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ARABS AND THE SEA: after old manuscripts and books
by Theodor Shumovsky
The Arabs have long been taken for underdeveloped nomadic tribes came from wild deserts. Many European observers of the two last centuries associated them with the dry Land, and not with navigation across the immense Ocean on whose coasts many Arab peoples have been living and sailing from the old times. This wide spread but misleading Orientalist vision dating back to the era of the first colonial encounters between the Europeans and the Arabs is contested in the book written in 1962 by a St.-Petersburg historian Theodor Shu-movsky, the renowned authority in historical geography of premodern Arabic navigation. The second corrected edition of the book comes out in 2010.
A thorough examination of old Arabic manuscripts and modern academic scholarship led the author to the conclusion that before the advent of European sailors the Arabs had succeeded in creating an original art of navigation. The sea was present in their traditional culture that is witnessed in its well-known literary monuments including the Qur’an. Shumovsky argues that achievements of the pre-modern Arab navigation much contributed in discoveries happened in the Indian and Pacific Oceans at the Age of Exploration when the Europeans intensively investigated and mapped the World. This is not a tale full of sound and fury. It should be noted that the famous Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama opened the maritime way from the Western Europe to the Oriental Seas in the fifteenth century following instructions of his Arab pilot Ahmad ibn Majid from Julfar or Ra’s al-Khaymah in Oman. The latter composed in verses three sailing directions whose unique copy was preserved in the collection of Arabic manuscripts at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts in St.-Petersburg. This important source was introduced into the research use, translated and commented by Shumovsky who devoted to its study almost half a century from 1938 to the mid-1980s. In the 1960s-1980s the first Soviet edition of Arabic sailing directions (1957) was republished in Portugal and the Middle East.