Арабы и море. По страницам рукописей и книг

In Oriental studies Shumovsky is known for his exploration of pre-modern Arabic navigation. Later, in 1995, he published the first Russian translation of the Qur’an in verses. In this respect Shumovsky followed the way of his teacher academician Ignatiy Krachkovsky who had also prepared academic Russian translation of the Qur’an from Arabic, and much contributed in investigation of the Arabic medieval geography and literature as well. Arabists of the St.-Petersburg classical school, the author belongs to by training and research interests, got accustomed to confine themselves with textual analysis. As a rule they are not interested in the historical context of manuscripts they study missing real people who wrote, read and copied these texts. Contrary to such an approach that still dominates Orientalist academic works, a popular book of Arabs and the Sea deals not only with old Oriental manuscripts but also with scholars’ work under them. The author has a flowing pen that allows readers traveling in the unmemorable years of his youth at the University from which he failed to graduate in 1938 due to the first arrest by the NKVD, following step by step a detective story of sensational research finding of Arabic manuscripts of Ahmad ibn Majid and his contemporary Sulayman al-Mahri, discussing Shumovsky’s innovative ideas about Arabic navigation and translators’ skills.

Shumovsky continues his autobiographical account of the work under Arabic sailing directions plunging more and more into the history of sailing culture in the Middle East and North Africa. Popular character of the book allows him to move freely from one historical period and region to another. The second part of this work contains fascinating narrative of navigation and sea exploration among the pre-modern peoples in the Middle East beginning from the maritime discoveries happened in Pharaonic Egypt under the reign of Queen Hatshepsut in the fifteenth century B.C., through sailing navigation as it was developed in Ancient Phoenicia and South Arabia including description of the expedition carried by the Carthaginian explorer of the African coast Hanno the Navigator in the sixth century B.C., oversea voyages ordered by Ptolemaic Egypt till maritime raids and trade navigation occurred under the Caliphate and its successor states until the Ottoman sailing of the early modern times. The last part of the book introduces readers into medieval Arabic sailing directions focusing on the Book of Useful Information on the Principles and Rules of Navigation or Kitab al-fawa’id fi usul ‘ilm al-bahr wa-l-qawa‘id by Ahmad ibn Majid. Known under this spicy Oriental title this solid work was, in reality, a detailed encyclopedia of the Arabic navigational lore as it was practiced in the Indian and Pacific Ocean on the eve of the European colonial conquests.