The Position of the Maghreb in Traditional Chinese Geographical Knowledge about the Islamic Middle East

Abstract

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 38, 1, 2013 © The Maghreb Review 2013 This publication is printed on longlife paper THE POSITION OF THE MAGHREB IN TRADITIONAL CHINESE GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE ISLAMIC MIDDLE EAST BY HYUNHEE PARK* INTRODUCTION In his famous travel account, the fourteenth-century Muslim traveller Ibn Ba††ü†a (1304-1368) claims that he had once journeyed to China from his hometown of Tangier in Morocco (then ruled by the Marinid dynasty, 12441465 ). Contemporaneous sources—both Chinese and Arabic-Persian—testify that many merchants and other itinerants journeyed between China and the Islamic Middle East by means of the Indian Ocean trade networks that operated at that time. Moreover, some of these sources—with the exception of Ibn Ba††ü†a, whose claim some scholars still hold in doubt—suggest that people travelled directly between China and northwestern Africa, the westernmost part of the Islamic Middle East, in the region called the Maghreb. Meaning “western land” in Arabic, the Maghreb actually lay too far west from China to be directly connected to it, situated as it was at the eastern end of the Indian Ocean’s trade networks. Indeed, some Muslim audiences found it hard to believe the fantastic stories that Ibn Ba††ü†a told at the court of the Marinid sultan, given the great distance that lay between the two parts of the world. However, thanks to the circulation of geographical literature about the known world by medieval Muslim scholars living in all parts of the Islamic Middle East, Muslim elites most likely possessed a basic knowledge of China without anyone from the region actually having gone there. Ibn Ba††ü†a, by contrast, claimed that he had an opportunity to travel to China directly; indeed, his account brought fresh information about China to his fellow Muslims.1 What, then, was the situation in China? How did contemporaneous Chinese understand the Maghreb? In fact, a multi-faceted cross-cultural exchange between China and the Islamic Middle East developed with the the rise of Islam in the seventh century, and this led to an increase in mutual geographical knowledge that lasted for centuries.2 One of the most important and practical pieces of geographic information about the Islamic world that Chinese geographers acquired was knowledge about the sea routes that connected these two worlds. However, most of these routes that the Chinese geographers knew reached only as far as the Arabian Peninsula, * City University of New York, John Jay College 1 Ibn Khaldūn, Muqaddimah, an Introduction to History, vol. 1, Franz Rosenthal, trans. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 369–372. 2 For more detailed discussions about significant events of contacts and geographic sources, see my monograph, Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in PreModern Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 4 HYUNHEE PARK Egypt, and the northeast coast of Africa. These regions integrated with Indian Ocean trade networks that did not connect to the Maghreb directly. There is nothing strange about this; in pre-modern times, when people faced limited means of transportation, Chinese probably found it difficult to make contact with and obtain knowledge about a society with which they did not share any direct political or commercial interest. Nonetheless, despite these limited contacts and connections, Chinese found middlemen through which they collected incomplete information about the region beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Some of these Chinese geographers tried to plot the Maghreb’s geographic location on their world maps more precisely. This happened at a time when world geographic knowledge circulating in the Islamic world transferred to China through academic exchanges that were made possible during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries thanks to the interconnections that grew as a consequence of the Mongol conquest of both China and Iran. This essay will examine relevant pieces of information about the Maghreb as found in extant traditional Chinese sources and explore its significance in the development of Chinese geographic understanding of the world. Some evidence for Chinese knowledge of the Maghreb, though not as rich and concrete as Chinese knowledge about other parts of the Islamic world, hints that knowledge about a distant society lacking any direct political and commercial connection to China was nonetheless...