Contributions of Arab Geographers in Geography

• Arab (more broadly, Islamic) geographers kept geography alive and moving between the 8th and 15th centuries, while Western Europe lived through its “Dark Ages” of learning.
  • They preserved and corrected Greek geography, absorbed Indian and Persian astronomy, and added a vast body of first-hand observation from travel, trade and pilgrimage.
• Writing in Arabic, they came from many peoples: Arabs, Persians, Central Asians, Berbers and Andalusians. Their work was holistic, joining physical and human geography with astronomy, history and religion.
• Their lasting contributions lie in mathematical geography, climatology, geomorphology, cartography and regional description, and in human–environment and political geography through Ibn Khaldun.

Background: Why Geography Flourished

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The Islamic World as a Setting

• A vast, connected realm: within a century of the Prophet’s death, Arab armies took Persia and Egypt (641–642), North Africa and Spain (from 711), and reached Sind (712) and Central Asia.
  • A traveller could move from the Indus to the Atlantic within one cultural and legal world, with a shared language of learning.
• Baghdad and the translation movement: the Abbasid capital Baghdad (founded 762) became the intellectual centre of the world.
  • Under the caliphs Harun al-Rashid (786–809) and al-Ma’mun (813–833), the Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom) translated Greek, Persian, Syriac and Sanskrit works into Arabic. These included Ptolemy’s Almagest and Geography, Euclid and Aristotle.
  • Indian astronomy arrived through the Arabic translation of Brahmagupta’s Brahmasphutasiddhanta (the Sindhind, c. 770s). It brought Hindu numerals, the decimal system and the sine.
  • Arab astronomers took over the Indian idea of a central meridian through Ujjain (Arin, the “cupola of the earth”), alongside Ptolemy’s meridian through the Fortunate Isles.
• Pilgrimage (hajj): the duty of journeying to Mecca sent a stream of travellers across Asia and Africa every year. It also created a practical need for routes, distances and the direction of Mecca (qibla).
• Trade: the merchant held an honoured place in Islamic society.
  • Arab traders dominated the Indian Ocean trade from East Africa to India, Southeast Asia and China, and brought back reports of winds, currents, ports and products.
  • Sailors’ manuals described the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the seas of China.
  • Sulaiman the Merchant’s account of India and China (851) is an early example.
• Administration and the post: the caliphal postal service (barid) produced road books (masalik wa mamalik, “routes and realms”), such as Ibn Khurradadhbih’s (c. 870), listing stations, distances and revenues.
• Learning as a duty: travel in search of knowledge (rihla fi talab al-‘ilm) was a respected tradition, and scholars valued observation (mushahada) over hearsay.

Sources and Method

• Al-Muqaddasi set out the method clearly. A geographer should rely on three sources, in descending order of reliability:
  • His own observation on travel.
  • Reports of trustworthy informants about places he could not visit.
  • Earlier books, checked against the first two.
• This blend of inherited theory and checked observation let Arab scholars correct Ptolemy on the Indian Ocean, the Caspian, the Mediterranean and the habitable world.
• Most scholars were generalists. A few specialised:
  • Al-Asma’i (c. 740–828) wrote on plants and animals.
  • Abu Hanifa al-Dinawari (d. 895) wrote a pioneering Book of Plants, an early work of plant geography.

Major Arab Geographers and Their Contributions

Al-Khwarizmi and Mathematical Geography

• Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–c. 850), a scholar of the House of Wisdom, gave algebra its name. His work on Hindu numerals carried the decimal system to the West.
• His Kitab Surat al-Ard (The Image of the Earth, 833) reworked Ptolemy’s Geography into tables of about 2,400 coordinates of cities, mountains, rivers and seas.
  • He shortened the Mediterranean from Ptolemy’s 63° of longitude to about 50°, close to the truth.
  • He showed the Atlantic and Indian Oceans as open seas.
• He also helped prepare a world map for al-Ma’mun.
• Measuring the earth: al-Ma’mun’s astronomers re-measured a degree of latitude on the Mesopotamian plain by Eratosthenes’ method, fixing star altitudes at both ends of a measured line.
  • The figures recorded vary, and the length of the Arabic mile is uncertain. The result was nevertheless the first state-sponsored geodetic survey since antiquity.
• Al-Battani (c. 858–929) refined the length of the year and the tilt of the earth’s axis.
• Ibn Yunus (d. 1009) of Cairo noted that a gnomon’s shadow is cast by the sun’s upper edge, not its centre, and corrected latitude readings accordingly.

