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Table of contents
Introduction
During the medieval period, Arab geographers made significant contributions to geographical knowledge. Unlike Christian scholars, Arab scholars emphasized direct observation and logical deductions, conforming their conclusions to near realities. Arab geography was enriched and widened between 800 and 1400 due to a variety of sources, including the spread of Islam and the consolidation of Arabic-speaking people. Arab scholars wrote geographical texts based on a more extensive variety of sources than their Christian counterparts.
The spread of Islam helped Arabs acquire knowledge about the land and people they conquered, and Arab geography flourished in Baghdad, the intellectual center of the Arab world. This period saw significant contributions from Al-Balkhi, Al-Masudi, Al-Maqdisi, Al-Biruni, and Ibn Sina, who made important observations in the fields of climatology and physical geography. The work of different Arab scholars is discussed below:
Al-Balkhi
- Arab scholars in the early medieval period contributed significantly to the field of climatology and physical geography.
- Their concepts still have relevance in modern geographical thinking.
- They made important observations regarding climate and processes shaping landforms.
- In 921, Al-Balkhi collected climatic data from different Arab travelers who made direct observations during their expeditions and journeys.
- Al-Balkhi prepared the world’s first climatic atlas Kitab al-Ashkal based on the collection of climatic data.
Al-Masudi
- Al-Masudi was a ninth-century scholar who traveled as far south as Mozambique, south of the equator.
- He formulated a concept of the monsoon based on empirical observations of the climate during his voyage along the east African coast.
- Al-Masudi understood the evaporation of moisture from water surfaces and the condensation of moisture in the form of clouds.
- He believed in the sphericity of the Earth and described the effect of the environment on people’s attitudes and lifestyles.
- Al-Masudi held an opinion on environmental determinism.
Al-Maqdisi
- In 985, Al-Maqdisi created a new climatic map of the world with 14 climatic regions, which improved upon the earlier map of Al-Balkhi.
- Al-Maqdisi believed that climate varied not only with latitude but also with the east-west position of a region.
- He also introduced the idea that the southern hemisphere was mostly open, with the majority of the world’s land area located in the northern hemisphere.
Al-Biruni
- Al-Balkhi, Al-Masudi, and Al-Maqdisi made significant contributions to climatology while Al-Biruni and Ibn-Sina are known for their contributions to geomorphology.
- Al-Biruni’s who had been to India during the time of Mahmud Ghaznavi prepared his great geography of India “Kitab-al-Hind” which deals with processes shaping landforms in India.
- He identified the significance of rounded stones in alluvial deposits and observed coarse alluvial materials closer and finer alluvial materials farther from the mountains.
- Al-Biruni also noted the absence of night at the South Pole, likely from accounts of explorers who had been there before the 11th century.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina
- Avicenna or Ibn Sina is credited with the idea of Landscape erosion based on his observations of mountain streams cutting down their valleys in central Asia.
- He deduced a hypothesis that mountains were being constantly worn down by streams, with the highest peaks occurring where rocks were especially resistant to erosion.
- Mountains are raised up and immediately exposed to the process of wearing down, which goes on slowly but steadily.
- Ibn Sina also observed the presence of fossils in high mountain rocks, which he interpreted as examples of nature’s effort to create living plants or animals that had failed.
- James Hutton presented similar ideas about erosion eight centuries later, but he probably never heard of Ibn Sina and could not read Arabic.
Al-Idrisi
- Al-Idrisi for the first time made extensive corrections to Ptolemy’s erroneous geographical ideas.
- He believed that there were uncertainties concerning the actual arrangement of mountains, rivers, or coastlines.
- Al-Idrisi prepared a new geography based on much new information.
- In his book “Amusement For Him Who Desires to Travel Around the World,” Al-Idrisi corrects Ahmud Ptolemy’s idea of the enclosed Indian Ocean and the Caspian Sea as a gulf of the world ocean.
Ibn-Battuta
- Abdullah Muhammad surnamed Ibn-Battuta was a medieval traveler who was born in Tangier in 1304.
- At the age of 21, he went on a pilgrimage to Mecca, but his interests shifted towards exploring North Africa and Egypt on his way there.
- He was fascinated by nature and decided to give up his studies of law to travel across the then-Arab territory.
- He carefully avoided following the same route twice and visited many parts of Africa that had never been visited before.
- He sailed along the Red Sea, visited Ethiopia, and traveled south along the coast of East Africa to Kilwa, nearly 10°S of the equator.
- He learned about an Arab trading post at Sofala in Mozambique, which was more than 20° south of the equator, confirming that the torrid zone in East Africa was not torrid, but occupied by a large native population.
- Ibn-Battuta sailed from Mozambique to Mecca and then continued his journeys to Baghdad, Persia, and the Black Sea region.
- He traveled across Russia, went to Bukhara and Samarkand, crossed Afghanistan, and moved into India.
- He spent several years in the court of the Mongol emperor in Delhi and was appointed as an ambassador to China.
