An Arabic Manuscript On China and Tibet

Abstract

E VER since western orientalists took interest in Arabic geographic accounts, a score or so of Arab geographers who had either travelled to the Far East or, more often, collected hearsay and stories from secondary sources about the marvels of those lands, have been translated into European languages. More texts of this sort, in Persian and Turkish, were translated, edited and published over the years. The most recent of Arabic manuscripts touching upon China was published by Richard Frye in 1949.1 The present manuscript is a section of a larger work by Muhammad b. Ha`i 'All, a writer of the 16th century who, interestingly enough, entitled his book: Iqlzm Ndmeh f-l Tarnh (The Book of IqlzmPashas in History). The manuscript was written in 993/ 1585 by commission of Murad, an illustrious military commander, later made Grand Vizier, under Sultan Ahmad I (enthroned in 1603). The pages relevant to China and Tibet (8-13b) were hand-copied by Richard Frye2 in 1945 from the original MS, at the Top Kapi Saray in Istanbul, the section of Andarun Hamayun (the Inner Palace) in the Sultan Ahmad III Library. Whether the MS is still located there it is now hard to ascertain. What is clear is that the book included accounts of other places in Central Asia such as Samarkand and Turkestan. The report of China, Tibet and Central Asia being sketchy at best, and dealing with what appears more as fantasy than substantive data, the question arises why would Murad Pasha, an eminent man of action, commission such an account? Indeed, judging from the text, one would be inclined to conclude that rather than a travel-