The Balkhi School: Ibn Hawqal and Al-Muqaddasi

• Abu Zayd al-Balkhi (850–934) prepared Suwar al-Aqalim (“Figures of the Regions”, c. 921), a set of maps of the provinces of the Islamic world, each with a description.
  • Here aqalim means regions, not climates in the modern sense. The work is often described as the first “climatic atlas”, but it is better seen as the founding regional atlas of the Islamic world.
  • It founded the Balkhi school, whose atlases (later called the “Atlas of Islam”) show some 20 regional maps and a world map in a geometric, diagram-like style with south at the top.
• Al-Istakhri revised the work (c. 951). Ibn Hawqal expanded it.
• Ibn Hawqal (d. after 978), born in Nisibis, travelled from 943 to 969 across North Africa, Spain, Sicily, Armenia, Iran, Transoxiana and Sind.
  • His Surat al-Ard (977) described for each region its limits, cities, rivers, resources, taxes, routes, distances and trade, a model of economic-regional description.
  • He gave a map and account of Sind and the Indus, described farming methods and crops more fully than any contemporary, and showed the Caspian to be a closed sea.
  • He reported populous lands far south of the equator on the East African coast, contradicting the Greek belief in an empty torrid zone.
• Al-Muqaddasi (c. 945–c. 991) of Jerusalem wrote Ahsan al-Taqasim fi Ma’rifat al-Aqalim (The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, 985).
  • He divided the Islamic world into 14 regions (six Arab, eight non-Arab) and described each by its towns, climate, products, peoples, languages, weights, measures and customs.
  • He saw the towns of a region as a hierarchy: great cities as kings, provincial capitals as chamberlains, towns as cavalry and villages as foot soldiers. This is an early idea of an urban hierarchy.
  • He noted that climate varies not only with latitude but also with east–west position, and that most of the earth’s land lies in the northern hemisphere.
  • He divided Syria into four physical belts running parallel to the coast: coastal plain, highlands, rift valley and the edge of the desert.

Al-Masudi

• Al-Masudi (c. 896–956), born in Baghdad and often called the “Herodotus of the Arabs”, travelled to Persia, India, Sri Lanka, the East African coast down to the land of Sofala, Oman, the Caspian, Syria and Egypt. He died at Fustat (Cairo).
• His surviving works are Muruj al-Dhahab (Meadows of Gold, 947) and Kitab al-Tanbih wa al-Ishraf (956). His 30-volume history is lost.
• Physical geography:
  • He argued for a spherical earth, since a ship’s coast appears gradually above the curved sea.
  • He gave a clear account of the monsoon winds of the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, of evaporation and condensation, and of windmills in Sistan.
  • He held that salt in the sea comes from the land, and explained the colours of sea water by salinity and marine life.
  • He described the Caspian as a closed sea, the Oxus flowing into the Aral Sea, and the Volga as a trade highway.
  • He held that land and sea constantly change places, as rivers shift and build up land: places have a youth and an old age, like living things. This anticipated the later idea of a cycle of landforms.
• Human geography:
  • He explained differences in temperament, physique and way of life by water, vegetation and relief, contrasting northern peoples with those of the south. It is an early form of environmental determinism.
  • He noted that Turks settled in India took on new traits, an idea of adaptation to environment.
  • He grouped the world’s peoples into seven nations by language: Persians, Chaldaeans (Arabs), Greeks, Egyptians and Libyans, Turks, Indians and Chinese.

