The Meadows of Gold

"It is vast, it’s a huge book, and I’m sure there’s no complete English translation, though there is a French one. It is a great book and yet it’s an abridgement, perhaps an abridgement of an abridgement of an abridgement – he wrote, allegedly, a much vaster thing of which this is a part. We’ve only got a fragmentary translation in English, very well done by Lund and Stone. It selectively covers the Abbasid period, but the selection is really good. Masudi doesn’t – unlike most of the historians who follow him, who write strictly Islamic history that perhaps give some nod to pre Islamic Arabia, but for whom history really only gets exciting at the coming of the prophet – provide a history of the Islamic world and think ‘job done’, perhaps finishing off with what’s known about how the world’s going to end. On the contrary, Masudi travelled widely, well beyond the frontiers of Islam, and was particularly interested in all the non-Islamic cultures he visited. He seems to have gone a bit farther east than his contemporaries. It’s conceivable he went to China – although probably not – but he did at least try to find out about China, and he was in Madagascar. He was very interested in the Slavs, he got a list of the French kings from somebody he met on the Abbasid frontier. He was also very interested in the history of the Israelites, and in what you could get from the Bible. So his is a global history, but it’s not restricted to what we would regard as history, even; he is very interested in geology and astronomy and geography. Anything scientific or natural history – and this is a big difference with him – he loves wonder stories. He loves tales and things like the nasnas , the man who only had one arm and one leg, so he’s only half there. Or the city of brass, which is somewhere in the North African desert and has no gates and is constructed only of brass and all the inhabitants inside it are dead. He loves these stories – he didn’t believe them, I don’t think, but he loves to tell them. He knows that his audience isn’t going to believe him, either, but he knows his audience is going to enjoy reading and hearing about it nonetheless. So he writes for entertainment and, like Jahiz, he’s great at digression. “It’s called al-jidd wa al-hazl, ‘seriousness and joking’, the good discourse of a cultured man” In those days there were people called nudama , who were paid professionals who sat at the Caliphs’ tables at dinner and entertained them with what they had learned. Some of it might be about the Qur’an, but some of it might be about the strange habits of the Scythians, or about famous misers, or whatever. That sort of stuff gets incorporated into Masudi’s work. It’s the reverse of dull. With earlier historians there’s a heavy dependence on chains of transmission. The most famous example is Tabari, a generation before Masudi, who finds information about, say, a battle and provides you with three different accounts of it, two of which contradict each other completely. Then he’ll say: ‘I heard this on the authority of Abdullah who had it from Daoud, who heard it from…’, and you end up with these great chains of transmission, which clutter the narrative. And at the end of it he’ll say, ‘well, that’s it and now we’re on to the next topic.’ So history becomes a huge unsorted information dump. But Masudi can’t be bothered with all that chain of transmission, so he’ll say, ‘all these sources are obviously ridiculous, so here you go, this is my story which you’ll find preferable.’ Yes, he provides an authoritative narrative. The translation you’re recommending is the 1989 one by Lund and Stone. But again, Pellat got there first, didn’t he? And before him was the Austrian Aloys Sprenger. Presumably each editor/translator shaped the work depending on his own specialisms and readership? Well, the Lund and Stone is accurate, and just really excellent all round. Pellat is much more complete. And Pellat did rely quite heavily on the German translation, but he found many errors in it. The Pellat translation is quite difficult to use – I’ve tried to find things in it and really one can get very lost. It is very poorly sign posted and organised. It was his focus on the literature rather than the history, say, that set him apart, really. Yes. After him, André Miquel worked in a similar vein. The English – figures like Arberry and Nicholson – tended to be a bit grand, looking for difficult texts that would make one’s reputation. Whereas Pellat and Miquel were simply more interested in finding something that might be readable."