, white men–in Andromeda Strain it’s biological warfare, in Rising Sun it’s the Japanese (remember when they were going to rule the world?), in Jurassic Park it’s DNA tampering, in Sphere it’s aliens, in Disclosure it’s women in the workplace and, in what surely must have been a disquieting touch for his target audience, in Airframe it’s airline safety. How fitting then that in Eaters of the Dead he returns to the legend of Beowulf, one of the primal tales of dread from the murky Anglo Saxon past.

In 1974 one of Crichton’s friends, a college professor, joked about teaching a literature course on “The Great Bores”, among which he counted Beowulf. Crichton laudably came to the defense of this classic and decided to try and retell the tale for a modern audience. Eventually he decided to move the setting of the story forward in time to 922 AD so that he could have a historical figure, the Arab traveler Ahmad Ibn Fadhlan (احمد بن فضلان), narrate it. Ibn Fadhlan was an emissary of the Caliph of Baghdad (المقتدر بالله) who came into contact with Vikings during his journey into modern Russia and left behind a manuscript detailing his experiences.

For the purposes of the novel, Crichton has him meet up with a band of Northmen lead by the warrior Buliwyf just as they have been summoned to Hurot Hall to help King Rothgar repel the mysterious and terrifying Eaters of the Dead, a horde of seemingly demonic beasts who attack under cover of night and fog. A soothsaying crone insists that he accompany them as the 13th member of their party. As he finds out later, his inclusion is necessitated by cosmological and numerological superstition:

I learned that these Northmen have some notion that the year does not fit with exactitude into thirteen passages of the moon, and thus the number thirteen is not stable and fixed in their minds. The thirteenth passage is called magical and foreign, and Herger says, “Thus for the thirteenth man you were chosen as foreign.”

Initially repulsed by their violence and carnality and by their lack of hygiene, the more cultured, even effete, Ibn Fadhlan gradually becomes an integral member of the band, developing a particularly good friendship with the affable Herger, and, unlike most of his comrades, survives the repeated savage encounters with the Eaters of the Dead (or wendol, as they are also known) to become the official chronicler of their adventure.

I thought that it took Crichton a little too long to set the stage here, particularly for such a short book, and the technique of casting the tale in Ibn Fadhlan’s voice and style makes for a somewhat archaic narrative. But once the action gets going it is great fun. I read the book after seeing the movie version, The 13th Warrior, which t

hough it got decidedly mixed reviews I enjoyed greatly. Basically what you’ve got here is a combination of Beowulf and The Magnificent Seven with a smidgen of anthropology thrown in for good measure; what’s not to like?

Differences between film and novel

In the book, during the first fight Ibn Fadhlan is nearly helpless against the monsters and must depend entirely on the Vikings to slay them. Later on Ibn Fadhlan becomes convinced that death is only a moment away and decides to become a fighter. In the movie Ibn Fadhlan kills several Wendol and is shown the equal of the Vikings in combat by his use of a scimitar (a sword with a curved blade design finding its origins in western Asia Middle East, the name can be used to refer to almost any Middle Eastern sword with a curved blade. They include Arabic saif, Indian talwar, Persian shamshir, and Turkish kilij, among others. These blades all were developed from the ubiquitous parent sword, the Turko-Mongol saber), also it is his idea that the Wendol are sleeping in caves. The Tengol (leader of the dwarves) from the book is replaced by an old mad woman in the film (unknown whether a dwarf or normal human). In the movie Ibn Fadhlan travels with a friend when he meets the Vikings; in the book that friend was s

ick during a hard winter and is left behind. In the movie, Buliwyf doesn’t acknowledge Ibn Fadhlan as much of a friend; in the book they were so close that Ibn Fadhlan was one of the few that got the honor to be in the ceremony of Buliwyf’s funeral.

A further difference is that in the book, the Wendol (mist monsters) actually seem to be another human species (Ibn Fadhlan makes a few accurate descriptions on how their faces and bodies differ from those of “normal” humans), while in the movie there are no direct references by the characters of the Wendol being Neanderthals and the Wendol seem to be just a tribe of Stone Age savages wearing bear skins and heads. Later in the book one finds a suggestion that the Wendol are actually the last tribe of the Neanderthal sub-species.

References

Crichton, Michael. “A Factual Note on Eaters of the Dead” in Eaters of the Dead. New York: The Ballantine Publishing Company, 1992. ISBN 0-345-35461-3.

