"In
this revised version of his University of Toronto doctoral thesis, Nizar Hermes
gives a valuable and cogent review of what a number of medieval Arabic writers,
in particular geographers, have said about medieval Europe and Europeans. He
frames his work as a refutation of the oft-quoted assertion by Bernard Lewis
that Europeans showed from early on an intellectual curiosity that made them
open to the observation and appreciation of foreign cultures, whereas
“orientals,” and in particular Arabs, did not. Hence the large number of travel
narratives and geographical and ethnographical works in the European languages,
which, for Lewis, contrasted to a dearth of comparable material in Arabic.
Lewis's assertion no doubt already seemed untenable to those in the know when he
first made it in 1982, indeed to anyone who had ever perused André Miquel's
magisterial survey of Arabic geographical erudition. Yet Lewis has considerable
readership and influence well beyond academic circles, and even his most
questionable assertions carry a certain weight of authority. Hermes places
himself in the footsteps of Nabil Matar, who has brought to light and translated
a number of important Arabic texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
concerning Europe.
Hermes
focuses first and foremost on the writings of medieval Arab geographers, many of
whom traveled extensively in non-Muslim lands: al-Ghazal was sent as an
ambassador from Umayyad Cordoba to Viking Denmark in 845; tenth-century Baghdad
geographer al-Mas‘udi purportedly traveled to China, the Indus Valley, Southeast
Asia, and East Africa; his contemporary al-Biruni traveled extensively in India;
Harun Ibn Yahya was a prisoner in Constantinople in the early tenth century and
subsequently visited Rome; Ibn Fadlan, an ambassador whom Abbasid Caliph
al-Muqtadir sent from Baghdad in 921, visited the Bulgars, Oghuz Turks, Rus, and
other northern peoples. All of these travelers wrote about the places they had
visited and the societies they had observed. As Hermes amply shows, they often
make keen ethnographical observations and in many cases their texts are to this
day fundamental sources of information for the histories of these
peoples.
Hermes
plays particular attention to what these authors wrote about Europe and
Europeans. Mas‘udi, for example, relates the history of Frankish kings from
Clovis (whose conversion he relates) to Louis IV. Al-Bakri's descriptions of the
Slavic lands of the tenth century, including his observation on their linguistic
divisions, their sexual mores, and their use of saunas, constitute a precious
source for historians of ninth-century Slavs."
