Mas‘udi, Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali al- (Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali al-Mas‘udi) (Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Husayn ibn Ali al-Mas'udi) (b. 893/896, Baghdad - d. September 956, Cairo, Egypt). One of the most eminent Arab writers. His works comprise geography, history, heresiography, comparativism, general philosophy, science, Muslim law and its principles. He also wrote the history of ‘Ali, of the Family of the Prophet, of the Twelver Shi‘a, and of the Imamate.
Born in Baghdad in the late ninth century, he spent twenty years travelling in Asia, Europe, North Africa, and parts of eastern Africa. In 915/916, he journeyed to Madagascar, apparently visiting Zanzibar and various east African towns along the way. However, the places he named cannot be identified today. His description of Islamic culture in east Africa helped to give rise to the false notion that there was a centralized Zanj Empire.
Al-Mas‘udi never visited West Africa. However, he recorded other travellers’ accounts of the western Sudan. His writings contain an important description of the “silent barter” through which traders of the ancient Ghana Empire obtained gold from their southern neighbors.
The best known among the 36 titles listed are a great history of the world, which is said to have filled 30 volumes; a work containing generalities regarding the universe and information of a historical nature on non-Muslim peoples (including the pre-Islamic Arabs) and the history of Islam, from the Prophet up to the caliphate of the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Mut‘i li-‘llah, and finally, a work called Warning and Revision, which is basically an overall review.
Al-Mas‘udi traveled extensively, gathering enormous quantities of information on poorly known lands. His work helped set the tone for future Arabic scholarship. He has been called the Herodotus of the Arabs.
Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali ibn Husain al-Mas‘udi came from an Arab family in Baghdad which claimed descent from one of the early Companions of the Prophet Muhammad, though some sources erroneously describe him as of North African origin. His educational background is unknown, but his career reflects a catholic and almost insatiable thirst for knowledge.
By the standards of the tenth century, al-Mas‘udi was a peerless traveler and explorer, whose feats surpass those of Marco Polo more than three centuries later. He began his travels as a young man, visiting Iran, including the cities of Kerman and Istakhr, around 915. Subsequently, he fell in with a group of merchants bound for India and Ceylon. Later, al-Mas‘udi seems to have found his way as far as southern China. On his return from China, he made a reconnaisance of the East African coast as far as Madagascar, then visited Oman and other parts of southern Arabia. There followed a visit to Iran, particularly the region of the Elburz Mountains, south of the Caspian Sea.
On yet another journey, al-Mas‘udi visited the Levant. He examined various ruins in Antioch and reported on relics in the possession of a Christian church in Tiberias in 943. Two years later, he returned to Syria, settling there for most of the remainder of his life. From Syria, he paid several extended visits to Egypt. Although it is uncertain whether he traveled there, al-Mas‘udi’s writing also demonstrates detailed knowledge of the lands of North Africa.
Al-Mas‘udi’s written work is characterized by his adherence to the rationalist Mutazilite school of Islamic thought. The Mutazilites, who applied logical analysis to fundamental questions of human existence and religious law, combined an intellectual disposition with a preference for vocal activism.
Regrettably, much of al-Mas‘udi’s literary work has been lost, so that in modern times it is known only by the references of others and from his own summaries in extant material. Only a single volume remains extant, for example, out of perhaps thirty that constituted al-Mas‘udi’s monumental attempt to write a history of the world. The surviving volume covers the myth of creation and geographical background as well as the legendary history of early Egypt.
The major work of al-Mas‘udi which has survived is Muruj al-Dhahab wa-Ma‘adin al-Jawhar (947 -- partial translation as Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems [1841]). Apparently, there was a considerably larger, revised 956 edition of this work, but it is not extant. Al-Mas‘udi laid out his philosophy of history and the natural world in Kitab al-Tanbih w’al-Ishraf (book of indications and revisions), a summary of his life’s work.
In his books, al-Mas‘udi presents a remarkable variety of information. His material on peoples and conditions on the periphery of the Islamic world is of vital importance, as modern knowledge of this aspect of Islamic history is extremely scanty. For modern scholars, however, al-Mas‘udi’s style and critical commentary leave something to be desired. His presentation jumps from subject to subject, without following a consistent system. Al-Mas‘udi made little attempt to distinguish among his sources or to obtain original versions of information, as, for example, the eleventh century geographer/historian al-Biruni was careful to do. He treated a sailor’s anecdote or a folktale in the same way as he did a map or a manuscript.
On the other hand, al-Mas‘udi’s uncritical approach doubtless led to the preservation of material, much of it useful, which would not have found its way into the work of a more conventional scholar. Al-Mas ‘udi expressed none of the condescension one sometimes finds in other writings of the time for non-Muslim authorities. He displays as much enthusiasm for learning what lay outside Islam as he does for Islamic teaching. The broad scope of his investigations was without precedent.
The juxtaposition of sources of varying authority in al-Masudi’s work is enough to raise skeptical questions in the minds of modern readers. In discussing the geography of the Indian Ocean, for example, he first presents the “official” version, heavily dependent on erroneous ideas borrowed from Ptolemy and other Hellenistic writers, who regarded the sea as largely landlocked and accessible only through a few narrow entrances. Al-Mas‘udi then lays out contrary -- and more accurate -- information about the Indian Ocean drawn from sailors’ tales and from his own experience, indicative of the vastness of the ocean and the cultural diversity of the countries surrounding it. He also presents the orthodox notion of his time that the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea were connected, followed by an account of his own explorations which revealedthat they are separate bodies of water.
Al-Mas‘udi departed from established form in presenting his information in a loosely topical manner, organized around ethnic groups, dynasties, and the reigns of important rulers instead of the year-by-year chronicle method typical of the time. In this respect, he anticipated the famed fourteenth century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun, whose work, in turn, represents a major step toward modern historical scholarship.
A noteworthy feature of al-Mas‘udi’s observations of nature is his attention to geologic forces which shape the environment. Although his comments sprang mostly from intuition, they were often prescient of modern scientific theory. He wrote, for example, of physical forces changing what once was seabed into dry land and of the nature of volcanic activity.
Al-Mas‘udi deserves to be included among the major Arabic historians, despite the loss of most of his work. His career marks the introduction of a new intellectual curiosity in Islam, one that sought knowledge for its own sake and paid scant attention to the boundaries between Islam and the rest of the world. His fascination with geographical elements in history and human affairs would be taken up by many later Arabic scholars.
Western historians have suggested that al-Mas‘udi’s intellectual disposition reflects the development of Hellenistic influence in Islamic scholarship, foreshadowing the pervasive Greek character in non-theological Islamic writing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, particularly in Mediterranean lands. He has been conpared both to Herodotus of the fifth century B.C. T. And to the first century of the Christian calendar. Roman geographer/historian Pliny the Elder. Lack of knowledge about al-Mas‘udi’s training and education makes such judgments problematic, but there can be no doubt that his work is in many respects prototypical of what was to come in Islam.
Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali al-Mas‘udi see Mas‘udi, Abu’l-Hasan ‘Ali al-
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