Eaters of the Dead
the manuscript of Ibn Fadhlan relating his experiences with the Northmen A.D. 922
Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1976
ISBN: 0060891564

The one that started it all – at least the phenomenal interest in popular science books. Hawking’s media presence from Star Trek TNG to BT adverts does nothing to trivialize this remarkable book. It’s one of a very few books in this category that continues to fascinate despite the fact that much of its contents stretch the reader further than is usually expected in a book of this sort.

To be honest, this reviewer avoided the book for many years for two reasons.

The first, which really wasn’t justified, was that this was so much a book that ‘everyone is buying’ that it seemed the cool thing to do to avoid it altogether. If that was your excuse too, it has now had plenty of time to stop being trendy, so you’ve no excuse for not getting it.

The other reason it seemed worth avoiding was its reputation as a book that rivalled Joyce’s Ulysses as one that most people never managed to get through because, trendy though it was, it’s almost impenetrable. If this is your reason for avoiding the book – you (like me) were wrong. It simply isn’t true.

Hawking starts remarkably gently, and though some of the contents are baffling in the small scale, provided you accept the standard undergraduate approach of nodding wisely and continuing whether or not you understand the fine detail, you will find that it fills in nicely with only a few gaps left.

I think this reputation itself reflects the way this book started a trend. The fact is, in modern popular science terms, while not an easy read, it’s quite acceptable – in fact just at the right level. If there’s one small doubt it’s the suspicion that the few autobiographical comments, interesting though they are, are thrown in at the instance of an editor saying ‘put something in about yourself, Stephen, that’ll keep them going.’

The fact remains that this book deserves its place on every popular science shelf, not as a trophy or an icon, but as a fascinating, enjoyable read.

Annotation

This landmark volume in scientific writing leads us on an exhilarating journey to distant galaxies, black holes, and alternate dimensions, and includes Professor Hawking’s observations about the last decade’s advances — developments that have confirmed many of his theoretical predictions. Makes vividly clear how Professor Hawking’s work has transformed our view of the universe.

From the Publisher

In the ten years since its publication in 1988, Stephen Hawking’s classic work has become a landmark volume in scientific writing, with more than nine million copies in forty languages sold worldwide. That edition was on the cutting edge of what was then known about the origins and nature of the universe. But the intervening years have seen extraordinary advances in the technology of observing both the micro- and the macrocosmic worlds. These observations have confirmed many of Professor Hawking’s theoretical predictions in the first edition of his book, including the recent discoveries of the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE), which probed back in time to within 300,000 years of the universe’s beginning and revealed wrinkles in the fabric of space-time that he had projected. Eager to bring to his original text the new knowledge revealed by these observations, as well as his own recent research, Professor Hawking has prepared a new introduction to the book, written an entirely new chapter on wormholes and time travel, and updated the chapters throughout.

Synopsis

This landmark volume in scientific writing leads us on an exhilarating journey to distant galaxies, black holes, and alternate dimensions, and includes Professor Hawking’s observations about the last decade’s advances—developments that have confirmed many of his theoretical predictions. Makes vividly clear how Professor Hawking’s work has transformed our view of the universe.

From The Critics

Publishers Weekly
Hawking’s discovery that black holes emit particles caused great excitement among astronomers. In this succinct overview of current theories of the cosmos, the Cambridge University physicist modestly weaves in his own notable contributions while giving due credit to his colleagues. He explains why relativity implies that a “big bang” occurred and examines string theory, which posits a universe of 10 or 26 dimensions. His understanding of time’s flow leads him to conclude that intelligent beings can only exist during the expansion phase of our increasingly chaotic universe. New research on black holes and subatomic particles holds implications for scientists who, like Hawking, are attempting to devise a unified theory linking Einstein to quantum mechanics. The merit of this book is Hawking’s ability to make these ideas graspable by the lay reader. (April)

Library Journal
A central question underlies this brief but crystal-clear account of the history of physical speculation about the universe: does the universe always operate in the same manner or does it allow for divergence? That the universe is static, as once thought, eventually proved impossible to reconcile with evidence from astronomy, for how could an expanding universe follow unchanging laws of nature? Hawking, along with mathematician Roger Penrose, discovered the answer: relativity theory not only allows, but requires, a big bang. The discussion does not end therethe universe may really be static, the “big bang” being local history in only a part of the universebut once again Hawking has proved himself a pioneer. David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., Ohio

A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes
with introduction by Carl Sagan
Bantam Books, 1988
ISBN: 055305340X

Da Vinci Code controversy – It is everywhere! Dan Brown’s book claims Jesus in not divine or God, and the gospels as we know them, have been changed, and after Jesus stay here on earth, men raised his status to the level of God. Could any of this be true?

