A FOUNDATION FOR HISTORY 75
second that the Muslim governor collects all of the offerings given to
the idol and redistributes a small amount back to the caretakers of the
temple.
In these recurrent descriptions of cities and settlements, we glimpse
the politically volatile but intertwined life at the frontier. The accounts
of battles, trades, and patronage of Muslim communities are authenti-
cated with the epigraphic accounts such as the Chinchani charter from
926 CE that was found near Sinjan in Gujarat and that shows Krishn~ II
giving his support to an Arab polity.^67 Patronage stories in both tex-
tual and epigraphic records from the pre-thirteenth-century world helps
us imagine a diverse and interconnected frontier.
Was the world described by the Arab geographers and Rahman lost
by the eleventh century? From 'Awfi, we can see that the cultural
memory of this world, if not its political realities, continued in
thirteenth-century Uch. In the opening section of fawami Hikayat,
'Awfi narrates an anecdote from his time in Cambay: "In Cambay were
a group of Muslims with pure faith" who lived alongside foreigners
under the rule oI Jay Singh. He had given them permission to build a
mosque from which they could give public calls for prayers.^68 Some un-
believers attacked the mosque, killed eighty Muslims, and burned the
mosque. The preacher of the mosque appealed to the ruler against the
atrocity, but he was unable to reach him. Eventually he managed to
meet Jay Singh during a hunt, submitting a petition written in "the dia-
lect of Hindi."^69 'Awfi describes how Jay Singh puts on a disguise-very
much in the spirit of the great 'Abbasid caliph Harun ur-Rashid-and
rides to Cambay to investigate this crime. Once he has asked around
and learned that the mosque was indeed burned, he fills a jug with
seawater and returns to his capital of Naharwala. There he fines all of
the leaders of the community for failing to protect peace in his do-
main and gives the preacher four gifts for the reconstruction of the
mosque and four canopies of intricate designs. These canopies, 'Awfi
claims, he saw with his own eyes.
Furthei'f evidence of a richly populated and vibrant world comes
from the thirteenth-century Persian geographer Zakariya ibn Mu-
hammad Qazwini (1203-1283). In his Asar al-Bilad wa Akhbar al
'Ibad (Monuments of the Lands and Reports of God's Servants), Qaz-
wini praises the land of Sind: