Islamic Civilization in Thirty Lives by Chase F. Robinson

Author:Chase F. Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
Published: 2016-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

20 al-Idrisi, cosmopolitan cartographer

(1165)

What does our world look like? The question is deceptively simple. Familiar with images from satellites and the like, we now know that it is a sphere that orbits in space, and that upon that sphere sit landmasses divided by oceans. Plain as it is, this statement already obscures several issues. What, precisely, is an ocean? Saying much more means using any number of increasingly loaded conventions. We speak of ‘continents’, for example, disagreeing about how many to count (four, five, six or seven). Similarly, we take for granted the four cardinal directions, placing what we call the Arctic in the north and Antarctica in the south, while knowing that these are mere conventions. It almost goes without saying that the ‘Middle East’ and ‘East Asia’ are in the ‘east’ only relatively speaking.

Our mental map of the world is usually provided by versions that derive from the Mercator projection, which dates from the late sixteenth century. This project of mapping has two salient features. The first, which stems from a mathematical rigour employed to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat page, is a distortion of continent size, the greater the distance from the Equator, the grosser being the distortion. What results is an elephantine Greenland that approximates South America in size (even though the latter is actually about eight times larger), along with an oversized Europe. The second feature of the Mercator projection is the position of this oversized Europe at its very centre. This is an effect of culture rather than geometry. Because Mercator was a Dutchman living in a world that was being charted by Europeans, his map made good cultural sense: after all, Europe was the centre from which explorers, traders and colonists were projecting European power the world over. Earlier, Christian world maps (mappae mundi) had identified Jerusalem as the navel of the world. ‘The temptation not only to put one’s own land in the centre of the map, but one’s own people in the centre of history, seems to be universal.’ 130

Mercator stood in a long tradition of map-making, and just as his way of projecting the world says something about the conventions he either inherited or established, so, too, does the work of Muslim cartographers. None was more significant than Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad al-Idrisi.

Al-Idrisi was a native of the town of Sabta (Ceuta), which lies on the northern tip of present-day Morocco. Born around 1100 to a wealthy family, he took up education at an early age, and in his teenage years embarked upon what ambitious scholars-to-be (such as the young al-Tabari) did as a matter of course: he travelled widely on a study tour, which in his case took him from Lisbon and Cordoba, in his day the greatest city of Europe and one of the greatest the world over, across the Mediterranean, and all the way to Damascus. Little is known about his early adulthood, but of one thing we can be sure: due to

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