Ancient secrets of the Church, hidden for centuries have actually been revealed and published in books prior to the fictional writings of Brown in the Da Vinci Code. Baigent and Leigh have produced other books from researchers point of view over the last two decades, including “Dead Sea Scrolls Deception”, “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, and “Messianic Legacy.” These books were the talk of the religious communities when they came out in the early 90’s and certainly they have fueled an ongoing interest into just exactly who was this man Jesus, what was his message and what happened to him?

Islam claims to “break the code” so to speak, over 1,400 years ago. The answer, according to Muslim scholars has been in the Quran for over fourteen hundred years

Some may be surprised to learn, Muslims believe in the miracle birth and other miracles associated with Jesus. They actually consider him as the “Messiah” and they even say, “peace be upon him” when mentioning his name. However, they are quick to negate any connection between God and Jesus as a partnership or God-head, and they rule out the notion of God having any son (or daughter for that matter).

Here is how Muslim scholars present their understanding and “break the code”:

Creation itself tells us there is a creator and from the beginning of time – Allah, (the One God in Arabic) alone is to be worshiped. This is clear teaching throughout the Old testament (Torah), the scriptures that Jesus himself read and taught from. God is one not one of three; for example: ‘He is God; there is no other besides Him’. (Deuteronomy 4:35). The same is mentioned in the book of Mark in the New Testament, chapter 12, verse 29, when Jesus, peace be upon him, had been asked about the Greatest Commandment he replied, “To know, O Israel, the Lord your God is One Lord; and you have to love Him with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength.”

According to the oldest and most authentic copies of manuscripts and scrolls available throughout the centuries, Jesus, peace be upon him, never claimed to be God, or the creator, or the One to pray to, nor did he tell his followers to revere him as God. These notions appear on the lips of others who came along decades and even centuries later.

While Jesus was on earth he did not claim to be the creator or ask us to revere him as God. His miraculous birth is a sign of his prophethood: “Verily, the likeness of Jesus before Allah, is the likeness of Adam. He (Allah) created him from dust and said “Be!” and he was” (Quran 3:59). Like all the great and noble prophets of Allah such as Adam, Abraham, Moses, Isaac and David, Jesus came with one message: Worship, love, obey and submit to the one true God, Allah, the creator of everything and do not worship anything besides Allah.

Throughout history, people have taken to worship things or people alongside Allah, or just worshiping something else like power, status or money. Even the names of religions seem have more to do with the creation and less or nothing to do with the Creator. For example: Buddhism – Buddha (the name of a man), Confucianism – Confucius (the name of a man), Hinduism – Hind (the name of an area), Judaism – Judah (the name of a tribe) and Christianity – Christ (the name of a great prophet).

Islam is different. Islam is a word coming from the verb “aslama” and it carries the meaning of “surrender”, “submission”, “obedience”, “sincerity” and “peace” between you and Almighty Allah (God) and not to any human or anything within creation. Anyone who practices Islam submits to and worships Allah, alone without any partners of any kind.

The Quran states: “There is only One God (Allah) then have reverence for Me and fear Me (and Me alone).” To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and on earth, and to Him is duty due always: then will ye fear other than Allah?” (Quran 16:51-52)

Isn’t it time you join Jesus, the son of Mary, along with all of the other Prophets of Allah and practice the “Submission to the Will of God” (Islam)?

Or simply put: “Worship the Creator – and not His Creations!”

The Da Vinci Code
Knopf Publishing Group, 2006
ISBN: 1400079179

UNHOLY WAR: Terror in the Name of Islam

by John L. Esposito. Published by Oxford University Press.

Why is it that Islam seems to be the only world religion which consistently produces large-scale terrorism and suicide bombers who kill and die explicitly in the name of their faith? Who are the people who commit such terrorism in the name of Islam? What do they want to achieve through their violent actions, and why?

In the wake of the September 11th suicide attacks, John L. Esposito – one of the world’s foremost scholars of political Islam – has written a book in an attempt to answer just such questions. The current struggle against terrorism won’t accomplish a great deal unless people understand just what it is they are fighting against. It simply is not enough to label terrorists “evil people” because few, if any, consciously set out to commit acts they regard as evil. On the contrary, they believe they are doing something justified and righteous – and if that is the case, then no military victory alone can last long. An ideological victory must quickly follow in an effort to change people’s minds.

