Diagrams for Travel from the Qanoon-e-Islam (1832)
If you were a nineteenth-century merchant bringing diamonds from the Kollur Mine near Bezawada (now Vijayawada) to Golconda (now Hyderabad), going northwest along the Krishna River, your best bet would be to leave on a Tuesday or Thursday, on the 5th, 13th, or 28th of the lunar month. On a Tuesday, you should eat coriander seeds before leaving; on Thursday, some jaggery. Trade is a dangerous game at the best of times, and it’s always good to have luck on your side. You need to keep the rijāl al-ghayb behind you or to your left; God help you if your path faces the shukur yulduz. Making such calculations is not for the faint of heart. Luckily, as Jaʿfar Sharīf (d. 1863) told his English readers, the learned people of the Deccan Plateau have devised a variety of mnemonics to help you.
These diagrams appear in the Qanoon-e-Islam, which the East India Company surgeon Gerhard Herklots (1790–1834) translated and published from Sharīf’s now-lost Urdu (“the genuine Dukhunee language”) manuscript in 1832. Aimed at providing “a detailed account of all the customs adopted and observed in India, more particularly in the Dukʿhun, (vulgarly written Deccan: i.e. the Peninsula or Southern part of India), by the followers of the Arabian Prophet”, the Qanoon-e-Islam was one of the first major British ethnographic analyses of their new Muslim subjects on the Deccan Plateau, which they had been gradually dominating over the last century.
Chapter 35, “Considering travelling”, is only a small part of the 570-page book, which sought to elucidate everything that the Muslims of the Deccan did that could not be fully explained by Islam itself. (The word qanūn, originally from Arabic, referred to laws and practices that lay outside the shariʿa, Islamic jurisprudence based on the Qurʿan and Prophetic tradition.) Sharīf, an Urdu language teacher from whom Herklots commissioned the book at the EIC base in Madras (now Chennai), provides brief sketches of every stage of an Indian Muslim’s life, from birth to death, plus information about sex, holidays, magic, and friendship; Herklots then added a series of appendices with a glossary, list of clothing terms, and more.
While vedic astrology offers many tools for calculating the propitious days for all sorts of things, these charts and mnemonics for travelers turn out to be an even more complex palimpsest of the movement of ideas and empires across Central Asia in the medieval and early modern period. Take, for instance, the primary astronomical danger facing travelers: the rijāl al-ghayb. Herklots (who spells it rijal-ool-gyb, largely because, as he admits, his transliterations “have been guided by the ear”), glosses this as “an invisible being which moves in a circular orbit round the world”. Yet rijāl al-ghayb is an Arabic phrase meaning “the men of the Unseen” — how Sufi mystics, starting with the Andalusī Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), referred to saints. For Sufi mystics, travel was a necessary evil to be avoided if possible, but which almost certainly required some saintly intercession. Tunç Şen writes that Ottoman sailors used manuscript tables to figure when and where the rijāl al-ghayb would appear, although it is less clear whether one should go toward or away from them. Indeed, one such chart — here circular, versus Sharīf’s square — appears on the right flyleaf of an anonymous seventeenth-century Ottoman astronomical manuscript (now at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France), sketched in beneath another circular diagram about how to calculate the qibla, the direction of Mecca.
The avoidance of the rijāl al-ghayb perhaps is an amalgamation of that tradition with that of the “planet” Herklots calls the Skookoor-e-Yildooz. Actually a constellation, it is more commonly referred to by its Persian (sakīzildīz) or Turkish (shukur yulduz) names, and was, according to G. L. Lewis, a favored superstition of the Mughal emperor Babur (1483–1530), who always made sure to keep it at his back whenever he was engaging an enemy. And it wasn’t even technically a real constellation; never seen by any Persian, Indian, or other astronomer, its maleficence was a tradition that was apparently taken up in western China when Buddhism spread there from India around the second century. It became popular with the Turkic-speaking rulers of Central Asia, and then was perhaps reimported to the subcontinent when the Mughals took over in the sixteenth century. An invisible constellation is one that, of course, needs a chart to locate it; this one from a fifteenth-century Ottoman Turkish manuscript shows how.
Neither Herklots nor William Crooke, the British Orientalist who reedited and reissued the Qanoon in 1921 under the misleading title Islam in India, seem to have cared much for retracing the intellectual foundations and geographic displacements of their subjects’ superstitions. But then again, Sharīf doesn’t seem to have had a particular interest either. Magic is pure efficaciousness: if keeping the saints at your back makes a perilous journey safer, why look too closely?
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Jun 30, 2026