The Meadows of gold: the Abbasids (review)

Reviews 159 appreciated, with emphasis given to their construction and function. Then the introduction and supplementary material brings us closer to the full significance of the objects in their own time and context, thus answering the current concern of curators to present not only the physical objects surviving from the past but through them also the intangibles of that culture. Ann Moffatt Art History Department Australian National University Mas'udi, The Meadows of gold: the Abbasids, trans. P. Lunde and C. Stone, London, Kegan Paul, 1989; cloth; pp. x, 469; R. R. P. £30.00. Mas'udi's major surviving work, Muruj al-Dhahab, of which thefirstvolume was translated into English as early as 1841 by A. Sprenger (Meadows of Gold), deserves a fuU scholarly translation. The volume under review, covering the last part (755-945 A.D.), addresses the general reader and will disappoint the serious student, including MedievaUsts and historians of ideas, who, like earlier scholars, must continue to rely on B. de Meynard's edition and parallel French translation (Les Prairies d'Or, 9 vols, Paris, 1861-77; revised by C. Pellat: Arabic text, 7 vols, Beirut, 1965-79; French trans. 3 vols so far, Paris, 1962-71) or other Arabic editions. The editors' arbitrary exclusion of more than twenty five percent of the part they chose to translate seriously distorts the author's scholarly purpose. They may escape Mas'udi's curse invoked against any attempt to 'undermine the foundations' of his book '... by alteration or abridgment' (p. 428). Nevertheless, ignoring his plan based on caliphs' reigns and historical themes and replacing most of his 26 chapter headings with about 218 short anecdotal chapters, often with sensational headings, hardly deserves scholarly gratitude. 'Guided entirely by [their] own taste', the translators have turned Mas'udi's broad historical presentation into a hotchpotch of anecdotes. C. Field's less pretentious anthology, Tales of the Caliphs (London, 1909), not mentioned by the translators, already includes several stories from the Meadows. Since the volume under review is subtided The Abbasids, the omission of whole chapters, including four on the rise of this dynasty and on chronology and the annual pilgrimage, is inexplicable. Frequent omissions also deprive the uninitiated reader of important aspects of Mas'udi's value as a historian; for example, his appraisal of earlier and contemporary scholars, poets and litterateurs, his regular references to 'AUd and other uprisings, his concern for continuity and change, and his interest in science. G. Sarton, Introduction to the history of science (1927) vol. 1, p. 619, designates the tenth century as 'the time of al-Mas'udi'. Also excluded are certain intellectual, artistic and political accounts and eyewitness reports. The reader is left to 'form some idea of the omitted portions 160 Reviews from the summaries at the end of each chapter', but oftenfindsonly bewildering indications of these. The translators' brief introduction reflects recent Mas'udian scholarship - T. Khatidi, Islamic historiography (1975) and A. Shboul, al-Mas'udi and his world (1979). However, their notes do not. Certain elementary mistakes undermine one's confidence in the work. For example, Mas'udi's reference to the ta'assub (bias) of the ninth-century polymath, al-Jahiz, is wrongly rendered in the text as 'heretical tendencies' (p. 309) and explained in the notes with 'Jahiz was a Mu'tazilite'. Indeed, Jahiz was a leading Mu'tazilite. However, Mas'udi, himself a disciple of the rationalistic Mu'tazilite school but also a Shi'a sympathiser, was specifically criticising Jahiz's ostensible anti-Shi'a bias. While generally succeeding in rendering Mas'udi's entertaining portrayal of 'Abbasid court life and his skills as a story-teller, the translators not only disregard Mas'udi's historical structure by presenting only 'the bits that interested [them]' but also occasionally betray inadequate understanding of linguistic and cultural nuances. This volume deserves atitlesuch as Anecdotes of the 'Abbasids from Mas'udi's Meadows and is to be used only with caution by the student Ahmad Shboul Department of Semitic Studies University of Sydney Morgan, D., Medieval Persia 1040-1797, London/N.Y., Longman, 1988; paperback; pp. x, 197; 4 genealogical tables, 1 map; R. R. P. AUS$23.95...