It also is not enough to understand Islam as a religion, because these events are not solely religious. Although religion plays an important role, so do a variety of cultural, political and historical factors – and all of these must be taken into account. In this book, Esposito spends a great deal of time covering the history of Islamic extremism. This is important because Osama bin Laden did not simply appear out of nowhere to capture the hearts and minds of millions of devout Muslims.

Bin Laden is a product of a long history of religious and political ideas, a convergence which may not have been predictable, but it has certainly been destructive. This highlights an important issue which people in the West must learn to understand: the degree to which past and present are deeply intertwined for the Muslim world.

For Muslims, the past is not so much a subject of academic study as it is a reality which is lived and experienced on a daily basis. Thus, European Crusades and colonialism are not parts of the past but rather current events. This is why, for example, there were such negative reactions across the Middle East when President Bush originally described the campaign against terrorism as a “Crusade.”

Muslims today see the existence of Israel and most Western foreign policy as simply continuations of the Crusades and colonialism, a fact which Osama bin Laden has exploited regularly. A person like bin Laden can make vague references to historical events which occurred as part of the Crusades and colonialism and expect that the average Muslim listener will immediately know what he is talking about – it is in this context where his widespread appeal can be found and understood. Thus, understanding Muslims’ reactions to the West are key to understanding bin Laden’s appeal and current events.

Esposito explains the history and influence of people and organizations like Ibn Taymiyyah, Wahhabism, the Kharijites, the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb, and many more. In addition to explaining who they were, he also explains what they reacted against and what sort of religious and political goals they had. Although there are other books which cover political Islam and Muslim extremists, few cover such a broad sweep of Islamic history and in such a quick and understandable manner. Esposito may not always provide a tremendous amount of depth in every area, but he does provide the necessary background without which it simply isn’t possible to comprehend events in the Middle East.

An important aspect to the extremist ideologies which Esposito discusses is the manner in which they define and use the concept of jihad. Westerners are accustomed to various scholars and moderate Muslims arguing that jihad is not really the aggressive and violent idea which is often depicted in popular media. Instead, these moderates claim that it is a relatively benign and peaceful concept of struggle, particularly a personal struggle against temptation and immorality. However, such arguments are disingenuous in their portrayal of jihad:

The doctrine of jihad is not the product of a single authoritative individual or organization’s interpretation. It is rather the product of diverse individuals and authorities interpreting and applying the principles of sacred texts in specific historical and political contexts.

The fact of the matter is, jihad has both offensive and defensive meanings in the Qur’an and in other early Islamic writings. Moreover, much of the rhetoric from Islamic extremists use the defensive understanding in order to justify their aggressive and terroristic tactics. As far as they are concerned, Islam is under attack from the West, and this justifies a violent response. In the end, neither moderates nor extremists have an exclusive claim to the use of the term and the manner in which is expressed. Violent jihad is just as much a part of Muslim tradition as is peaceful jihad – by denying this, moderates fail to do what is necessary to help solve the problem.

Esposito believes that Islam can have a democratic future but that it must first undergo important political and economic developments. People tend to forget that Muslim countries have not had as much time and opportunity to deal with the various changes which have occurred in the past couple of centuries. However, it should also be added that significant religious changes are also necessary.

Christianity in the West has developed in many ways since the Middle Ages, and one of the most important changes has been the development of a secular culture which allows greater freedom from the churches and from religion. A separation between clerical and political power has played an important role in the West’s growth, and without this it is unlikely that Muslim nations will be able to compete on the same economic, social and political playing fields.

Helping Islam develop greater tolerance for an independent, secular culture will, therefore, be necessary for the development of a more democratic future. This cannot be done through any sort of imposition from the West – it is exactly this against which the extremists are fighting. Instead, it must come from within, from moderate Muslims who recognize that such a distinction is necessary.

Anyone interested in learning what sorts of political, religious and social factors have led to the current state of Islam, and perhaps what sorts of changes may be necessary for a long-term improvement to be achieved, would be hard-pressed to find a better starting point than Esposito’s book.

John L. Esposito is University Professor of Religion and International Affairs and Founding Director of the Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. A past president of the Middle East Studies Association, he is Editor-in-Chief of the four-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World , Editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of Islam , and the author of numerous books, including Islam: The Straight Path and The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? His newest books include What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam and The Oxford Dictionary of Islam. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Center for the Study of Islam Democracy (CSID)

Unholy War
terror in the name of Islam
Oxford University Press, 2003
ISBN: 0195168860

The 1984 book Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, by Canadian journalist George Jonas, tells the story of an Israeli assassination squad from the viewpoint of a self-described former Mossad agent and leader of the squad, Avner. Avner has since been revealed as a pseudonym for Yuval Aviv, an Israeli who now runs a private investigation agency in New York.

