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Meadows of Gold, Roads Without End: The Life and Ideas of Al-Masudi, the Herodotus of the Arabs - Softcover
Inhaltsangabe
What did you stop being curious about?
There was a version of you that asked questions without checking first whether they were reasonable. Somewhere along the way the asking got expensive, and you learned to want smaller things. Most people do. Almost nobody notices the day it happens.
In the tenth century, a young man in Baghdad refused.
Al-Masudi had everything a scholar could want. He lived in the richest intellectual city on earth, in a house of books, among men who could trace what they knew back three hundred years. He left anyway. He sailed the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, walked the coast of East Africa, sat with Brahmin priests in India and Zoroastrian priests in the mountains of Persia, and stood on a Caspian shore while men described a fleet of five hundred ships that had come down the Volga and never gone home. Then he wrote it all down in a book called the Meadows of Gold, and did something almost no one in his century did: he told his readers exactly where each piece of it came from, and which parts he was unsure of.
This is his story, told as the life it was rather than the footnote it became.
- Feel the specific pull of a question you cannot answer from a chair
- Watch a man choose difficulty over comfort, at twenty-one, and never regret it
- See the medieval world as it actually was: connected, argumentative, astonishingly wide
- Understand why the habit of saying "I have not seen this myself" is the rarest kind of courage
- Recognize the question you set down years ago, and pick it back up
This is a book for anyone who used to want to see things, and who still catches themselves looking at maps.
He was not the greatest mind of his age. He was the one who went.
The road is still there. Open the first page.
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Meadows of Gold, Roads Without End : The Life and Ideas of Al-Masudi, the Herodotus of the Arabs
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Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 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. Artikel-Nr. 9798196921988
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