Traveling through an Ocean of Wonders: Muḥammad Rabīʿs Safīna-yi Sulaymānī and Southeast and East Asian Geography

The Safina-yi Sulaymani (The Ship of Sulayman), one of the foremost Persian travelogues from the Safavid period, includes a geographic description of East and Southeast Asia centered on the Indian Ocean. While the Safina is well-known to scholars, secondary literature on this part of the book is scant and often characterizes it as incoherent and devoid of value. This paper challenges this interpretation through providing a new reading of this text. By casting it in a comparative framework with earlier books of wonders, this paper argues that the geographic section of the Safina articulates an original view of the Indian Ocean resulting from the encounter between the traveler's observations and experiences and the Islamic tradition of wonders, the.aja.ib. As such, it encapsulates one of the central intellectual developments in early modern knowledge production, i.e., the tension between independent inquiry (tahqiq) and imitation of earlier authorities (taqlid).