However, Aviv’s account of the operation has not been independently verified beyond the fact checking Jonas says he has done. Jonas points to a former Director General of the RCMP Security Service, John Starnes, who he says believes Aviv’s essential story. In spite of this, the Mossad director at the time of the operation, Zvi Zamir, has stated that he never knew Aviv. Several former Mossad officers who took part in Operation Wrath of God have also told British journalists that Yuval Aviv’s version of events is not accurate. After its 1984 publication the book was listed on the fiction and non-fiction bestseller lists in Britain.

AT THE 1972 OLYMPICS, 11 Israeli athletes were murdered in cold blood by Palestinian terrorists. As the rest of the world continued playing their games, Israel mourned. In the coming years Israel would set out to kill those responsible for the attacks and individuals who would plan, supply, and commit such atrocities in the future.

Steven Spielberg’s Munich and George Jonas’s Vengeance, the book on which it is based, are purportedly accounts of the Israeli hit team that set out to conduct these executions (Operation Wrath of God [Hebrew: מבצע זעם האל, Mivtza Za'am Ha'el], also called Operation Bayonet). The story of those two works is also countered by a new book, Striking Back by Aaron Klein, a correspondent for Time magazine and an officer in the Israeli Defense Force’s intelligence unit. And although the two sides of the story seem to conflict, they are, at a deeper level, of a piece.

FIRST PUBLISHED in May, 1984, Vengeance caused immediate controversy. The book, which reads more like a novel than a historical or journalistic work, relies on “Avner,” a single, pseudonymous source for its narrative. While Jonas may have trusted his source, it is ultimately up to the reader to decide if Avner should be believed. Portions of the book were labeled as either false or unprovable by both the New York Times and Maclean’s magazine.

Whether or not all the specifics of Vengeance are true, one thing can certainly be said about it: Vengeance is not a piece of mindless moral relativism. In fact, the author explicitly denounces moral relativism in his epilogue. “One can,” Jonas writes, “in terms of moral justification, distinguish between counter-terrorism and terrorism in the same way one distinguishes between acts of war and war crimes. There are standards; terrorism is on the wrong side of them; counter-terrorism is not.”

That is not to say that “Avner” feels nothing about killing Palestinian terrorists. Indeed, in Vengeance he and the rest of the Israeli team are, for the most part, happy with their work. The team was “for the first time in millennia [making] slaughtering Jewish men, women and children an expensive proposition. Avner saw nothing wrong with that. If anything, he continued to be proud of being one of the swords that cut off the hands of the enemies of Israel.” However, the deeper question raised by Vengeance is whether or not the Israeli squads were doing any long-term good. “[B]eyond vengeance, their mission was supposed to weaken and diminish anti-Israel terror in the world. Not stop it all together . . . but at least slow it down,” Jonas writes. And at the end of the day, Avner comes to the conclusion that his mission did not cause terrorists to hit the brakes.

This is a country mile from moral relativism.

NONETHELESS, Aaron Klein disagrees with Avner’s conclusion. For Striking Back Klein interviewed more than 50 current and ex-Mossad agents about the post-Munich attacks. And he agrees with Jonas that deterrence was at least a part of the mission: “The Mossad’s aim was to create a permanent threat in the minds of Palestinian operatives and potential inductees, a violent persuasion to cease, or shy away from, all activity on the behalf of terrorists,” Klein notes.

Klein admits that it is tough to measure the efficaciousness of preemptive strikes, but says that the Mossad is certain that terrorist activities were at least hindered by the post-Munich killings. “Deterrence is something you cannot measure. Things happen because of your deterrence. You can’t count the numbers because it is impossible to say who didn’t do something for this specific reason, but it’s there,” he said in an interview.

Consider the assassination of Wadi Haddad, one of the leaders of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. “The faction under [Haddad's] command collapsed after his death,” Klein reports in Striking Back. “Dry statistics indicate that the number of attacks against Israeli targets abroad plummeted with his passing. Israeli intelligence and, in particular, the Mossad, viewed them as further proof of the effectiveness of their assassination program.” Or take the killing of Zuhir Mokhsan, the leader of the terrorist group A-Tzika: “Mokhsan’s sudden death led to the dissolution of the A-Tzaika organization–another veritable well of terrorism gone dry.”

