The Theoretical Approach of Ibn al-Mujawir in Tarikh al-Mustabsir

Ibn al-Mujawir is an unknown Iranian theoretician, whose travelogue, Tarikh al-Mustabsir, despite its theoretical importance, is less known among contemporary researchers. Tarikh al-Mustabsir is a report of Ibn al-Mujawir’s journey into the cities of the Arabian Peninsula in which a first-hand account of the replacement of trading centers and its causes in the first half of the 7th century AH has been presented. One of the remarkable characteristics of the author of the travelogue is that he takes into account the theoretical issues when discussing the causes of the destruction or prosperity of the cities. Despite theorizing about the replacement of the aforementioned centers, Ibn al-Mujawir did not present his theoretical framework explicitly. But through scrutinizing his accounts in Tarikh al-Mustabsir, it can be inferred that the author methodologically based his descriptions and observations on a coherent theoretical framework. His theory is based on the preposition that the decline and destruction of certain urban centers, especially seaport ones, would lead to the prosperity of other urban centers. In this paper, in addition to shedding light on two historical problems related to Ibn al-Mujawir and his travelogue, the theoretical approach of him has been introduced and his theory about the replacement of trading and demographic centers has been studied for the first time by using the method of intentional Hermeneutics. The method of data collection of this paper is library-based.