As products of a borderland between Africa and the Middle East, the writings of Ethiopian Christian scholars occasionally offer a unique view of the world beyond the Red Sea. This paper introduces and analyzes the constructions of the Muslim world evident in several Ge’ez and Amharic histories from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are two principal sources for this discussion. The first is series of royal biographies, or yaheywet tarik, that describe the sixteenth century military conflicts between Ethiopian Christians, the Adal Sultanate, and its Ottoman allies. The second source is a seventeenth century universal history, or yalam tarik, that briefly describes the emergence of Islam and its impact on world history over the long term. This second source, contained in the Zuryas Warq manuscript at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, has yet to be translated or receive scholarly attention. After introducing and outlining the main themes and concerns of these historical works, this paper will use them to explore their authors’ intellectual constructions of the Muslim world. Key questions will include the following: What motivated Ethiopian scholars to write about distant parts of the world? How did they acquire their knowledge of foreign lands, and to what extent were their works informed by other scholarly traditions? And how did they conceptualize their relations with their Muslim, Christian, and Jewish neighbors? The paper concludes by considering these works in light of Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s arguments about a global sixteenth century turn towards innovative forms of world historiography. This paper contends that while the topical interests of these Ethiopian works resemble the new historical scholarship Subrahmanyam describes, their underlying source material and analytic categories are rooted in a much older tradition of universal historiography in which the distant is always subordinate to the local.

One of the most prominent and challenging works left by the Ottoman scholar and polymath Katip Çelebi is his massive geographical work, the Cihânnümâ, which was never completed. The noted Ottoman founder of its first printing-press, Ibrâhîm Müteferrika, considered it important enough to expand upon its foundations and print the work in 1732. The development of the Cihânnümâ is remarkable, at least in part, because Katip Çelebi recognized the utility of several treatises of European geographical literature that had been emerging in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Having had these works translated by intermediaries, he was in the process of rewriting the work with the input from this foreign literature when he died in 1657. While the work has since attracted the attention of a number of German scholars, interest in it has otherwise languished in favor of Katip Çelebi's other, more accessible works, such as The Balance of Truth or his catalogue of medieval and early modern works of Islamic civilization. Having recently completed a translation of the relevant chapters, the goal of this paper is to examine how Katip Çelebi presented the Indian Subcontinent and Indian Ocean world to his contemporaries. Through an examination of these chapters of the work and others related to the topic, the paper will address the question of how an Ottoman intellectual like Katip Çelebi envisioned and imagined parts of the world that he encountered only through textual intermediaries, both Muslim and European. It will also examine the interplay between the Muslim and non-Muslim sources in the compilation of the Cihânnümâ as a whole.

This paper will address the seemingly simple question of what literate Early Modern Muslims knew, or thought they knew, about the wider world in which the lands of Islam were situated. The early 16th century Khatay'namah, a Transoxanian merchant's description of law and governance in Ming China, contains what may be described as vernacular macrohistory: a narrative of historical developments that took place over many centuries and spanned large portions of the inhabited world, and which does not rely primarily on other written histories as sources. The Khatay'namah and other contemporaneous texts will be juxtaposed with modern macrohistorical scholarship or “big history” of the zone of contact between China and the Islamic world in order to understand the scope and nature of events on which these texts' vernacular macrohistorical narratives were based, thus moving us closer to a thickly described account of actual macrohistorical developments. In the case of the Khatay'namah, the alternative to written history was a combination of oral tradition or widely-known myths, recent reports by other travelers, and first-hand observations. The author of this text combined diverse details, such as the presence of grotesque figures in statues or reliefs in Inner Asian cities reminiscent of the dog-headed and bird-headed people said to have been confronted by Alexander the Great, as well as what appear to be reports of recent demographic changes in Chinese frontier provinces from other travelers or Muslim Chinese, into a narrative of Chinese history from its founding in distant antiquity by the descendents of Cain until the author's present (the early sixteenth century). This historical narrative is rationalistic, attempting to explain China's prosperity and strength in terms of causes and their effects. The Khatay'namah shares this macrohistorical dimension with apocalypses and other texts that may be described as social cosmographies—texts which define the boundaries of the possible in their authors' own social worlds by elaborating conditions comparable to paradise or hell. Apocalyptic legends, in particular, played an important part in political developments in the Islamic world during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. By exploring the connection between vernacular macrohistory and awareness of actual macrohistorical developments, I hope to give greater historical specificity to narratives based on theories such as world systems and world culture.

The paper will explore the Muslim geographers’ understanding of China at the turn of the first millennium. The political and commercial expansion of the Islamic World during the ?Abb?sid Dynasty prompted the development of the field of geography beyond the inherited Greek, Iranian, and Indian traditions. The ?Abb?sid geographers began by locating the Islamic World at the center of the known world according to the basic framework of the earlier world geographic theories they assimilated. To this, they incorporated fresh contemporary information unknown to their Greek predecessors. The clear inclusion of detailed information about China, at the eastern edge of their known world, illustrates this process. The Muslim merchants who frequently sailed in the Indian Ocean to China during the ninth and tenth centuries returned to their West Asian homelands with valuable goods and abundant information about the societies they visited and often settled for long periods of time. These merchants and sailors gave substantial, detailed, and accurate information about China, its society, and its trade routes to professional writers like Ibn Khurrad?dhbih, Abu Zayd, and al-Mas??d? who collected, systematically arranged, and published this information for general readers during the ninth and tenth centuries. The world maps drawn by different geographic schools and individual geographers place most of Eurasia and North Africa with detail and accuracy and all locate China clearly at the eastern edge of the world. The paper will examine the close connection between the Islamic World’s flourishing contact with China, largely through the dhow ships that sailed directly between the port cities of Arabia and China during the end of the first millennium, and the increase in the Islamic geographical knowledge about the known world that transformed China from a Terra Incognita to Terra Cognita. This early description and depiction of China provided a crucial foundation for later works that further expanded that knowledge.