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The world in Arab eyes: A reassessment of the climes in medieval Islamic scholarship*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2014

J.T. Olsson
J.T. Olsson*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

Many Arabic geographical texts from the medieval period portray the oecumene as comprising seven latitudinal climes. In general the middle clime, in which the majority of Muslim territories were located, was viewed as possessing the best environmental conditions, which progressively deteriorated the further one travelled north or south of this central territory. This theory of the climes was combined with ideas of humoral pathology in order to argue that those living in the central zones of the oecumene received numerous physiological and psychological benefits. Conversely, those like the Africans and the Turks, living at the peripheries of the oecumene, had neither rationality nor proportionate physiognomies because their humours were distorted by the harsh environmental conditions of these regions. This article, however, seeks to nuance the outline given above. While secondary studies have generally been happy to adopt uncritically this superficial understanding of the medieval Islamic worldview, which is gained from skimming the introductions to a few geographical works, few have questioned what (and where) is meant by the centre of the world, where did human habitation supposedly end, and was the medieval understanding of the seven climes uniform. These are some of the questions posed by the present investigation. I then go on to assess how far the notions derived from the theory of the climes were implemented in ethnological accounts of the inhabitants of the far north and south. In doing so I shall conclude that the standard conception of the medieval Islamic worldview masks numerous disagreements and debates in the writings of medieval scholars.

Keywords

Humoral pathologyClimatic theoryArabic ethnologyArabic geographyEnvironmental determinism
Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 77 , Issue 3 , October 2014 , pp. 487 - 508
Copyright
Copyright © SOAS, University of London 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Professors Robert Hoyland and Geert Jan van Gelder in particular for their help and invaluable advice which aided me in writing the study underpinning this article.

References

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59 Jwaideh, The Introductory Chapters, 50.

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98 Ibid., 122, 136. English translation 121, 135.

99 Ibid., 134, 154. English translation 133, 153.

100 Dols, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 92.

101 Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, trans. F. Rosenthal, 177–8.

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111 Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, trans. F. Rosenthal, 168–9.

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118 I have previously outlined one of Yāqūt's four definitions of iqlīm. Another definition, used by “the Persians of old” and frequently employed in his own time, was as of one of the seven kishwars. A kishwar, from the Avestan karshwar, was a circular territory of the oecumene. As with the Greek climatic system there were seven of them. However, in the kishwar system there was a central circle surrounded by six outer circles. This system appears in a number of works such as, for example, the Tārīkh Baghdād of al-Khatīb al-Baghdādī (d. 1071), and was employed instead of the Greek system. See Jwaideh, The Introductory Chapters, 40–42, Daryaee, T., “Ethnic and territorial boundaries in late antique and early medieval Persia (third to tenth century)”, in Curta, F. (ed.), Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis: Frontiers in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Turnhout, 2005), 123–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and A.J. Silverstein, “The medieval Islamic worldview”, esp. 276–7.