- Before going to China, he visited the Maldives Islands, Ceylon, and Sumatra, and stayed in China for a shorter period.
- In 1350, he returned to Fez, the capital of Morocco, and made a trip to Spain before coming back to Fez.
- In 1351-53, he traveled across the Sahara and reached Timbuktu, gathering important information about Arab Negro tribes living in that part of Africa.
- In 1353, he settled at Fez and devoted himself to writing a lengthy account of his travels.
- During his thirty years of travel, he covered a linear distance of about 75,000 miles, a world record at that time.
- Unfortunately, his book was written in Arabic and did not have a significant impact on the Christian world as it was not translated into Latin
Ibn-Khaldun
- Ibn-Khaldun was the last great Islamic geographer of the medieval period, writing between 1382-1405.
- He established the foundation of political geography through his analysis of the rise and fall of empires.
- Like Ibn-Battuta, he was born on the Mediterranean coast of northwest Africa and spent most of his life in Algeria, Tunisia, and the Arab part of Spain.
- He completed Muqaddimah, a voluminous introduction to his world history in 1377, which is the most detailed autobiography available in medieval Arab history.
- In Muqaddimah, Ibn-Khaldun discusses humankind’s physical environment and its influence and points out the characteristics of humankind that are related to her/his culture or way of living.
- Ibn-Khaldun focused on the most powerful units in the political hierarchy of his times, the tribe, and the city, and explained their differences deterministically in terms of choice of livelihood.
- Ibn-Khaldun analyzed the functioning of two types of socio-political organizations: Bedouins and sedentary people.
- He claimed that the Bedouins possessed qualities of courage, alertness, and loyalty, while the sedentary people lacked these traits and represented immobile concentrations of wealth.
- His generalizations regarding the Bedouin and sedentary states/political organization were based on empirically observed facts.
- Sedentary states had to develop new and complex systems of political organization for security against attack and self-government.
- The two types of socio-political organizations were interdependent, but the sedentary state dominated economically and politically.
- Ibn-Khaldun is credited with formulating the first concept of the life cycles of the state, which still holds some relevance in tribal Africa and Asia.
- Ibn-Khaldun’s views on the ekumene and other aspects of climatic determinism seemed to have been deduced from earlier Greek notions.
- He accepted the traditional seven climatic zones parallel to the equator and repeated Aristotle’s idea of an uninhabitable zone along the equator due to intense heat and an inhabitable polar zone because of cold.
- Ibn-Khaldun shared the view of Albertus Magnus that people turned black when they lived too close to the sun and gradually turned white when they moved to the temperate zone.
- His knowledge of the physical Earth is largely based on Greek theory, and his ideas about environmental influence are not highly sophisticated.
Some other important facts
- Arab geographers in the medieval period emphasized the importance of direct observation and made valuable contributions to geographical knowledge.
- Unlike their counterparts in the Christian world, some Arab scholars made logical deductions from existing theories and their conclusions conformed to near realities.
- The Arab geographic horizon was enriched and widened between 800 and 1400 due to a variety of sources and events, including the spread of Islam and the consolidation of Arabic-speaking people.
- The spread of Islam held together the previously isolated wandering tribes of Arabia, providing a sense of unity that contributed to the development of Arab geography.
- The geographical writings of Arab scholars were based on a much greater variety of sources than those of Christian scholars.
- The followers of Islam embarked on a conquest of the world outside Arabia, which included Persia, Egypt, the Iberian Peninsula, India, and parts of Southeast Asia.
- Their military expeditions helped the Arabs acquire knowledge about the land and people they conquered, which enriched their geographic knowledge.
- Arab geography flourished in the city of Baghdad, which was founded by the Arabs near the ruins of Babylon in 762 and became the centre of the intellectual world for more than a century.
- Arab scholars translated the works of Greek philosophers and scholars into Arabic with the patronage of caliph Harun al-Rashid, leading to a flood of new ideas throughout the Arab world.
- The decimal system in arithmetic was brought to Baghdad from the Hindus and adopted by Arab scholars.
- Arab scholars showed a fascination for Greek traditions and concepts, including the concept of the Earth as being located at the center of the universe with celestial bodies in a circular motion.
- Scholars of the Baitul-Hukma (Academy) attempted to recalculate the circumference of the Earth in the direction of Al-Mamum.
- They used the same method devised by Eratosthenes and calculated the circumference of the Earth as 20,160 miles, much less than what Eratosthenes had calculated.
- The Arabs considered the Mediterranean Sea as the western limit of the known ekumene while Sila (Japan) was the eastern limit.
- The Arabs in medieval Arabia had access to translations from Greek and their own travelers’ reports, giving them more accurate knowledge about the world than their counterparts.
- Ibn-Haukal, an early Arab traveler, explored remote regions of Africa and Asia and found people living in large numbers in those latitudes that were believed to be uninhabitable by the Greeks.
- Ibn-Haukal’s observations challenged the Greek concept of the habitable zone, but it persisted in different forms for a longer period.
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