The voyages of the mugharrirun and Khashkhash were private undertakings, apparently motivated by curiosity and bravado. The mugharrirun were “ordinary people”; the companions of Khashkhash were simply “young men of Cordoba.” This is probably why we know so little about them. Medieval historians focused their attention on the ruler and his court, and to a certain extent on the “urban elite.” The doings of private citizens, particularly of the humbler classes, are only incidentally mentioned by Arab historians of the Middle Ages - or indeed, by their Christian counterparts. We know as much as we do about the efforts of Prince Henry the Navigator to find the sea-route to the Indies because these expeditions were sponsored by the Crown, and the same is true of the four voyages of Columbus. Documents, logs and maps were placed in royal archives and were available to the historians of the time, whereas knowledge of the mugharrirun and Khashkhash has come down to us only because of the chance interest of al-Idrisi and al-Mas’udi. It is probable, however, that they entered sailors’ lore along the Atlantic seaboard and joined the tales of other fabulous islands to the west - the Antilles, Brazil, St. Brendan’s Isle, the Green Isle.
Abul Hasan Ali Al-Masu’di (Masoudi) (ca. 895?-957 CE) tells us that he was born in Baghdad. He was a descendant of Abdullah Ibn Mas’ud, a companion of the Prophet Muhammad. However, we know little else about his early years. He mentions his association with many scholars in the lands through which he travelled. However, most of what we know of him comes from the internal evidence of his own works. Although his biographer Ahmad Shboul questions the furthest extent sometimes asserted for al-Mas’udi’s travels, even his more conservative estimation is impressive: Al-Mas’udi’s travels actually occupied most of his life from at least 915 to very near the end. His journeys took him to most of the Persian provinces, Armenia, Azerbaijan and other regions of the Caspian Sea; as well as to Arabia, Syria and Egypt. He also travelled to the Indus Valley, and other parts of India, especially the western coast; and he voyaged more than once to East Africa. He also sailed on the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and the Caspian. Others journeys include Sri Lanka and China among his travels. Lunde and Stone in the introduction to their English translation state that al-Mas’udi received much information on China from Abu Zaid al-Sirafi whom he met on the coast of the Persian Gulf. In Syria al-Mas’udi met the renowned Leo of Tripoli who was a Byzantine admiral who converted to Islam. From him the historian received much of his information about Byzantium. He spent his last years in Syria and Egypt. In Egypt he found a copy of a Frankish king list from Clovis to Louis IV that had been written by an Andalusian bishop.
We know little for sure about how he supported himself during such extensive travels within and beyond the lands of Islam. Lunde and Stone speculate that like many travelers he may have been involved in trade. As both a historian and geographer al-Mas’udi presents China in the context of the entire world known to him in his Muruj al-dhahab wa-mdadin al-jawhar [Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems]. Thus having been well traveled throughout both the ‘Abbasid empire and India during his lifetime, al-Mas’udi acquired a variety of sources that he used to compile his encyclopedic historical and geographical masterpiece. Near the ending, of the The Meadows of Gold the author Al-Masudi wrote:
The information we have gathered here is the fruit of long years of research and painful efforts of our voyages and journeys across the East and the West, and of the various nations that lie beyond the regions of Islam. The author of this work compares himself to a man, who having found pearls of all kinds and colours and gathers them together into a necklace of and makes them into an ornament that its possessor guards with great care. my aim has been to trace the lands and the histories of many peoples, and I have no other.
The geographical sections, which are among the most interesting to modern readers, are either accounts of his own very far-flung travels or, where there are gaps in his personal experience, accounts gleaned from sources he considered reliable. For example, referring to other scholars, he tells us that “their researches on the latitude of the earth have proved that the inhabited area extends from the equator as far north as Thule, beyond Britain, and there the longest day lasts 20 hours.”
Again, when discussing some methods of water divining, he quotes textbooks on agriculture. On the topic of India, he says of Jahiz, the great scholar, thinker and wit, of whom he elsewhere tells many admiring stories:
Al-Jahiz claims that the Indus, the river of Sind, comes from the Nile and adduces the presence of crocodiles in the Indus as proof. I do not know where he could have found such an argument, but he puts the theory forward un his book, Of the Great Cities and Marvels of the Earth. It is an excellent work, but since the author never sailed, nor indeed traveled sufficiently to be acquainted with the kingdoms and cities, he did not know that the Indus in Sind has perfectly well-known sources.
Al-Mas’udi claims he visited China, yet he actually depended very much on previous accounts to write his section on China and what he learned from contemporaries like Abu Zayd. The eighty-five sources that he lists at the beginning of his book include Ibn Khurradadhbih’s Book of Routes and Realms. Like Ibn Khurradadhbih, he states that China was one of the seven ancient nations that existed before Islam and claims that its people descended from Noah. In contrast, al-Mas’udi supplies richer and more detailed description than Ibn khurradadhbih does, providing detailed geographical facts and a genealogy of the imperial family (which is unreliable, however, because it provides names that are difficult to trace in contemporary Chinese sources). Ahmad Shboul notes that al-Mas’udi rewrote Muruj al-dhahab. The extant version is only an earlier draft from 947, not the revised 956 edition. Lunde and Stone note that al-Mas’udi in his Tanbih states that the revised edition of Muruj al-dhahab contained 365 chapters.
Al-Mas’udi supplies a lot of theoretical information about world geography in Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems, which derives from earlier Greek works that he studied in Baghdad and Damascus. It begins with traditional Greek theories about the shape of the earth and the division of the lands and seas. A general account of the seas based on Greek tradition ends with the Abyssinian Sea, that is, the Indian Ocean. Al-Mas’udi portrays the Indian Ocean as one mass of water comprising seven connected seas. Each of these seas has its own name and features; the seventh of these lying at the easternmost end is the Sea of China. This complete description of the Indian Ocean’s seven seas supplements the missing part of the extant manuscript for the original volume of Accounts of China and India in 851.