The Meadows of Gold, the Abbasids, Mas'udi, transl. Paul Lunde and
Caroline Stone, Kegan Paul, London and New York, 1989

Introduction (pp. 11-19): Mas'udi (c. 896-956) is very largely known
from his two extant works, the Meadows of Gold (Muraj al-Dhahab) and
The Book of Notification (Kitab al-Tanbih). Born in Baghdad, he
travelled widely: through Persia to Western India, Arabia, Syria and
Egypt. He also was in the Caspian Sea area. In addition he keenly
consulted scholars and others, becoming informed of Ceylon, China,
Southeast Asia, Byzantium and the West, the affairs, history and
mythology of non Islamic religions.

The extant Meadows of Gold is a preliminary draft. This translation
focuses on those passages concerning the Abbasids and contains some
three quarters of this material. The translators express the intent
of producing two subsequent volumes, one on the Umayyads, the other
on Pre-Islamic times.

Among the interesting material in the introduction is the brilliant
glimpse offered of Abbasid intellectual life. With the introduction
of paper into the Islamic world following the capture of Chinese
learned in paper making at the Battle of Talas in 751, the Islamic
world rapidly became a realm where books were plentiful and cheap.
This facilitated an effecient bureaucracy and postal service. Also
it generated a very lively intellectual life.

This volume itself, some four hundred pages long, well demonstrates
its author's superb sense of selecting material of interest to the
reader. He draws on such fuller sources as at-Tabari entertaining
anecdotes. The translator's state that at Tabari is not read for
pleasure and that Mas'udi is very much so.

Michael McKenny March 27, 2007


Solarguard Islam



Solarguard Homepage