Deterrence has its limits, however. “Deterrence helps on a tactical level,” Klein said in the interview, but he added that “it doesn’t solve conflicts. It won’t solve the conflict between the west and extreme Islam. It helps to prevent the next terrorist attack, so you can use it.”

WHICH IS THE POINT of Steven Spielberg’s oft-maligned Munich. Much has been made of Spielberg’s movie, with many worrying that the director sees no difference between Palestinian terrorists and Israeli soldiers. That simply isn’t the case.

The film has its problems. As has been pointed out elsewhere, its devotion to reality is sorely lacking. While not a docudrama (the film opens by claiming only to be inspired by real events, not to be an actual portrayal of real events), some scenes are pure inventions of Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner. Yet, issues of factual fidelity aside, it is a misunderstanding of Munich to view the film as a work of moral equivalence.

For instance, much has been made of a scene near the beginning of the film in which photos of the Palestinian terrorists being targeted by the Mossad, and images of the dead Israeli athletes are juxtaposed. Some have suggested that this is a clear case of moral equivocation, that Spielberg is trying to imply that there is no difference between the two groups of “victims.” But if anything, it seems as though Spielberg is trying to help the audience understand the motivations of the Israeli government. In actuality, he seems to be highlighting the fact that the murders at Munich forced Israel to pursue these terrorists.

On the whole, Munich is a finely-wrought character study of the effects of war on those who have to fight it–not an apologia for terrorism. By the movie’s end Avner–gaunt, pale, and aged–is sleeping in a closet because he is afraid of retribution from Palestinian operatives. His fellow agents have been killed one by one and he now lives in fear, both for himself and his family.

Again, this may or may not be factually accurate. For his part, Klein says that of the 50 officers he spoke with “nobody knows some kind of figure who had remorse. And it’s a close circle of people. The people who were actually involved are not a lot.” One place where Klein and Spielberg would agree, however, is that, unlike the Palestinian terrorists, the Israelis took extreme lengths to ensure that innocents were not injured in their strikes. In the film, the team risks missing a target and blowing its cover to save the life of a little girl. Compare this to the Palestinian terrorists who have no problem with turning AK-47s on hogtied hostages. And then there is the deeper question of humanity: Avner understand the justness of his mission, but still struggles with the taking of life. The terrorists show no such qualms.

So even if it’s inaccurate, Spielberg’s characterization of a conflicted Avner is, in its own way, flattering to the Israelis. Indeed, it says more good than bad about the quality of the Israeli men who accepted the job of protecting their country by hunting down the terrorists who would do it harm. We should not want those tasked with defending us to be as remorseless as the sociopath terrorists who are so evil that they take delight in murder.

References

Countering Terrorism: The Israeli Response To The 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre And The Development Of Independence Covert Action Teams, M.A. thesis by Alexander B. Calahan at Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 1995.

Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team
with an introduction by Richard Ben Cramer
Simon & Schuster, 2005
ISBN: 0743291646

Superb kaleidoscopic history of religion, from an English nun who turned to scholar. Armstrong (Holy War, 1991, etc.) was a nun in the early 1960’s but left her convent in 1969 as part of the great wave that defected from religious life at that time. Although her faith grew progressively weaker, her fascination with religion didn’t abate, and, even as a nonbeliever, she continues to pursue theological studies. Here, her basic message is that “religion is highly pragmatic. We shall see that it is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for it to be logically or scientifically sound.” In an extraordinary survey, Armstrong traces the development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from their inception to the present day, and shows how they were created and shaped by their historical surroundings—which, in turn, they helped form and alter.

Although this approach is standard among religious scholars, Armstrong uses it to particular advantage in underscoring the historical correspondences among the three faiths—for example, examining the messianic fervor that surrounded the career of the Sabbatai Zevi (the 12th-century rabbi who built up an enormous apocalyptic cult among diaspora Jews prior to his imprisonment and conversion to Islam) in light of the early Christian response to the crucifixion of Jesus or of Jeremiah’s prophecies about the destruction of Jerusalem. It’s particularly in the mystical traditions, according to Armstrong, that the different faiths corroborate each other—in large part, she says, because the mystical apprehension of the divine is more abstract and therefore less dependent upon the traditional symbols by which most religions distinguishthemselves. There are major gaps in Armstrong’s history—she pays little attention to the Christian churches of the 20th century—but she manages against the odds to provide an account that’s thorough, intelligent, and highly readable. Magisterial and brilliant.

A History of God: the 4000 quest for Judaism, Christianity and Islam
Random House Inc., 1994
ISBN: 0345384563