Ahmad ibn Majid was a fifteenth-century Arab navigator and author whose surviving writings preserve sophisticated knowledge of Indian Ocean navigation before Portuguese fleets entered the region.
His Kitāb al-Fawāʼid fī uṣūl ʿilm al-baḥr wa-al-qawāʿid was assembled around 1490 and combines multiple treatises on navigation.
The work describes routes, harbors, landfalls, celestial navigation, directions and seas including the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea.
Such knowledge was practical rather than abstract. Navigators had to recognize stars, seasonal winds, coastal features, depths and sailing times across a maritime world with long-established trade routes.
A famous later claim says Ibn Majid personally piloted Vasco da Gama from East Africa to India. The Library of Congress summary notes that it is believed da Gama consulted him, but modern scholarship has questioned whether Ibn Majid was actually the pilot aboard the Portuguese expedition.
TransitSatellite should therefore present the da Gama link as disputed tradition, not established fact. Ibn Majid’s documented writings are important regardless of whether he ever met da Gama.
His work also corrects a Eurocentric narrative in which Indian Ocean navigation becomes sophisticated only after Portuguese arrival. The written manuals show an established technical tradition already in place.
For connected content, route examples should be derived from the navigational text itself where possible rather than retrofitting later colonial sailing routes.