Diagrams for Travels from *Qanoon-e-Islam* (1832) – The Public Domain Review

Although Vedic astrology offers many tools to calculate the auspicious days for all kinds of things, these maps and mnemonics for travelers prove to be an even more complex palimpsest of the movement of ideas and empires in Central Asia in the medieval and early modern periods. Take for example the main astronomical hazard travelers face: the rijal al-ghayb. Herklots (which spelled it Rijal-ool-gyblargely because, as he admits, his transliterations are ‘guided by the ear’, glossing this as ‘an invisible being moving in a circular orbit around the world’. Yet rijal al-ghayb is an Arabic expression meaning ‘the men of the invisible’ – how Sufi mystics, beginning with the Andalusian Ibn ʿArabî (d. 1240), referred to saints. For Sufi mystics, travel was a necessary evil to be avoided if possible, but which almost certainly required some sacred intercession. Tunç Şen writes that Ottoman sailors used manuscript tables to find out when and where the rijal al-ghayb would seem, although it is less clear whether one should go towards it or away from it. One such map – here circular versus Sharif’s square – appears on the right endpaper of an anonymous seventeenth-century Ottoman astronomical manuscript (now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France), sketched below another circular diagram on how to calculate the qiblatowards Mecca.