Al-Biruni

• Abu Rayhan al-Biruni (973–c. 1050), born near Kath in Khwarazm (Uzbekistan), served at the court of Mahmud of Ghazni and travelled in north-west India. He died at Ghazni.
  • He knew Khwarazmian, Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit. He is called the founder of Indology and an early anthropologist.
• Major works:
  • Kitab al-Hind (c. 1030), a study of Indian science, religion, society and geography.
  • Al-Qanun al-Mas’udi (1037), an astronomical encyclopaedia modelled on the Almagest.
  • Tahdid, on determining coordinates.
  • A book on minerals and gems.
• Mathematical geography:
  • At the fort of Nandana (Pind Dadan Khan, Pakistan), he measured the dip of the horizon from a hilltop of known height and used trigonometry to compute the earth’s radius, within a few per cent of the true value. It was a new, single-observer method.
  • He fixed the latitudes and longitudes of many places and measured the tilt of the earth’s axis. He discussed the earth’s rotation and judged that observations alone could not decide it.
  • He noted the continuous day and night at the poles and timed twilight at the sun’s depression of about 18°.
• Geomorphology:
  • In the alluvium south of the Himalaya, he noted that stones are rounded by rolling in torrents and that sediment becomes finer with distance from the mountains.
  • He concluded that the Indo-Gangetic plain had been a sea filled up by river alluvium.
  • Marine fossils in the deserts of Arabia and near the Caspian showed him that the sea had once covered those lands.
  • He traced the shifting course of the Oxus since Ptolemy’s day and its effect on settlement.
• Geography of India:
  • He estimated the size of the subcontinent closely and grasped its peninsular shape, with the Himalaya (Himavant) as a great spine across Asia.
  • He gave the first sound account of the Indus, its sources, the five rivers of the Punjab joining at Panchanada, and its floods.
  • He described Kashmir, ringed by mountains and entered by the Jhelum gorge, and Kannauj.
  • He described the seasons of India, the summer monsoon and the winter rain of Kashmir and Punjab.
  • He noted that the Western and Eastern Ghats control rainfall in the peninsula, and linked the tides at Somnath to the moon.
  • He described caste, Hindu beliefs, calendars and learning with rare objectivity, separating the views of scholars from popular practice.

Ibn Sina

• Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037), philosopher and physician, discussed landforms in his Kitab al-Shifa (Book of Healing).
  • Mountains arise by uplift, such as from earthquakes, and by erosion, as streams and wind wear away soft rock and leave resistant rock standing as peaks. The process is slow and goes on for very long periods.
  • He took fossils in mountain rocks as evidence of the former presence of the sea.
  • These ideas foreshadow the uniformitarian geology of James Hutton eight centuries later.

Al-Idrisi

• Al-Idrisi (1100–1165/66), born at Ceuta and educated at Córdoba, was invited by the Norman king Roger II of Sicily to Palermo.
• In 1154 he completed Nuzhat al-Mushtaq (The Delight of Him Who Desires to Journey Through the Climes), known as the Tabula Rogeriana.
  • It contains a world map and 70 sectional maps: seven climes, each cut into ten sections. It was based on Ptolemy, Arab geographers and envoys sent out to collect fresh information.
  • A large silver planisphere was also made for the king.
  • As in most Islamic maps, south is at the top.
• Corrections:
  • He showed the Indian Ocean as open to the south.
  • He drew the Caspian and Aral as inland seas.
  • He improved the courses of the Danube and Niger.
  • He gave the most detailed account of 12th-century Europe of any writer.
• He criticised the Greek five-zone scheme as too crude and used a fuller division into seven climes with regional detail.
• His work, written at a Christian court, was a direct bridge between Arab and European geography.

Later Compilers

• Yaqut al-Hamawi (1179–1229) compiled Mu’jam al-Buldan (Dictionary of Countries, completed 1224–28). It is an alphabetical geographical dictionary of places with their history and setting, and he urged that doctors and administrators need geographical knowledge.
• Al-Qazwini (1203–1283) wrote a popular cosmography of the heavens, earth, seas, plants and animals, and a geography of the inhabited climes.
• Al-Bakri (1040–1094) of Andalusia described the routes and kingdoms of West Africa, including ancient Ghana, in his Book of Routes and Realms, and compiled a dictionary of place names.

Ibn Battuta

• Ibn Battuta (1304–1368/69), a Berber scholar of law from Tangier, left home in 1325 on pilgrimage. Over nearly thirty years he travelled about 117,000 km, more than any traveller before the age of steam.
  • Route:
    • North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Arabia and the East African coast to Kilwa (about 9° S).
    • Persia, Iraq, Anatolia and the steppes of the Golden Horde.
    • Central Asia and India, where he served for years as a qadi (judge) in Delhi under Muhammad bin Tughluq.
    • Calicut, the Maldives (where he was also a qadi), Sri Lanka, Bengal and Assam.
    • Sumatra and China (Quanzhou, 1345).
    • Finally Spain and, across the Sahara, Timbuktu and Mali (1352–53).
  • His travels were recorded as the Rihla (dictated to Ibn Juzayy, 1355).
• Contributions:
  • The Rihla is a rich human geography: it records peoples, customs, food, dress, house types, soils, crops, trade, coinage and political conditions.
  • Its India chapters are a key source for the Tughluq period.
  • He confirmed that the “torrid” lands of East Africa were well peopled and traded with Arab ports such as Sofala, disproving Aristotle’s uninhabitable zone.
  • His interest was in people more than landforms, and he gave no theory.

