Overview

The greatest traveler-scholar of the medieval world - and why his questions still matter todayIn the tenth century, while Europe was mired in its so-called Dark Ages, one man sailed three oceans, crossed a dozen kingdoms, questioned sailors and priests and kings and merchants - and then wrote it all down. Abu al-Hasan al-Masudi was born in Baghdad around 893 CE into the golden age of Islamic civilization. He could have spent his life in the city's magnificent libraries, content to read what others had written about the world. Instead, he went to see it for himself. He sailed the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. He walked the coasts of East Africa. He visited the temples of India and questioned Brahmin scholars about the age of the universe. He sat with Zoroastrian priests in Persia, Jewish merchants in Egypt, Christian astronomers in the courts of Byzantium. He recorded the monsoon winds, the tidal systems, the trade routes that connected half the world. And he wrote about all of it with a clarity and honesty that still astonishes modern readers. His masterwork, the Muruj al-Dhahab - the Meadows of Gold - is one of the supreme achievements of medieval geographical and historical literature. It spans the history of the world from creation to his own time, the geography of three continents, the religions of a dozen peoples, and the science of the stars and seas. It is a book written by someone who genuinely loved the world and wanted his readers to see it as he saw it: large, strange, beautiful, and endlessly worth understanding. In Meadows of Gold, Roads Without End, Narin Hikma brings al-Masudi back to life for modern readers - his insatiable curiosity, his revolutionary methods of inquiry, his rare commitment to epistemic honesty, and the questions he pursued that we are still trying to answer: How do we know what we know - and how honest should we be about what we don't? What do we owe to the wisdom of traditions different from our own? How can we move between cultures without losing ourselves or distorting what we find? What does it mean to write history honestly, in the full awareness that your sources are incomplete? These are al-Masudi's questions. They are also ours. ""The world is larger than any single mind can hold, but this is not a reason to stop reaching."" - Al-Masudi

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