For your #fragmentfriday: A letter from a Libyan Jew in 1103 who gripes, in rhyming Judaeo-Arabic, about a string of Red Sea ports on his way to Aden. I find it hilarious; your mileage may vary. cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-000… 
2/“I arrived in ʿAydhāb, which is truly a city of tribulations (Arab. adhāb). Then we left al-Maqlaʿayn and set sail in a ship that had in it not a single nail of iron, but rather was tied together with ropes, may God protect us with his shield.”
3/(There’s abundant archeological evidence of this nailless ship-building style around the Indian Ocean basin; see swahiliweb.net/ziff_journal_3…, and Dionisius Agius, Classic Ships of Islam. Whether such ships were indeed terrifying to Mediterraneans I can’t confirm.)
4/“Then we arrived at a city called Sawākin, which is the most frightening of places (Arab. akhaḍḍ amākin).” (Here’s a map so you can follow the guy’s apparently harrowing journey: imgur.com/MsXaOdV. Thanks to Martin Jan Månsson for this lecture-altering graphic.)
5/“Then we arrived at a city called Bādiʿ (‘the one that cuts’), for it is just as the name says (Heb. ki ki-shmah ken hi): the most
bitter, frightening, miserable of
places.” (All this bitching and he’s only halfway to Aden!)
bitter, frightening, miserable of
places.” (All this bitching and he’s only halfway to Aden!)
6/“Then we arrived at a city
called Dahlak. The following
adage is said about it: ‘But you surpass them all (Prov. 31:29).’ It is a ruinous (or: destructive, perilous)
land (Arab. balad muhlik).”
called Dahlak. The following
adage is said about it: ‘But you surpass them all (Prov. 31:29).’ It is a ruinous (or: destructive, perilous)
land (Arab. balad muhlik).”
7/What’s going on here? One might reasonably imagine the Red Sea as the meeting point of the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean maritime worlds. As many have. But here’s a Mediterranean trader going on about the crappiness of Red Sea ports and ricketiness of Indian Ocean boats. Why?
8/Goitein wrote about this guy in 1985 in A Mediterranean Society (5:246-54). His name was Makhluf ibn Ayn (or Aynayn) Sarra, “the son of the man with joyous eye(s).” He does not, however, seem to have conveyed the same jolliness as his father.
9/Goitein describes him as self-obsessed to the point of paranoia, and, “despite his standing in the merchants’ community, lack[ing] self-control to an almost pathological degree.” Ouch!
10/Goitein quotes another of his letters—in full—in which he complains at inordinate length about his son, who threw wild parties in his absence and then sold off his furniture. In closing, he asks his correspondent to give the useless son a job. Wha?!
11/A massive complainer, yes. But lacking in self-control? I’m skeptical.
12/Roxani Margariti in a 2010 piece on Dahlak was the first to comment on this man’s string of rhymed complaints about the Red Sea. She notes that the poet Ibn Qalāqis (d. 1172) also wrote “unflatteringly” about Dahlak, following a tradition of Arabic prose writers
13/who described the archipelago as a “dreary, marginal place,” or as an Umayyad-Abbasid prison camp. So he wasn’t alone: It may be that his whining about Red Sea travel is pure topos, laid on for effect—in rhyme no less (a deliberate rhetorical choice if there ever was one).
14/Nor was he new to Indian Ocean seafaring when he wrote the letter: he wasn’t writing out of mere terror of the voyage. Other letters discuss him as an experienced trader, as would a later letter to Avraham ibn Yiju (the hero of @GhoshAmitav’s first book).
15/Why, then, all the complaints about Red Sea travel? He’s writing to his brother-in-law back home in Barqa, Libya. He may have been eager to display his professional knowledge and experience—
16/or perhaps, on the contrary, to say to his relatives back home, sure, I’ve left to make money, but it’s not like I’m enjoying these cheap hotels and crappy airports.
17/We’re more alert now to the deployment of affect and rhetoric for strategic effect in medieval letters, and less willing to attribute to their authors an interiority we can neither assume nor falsify. We know this guy complained; we shouldn’t presume to know why.
18/But the letter remains unedited and untranslated, having somehow escaped the phenomenal industriousness of Goitein and his student M. A. Friedman, who revised and published many of Goitein’s editions and translations. I’ll have a go at it and get back to you, inshallah.
19/Meanwhile, please enjoy the incomparable Roxani Margariti on the Dahlak archipelago: academia.edu/4260086/Thieve….
