Ahmad ibn Mājid

Aḥmad ibn Mājid , also known as the "Arab Admiral" (, ) and the "Lion of the Sea", was an Arab navigator and cartographer born in Julfar, the present-day Ras Al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates. He was raised in a family famous for seafaring; at the age of seventeen he was able to navigate ships. The exact date is not known, but Ibn Mājid probably died around 1500. Although long identified in the West as the navigator who helped Vasco da Gama find his way from Africa to India, contemporary research has shown Ibn Mājid is unlikely even to have met Da Gama. Ibn Mājid was the author of nearly forty works of poetry and prose.

Name At the beginning of his magnum opus, the Fawāʾid (see below), Ibn Mājid gives his name in full as Ḥājj al-Ḥaramayn al-Sharīfayn Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad ibn Mājid ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿAmr ibn Faḍl ibn Duwayk ibn Yūsuf ibn Ḥasan ibn Ḥusayn ibn Abī Muʿallaq al-Saʿdī ibn Abī Rakāʾib al-Najdī . The Najdī and Saʿdī titles relate his lineage to the central Arabian Peninsula and to the Yemeni Tihamah respectively.

Works

Ibn Mājid wrote several books on marine science and the movements of ships, which helped people of the Persian Gulf to reach the coasts of India, East Africa and other destinations. Among his many books on navigation, Kitāb al-Fawā’id fī Uṣūl ʿIlm al-Baḥr wa’l-Qawāʿid (The Book of the Benefits of the Principles and Foundations of Seamanship) is considered one of his best. It is an encyclopedia, describing the history and basic principles of navigation, latitude and longitude by way of celestial navigation, lunar mansions, loxodromes, the difference between coastal and open-sea sailing, the locations of ports from East Africa to Indonesia, accounts of the monsoon and other seasonal winds, typhoons and other topics for professional navigators. He drew from his own experience and that of his father, also a famous navigator, and the lore of generations of Indian Ocean sailors. The book encompassed the entire science of navigation in the Indian Ocean at the time.

Ibn Mājid was known as a muʿallim (“teacher”, the title for pilots), i.e. teacher of navigation. Most of his navigational calculations depended on sophisticated astronomical observations, especially using the lunar mansions (manāzil al-qamar) and the thirty-two stellar rhumbs (akhnān).

Researchers have also used the three rutters of Ibn Mājid, particularly the ‘Sofala Rutter’, to comprehensively debunk the entire story of Ibn Mājid and any association with Da Gama. The evidence in these, letters written by da Gama himself and Ibn Mājid’s age (he considered himself too old to navigate in 1498, when da Gama arrived in Malindi—Ibn Mājid would have been 77), all provide a strong refutation of the entire story and it is now accepted as highly unlikely that Ibn Mājid had ever even met Da Gama, let alone given him the route to India. However, his works are thought to have been a valuable source for the Portuguese when they arrived in the region.

In popular culture In the television series Star Trek: Picard, set in the future, the character Cristóbal "Chris" Ríos (portrayed by Santiago Cabrera) is a former Starfleet officer who once served on the Federation starship USS Ibn Majid, NCC-75710, as revealed in the 2020 episode "Broken Pieces".