Mujam al-Buldan

The Mu'jam al-Buldan ("Dictionary of Countries") is a geographical dictionary by Yaqut al-Hamawi of the names of countries, mountains, valleys, plains, villages, quarters, seas, rivers, pools, idols and shrines, arranged alphabetically. ^{2 3} Yaqut says he gave it a name that matches its content and began the fair copy on the night of 21 Muharram 625 AH. ⁴

Yaqut says the first spur was a question put to him at Marw al-Shahijan in 615 AH, in the circle of his teacher Fakhr al-Din Abu al-Muzaffar Abd al-Rahim, son of Abu Sa'd al-Sam'ani, about the vocalization of "Hubasha", a place named in hadith and a pre-Islamic Arab market; he said Hubasha, a hadith scholar insisted on Habasha, and Yaqut could not find it in the books of rare words and lexicons, plentiful as they were at Marw, until after the dispute was over, so he saw the need for a carefully vocalized book on the subject. ^{5 6} He lists who needs place names: jurists, because lands were taken by treaty or by force, each with its ruling on fay', jizya and kharaj; historians and hadith scholars; physicians, for the temperaments of countries; astrologers, for their ascendants; and men of letters and poets. ^{7 8} He gives the example of a commentator on al-Hariri's Maqamat who misplaced Karaj, Barqa'id and Tabriz and became "a laughing-stock for idlers". ⁵

Yaqut divides his predecessors into two classes. One described inhabited lands: the ancients, who called their books "geography", meaning "the image of the earth", and the Islamic authors of routes and realms such as Ibn Khurradadhbih, Ahmad ibn Wadih, al-Jayhani, Ibn al-Faqih, Abu Zayd al-Balkhi, al-Istakhri, Ibn Hawqal, al-Bashari, al-Muhallabi and Abu Ubayd al-Bakri in his al-Masalik wal-Mamalik. ^{6 9} The other, the philologists, recorded the halting places of the Arabs: al-Asma'i, al-Sakuni, al-Hamdani with his Jazirat al-Arab, Hisham al-Kalbi, al-Zamakhshari and others; he says he never saw al-Bakri's Mu'jam ma Ista'jam despite searching, and that everything he took from Nasr al-Iskandari's book on similar place names he attributed to him. ⁹ To these he adds Arab poetry collections, histories, the mouths of transmitters and what he saw on his travels. ⁹

He vocalizes every name letter by letter, then gives its derivation if Arabic and meaning if foreign, its clime and ascendant, its builder, neighbours and distances, its peculiarities and marvels, notables, Companions and Followers buried there, poetry about it, when and how the Muslims took it and under whom, whether by treaty or by force, and who ruled it in his day, admitting this is possible only for well-known places. ³ He says he included things "that reason rejects", about which he is "doubtful", disclaiming responsibility because he reports them as he found them, as hadith scholars transmit what they heard with responsibility resting on their source. ^{3 10} The book is divided into twenty-eight books, one per letter, each in twenty-eight chapters by the second letter, alphabetized through every letter of the word without regard to root and affix, since most names are foreign or coined proper nouns. ⁴

He asks copyists not to abridge it; students had often asked him to shorten it and he refused, comparing an abridger to someone who cuts the limbs off a sound body, and he tells the story of al-Jahiz and the man who cut down his book. ^{11 12} He presented his autograph copy to the library of the vizier and judge Jamal al-Din Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Yusuf al-Shaybani, al-Qifti. ¹²

Yaqut opens the dictionary with five chapters: ^{12 4}

• First, on the description of the earth and the views of earlier and later authorities on its shape. ⁴
• Second, on the seven climes, their derivation, the disagreements about them and the indications of the qibla; most placed all seven climes in the northern half of the earth, and al-Biruni recorded several meanings of iqlim, among them "inclination" and "rural district". ¹³
• Third, explaining recurring terms: barid, farsakh, mil, kura, iqlim, mikhlaf, ustan, tassuj, jund, sikka, misr, abad, longitude, latitude, degree, minute, sulh, silm, anwa, kharaj, fay', ghanima and qati'a. ¹⁴
• Fourth, the jurists' views on lands taken as fay' and ghanima and their division: whether land taken by force is to be divided after the fifth is taken, as at Khaybar, or kept as fay' for all Muslims, as Umar ibn al-Khattab (may God be pleased with him) did with the Sawad and Egypt on the advice of Ali ibn Abi Talib (may God be pleased with him) and Mu'adh ibn Jabal, and the views of Malik and the Hijazis and of Abu Hanifa and Sufyan on treaty land whose people become Muslim. ^{15 16}
• Fifth, general reports on countries, such as Zadan Farrukh's answer to al-Hajjaj on the characters of the garrison cities and Mu'awiya's questions to Ibn al-Kawwa'. ¹⁶

Entries of the first two volumes drawn on by the museum include Bukhara, its walls, coinage and conquest; ¹⁷ Balkh; ¹⁸ Barqa and its treaty; ¹⁹ Aswan, its dates and column quarries; ²⁰ Bamiyan and its two idols; ²¹ Bardha'a and its ruin in his time; ²² Bayhaq; ²³ Beirut between the Franks and Saladin; ²⁴ Tikrit; ²⁵ Tinnis; ²⁶ Abiward; ²⁷ Tiflis and its capture by the Georgians in 515 AH; ²⁸ and Tirmidh. ²⁹

The edition read is the first, printed at Matba'at al-Sa'ada in Cairo and dated on its title page "end of 1323 AH and beginning of 1906 CE", corrected, arranged and supplemented by Muhammad Amin al-Khanji, who read it with Shaykh Ahmad ibn al-Amin al-Shinqiti, in ten volumes, with a supplement titled Munjam al-'umran fi al-mustadrak 'ala Mu'jam al-buldan. ³⁰ Volumes 1 and 2, from the introduction to the letter ta, were read.