Ibn Khaldun

• Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), born in Tunis, statesman and scholar in North Africa, Spain and Egypt, completed the Muqaddimah (Introduction to History) in 1377.
  • It is the first systematic attempt to explain history through its physical and social settings. He is regarded as a founder of sociology, economics and the philosophy of history.
• Environment and people:
  • He accepted the seven climes. The middle (temperate) climes produce balanced bodies, temperaments and civilisations.
  • The extremes of heat and cold produce extreme character, and peoples near the equator are dark because of the sun, not by descent.
  • Population is thin near the equator, densest in the temperate belt and thin again towards the poles.
  • These are deterministic ideas inherited from the Greeks, which he used with care.
• Social environment: besides physical influences, he stressed culture and way of life. Nomads (badawa) are hardy and united by group solidarity (asabiyya). Settled townspeople (hadara) grow rich, refined and soft.
• Settlements: cities grow from small settlements sited for fertile land, water and defence. As population grows, crafts, division of labour, markets and supply and demand follow.
• Political geography and the life cycle of states: desert tribes with strong asabiyya conquer settled lands and found dynasties. In about three generations luxury erodes their cohesion, and the state declines and falls to new conquerors.
  • This cyclical theory of the rise and fall of states anticipates the organic view of the state later developed by Friedrich Ratzel in the German school.
• Assessment: the historian of medieval geography George H. T. Kimble (1938) judged that Ibn Khaldun grasped the true scope of geographical inquiry, though his physical geography still rested on Greek theory.

Ibn Majid and Arab Navigation

• Ahmad ibn Majid (c. 1432–c. 1500), an Arab pilot of Oman, wrote navigational treatises (Kitab al-Fawa’id, 1490). They describe the monsoon seasons, star altitudes, coasts and routes of the Indian Ocean.
  • A long tradition names him as the pilot who guided Vasco da Gama from Malindi to Calicut (1498), though historians doubt it.
  • The word monsoon itself comes from the Arabic mawsim (“season”).

Contributions by Branch

• Mathematical geography:
  • They kept the spherical earth and the Ptolemaic grid while Europe drew symbolic T-in-O maps.
  • They added precise astronomical tables (zij), better instruments such as the astrolabe and quadrant, and new methods for the earth’s size.
• Physical geography: Arab observations of the monsoon, the work of running water, sediment sorting and fossils were centuries ahead of European geology.
• Human geography:
  • They wrote rich regional geography of towns, trade, crops, taxes, languages and customs.
  • Ibn Khaldun’s man–environment and political ideas reach into modern environmentalism and state theory.
• Indian links:
  • Arab geography learned from India through the Sindhind, numerals and the Ujjain meridian.
  • It wrote about India through Sulaiman, al-Masudi, Ibn Hawqal on Sind, al-Biruni and Ibn Battuta.

Transmission to Europe and Evaluation

• Transmission:
  • From the 12th century, scholars at Toledo in Spain and at Palermo in Sicily translated Arabic works into Latin. Gerard of Cremona translated the Almagest from Arabic (1175).
  • Through these translations Europe recovered Aristotle and Ptolemy and gained Hindu-Arabic numerals, the astrolabe, the zij and Arab geography.
  • Spain and Portugal, longest in contact with the Arab world, led the Age of Exploration.
• Strengths:
  • They preserved the classical heritage and corrected it by observation.
  • They widened geography to include economic, urban, linguistic and political themes.
  • They produced the most comprehensive descriptions of Asia and Africa before modern times.
• Limitations:
  • Much work stayed within the Greek frame: the geocentric universe, the seven climes and climatic determinism. Many held on to the uninhabitable torrid zone despite travellers’ evidence.
  • Coverage of non-Muslim lands was thinner.
  • Ibn Battuta’s Rihla and much else never reached Latin, so Europe gained only part of this learning.
  • After the 14th century creative work declined.
• Place in the history of geography: the Arab period is the essential link between classical antiquity and the Renaissance. It is also a central part of the modern challenge to the Eurocentric story of the discipline told in the evolution of geographical thought.