The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (13 page)

The distance from Hebron to Jerusalem through the terraced Judaean hills was only 17 miles, and Ibn Battuta probably made the trip, including a brief look around Bethlehem, in a day or two. Jerusalem plays so solemn a part in the religious and cultural heritage of Western peoples and commands so much attention in contemporary world politics that we are inclined to assume it was always one of the great urban centers of the Middle East. In fact the Jerusalem of the fourteenth century was a rather sleepy town of no great commercial or administrative importance. Its population was only about 10,000,
²⁴
and it was ruled as a sub-unit of the Province of Damascus. Its defensive walls were in ruins, part of its water supply had to be carried in from the surrounding countryside, and it was located on none of the important trade routes running through Greater Syria. From the point of view of a Mamluk official or an international merchant, it was a city of eminently provincial mediocrity. What kept it alive and sustained its permanent population of scholars, clerics, shopkeepers, and guides was the endless stream of pilgrims that passed through its gates. Jerusalem was a place of countless shrines and sanctuaries. For Christians the spiritual focus of the city was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for Jews it was the Western Wall of the temple (the Wailing Wall), and for Muslims it was the Haram al-Sharif,
the Noble Sanctuary, revered as the third most blessed spot in the Dar al-Islam, after the Ka’ba in Mecca and the tomb of the Prophet in Medina.

During his stay in the city of perhaps a week, Ibn Battuta probably spent a good deal of his time in the Haram, an expansive trapezoid-shaped area bounded by buildings and city walls and dominating the southeastern quarter of the city. The entire Haram was itself an enormous mosque open to the sky, though within it stood several sanctuaries having specific religious significance for Muslims. The most venerated of these was the Kubbat al-Skhra, the Dome of the Rock, a wondrously beautiful building set in the center of the Haram on the site of the ancient Temple of Solomon. This shrine, dating from the seventh century, is in the shape of a regular octagon, sumptuously ornamented with interwoven Arabic scriptural quotations and geometric designs and surmounted by a massive dome. Inside the sanctuary and directly beneath the dome lies embedded in the earth the blessed Rock of Zion. It was from here, it is told, that the Prophet Muhammad, transported at lightning speed from Mecca to Jerusalem in the company of the Angel Gabriel, was carried on the back of a great winged steed up to the Seventh Heaven of Paradise, where he stood in the presence of God. It is in commemoration of Muhammad’s Night Journey that Muslims enter the Dome, make a circuit of the Rock, and descend to the little grotto beneath it.

Ibn Battuta mentions in the
Rihla
a number of the scholars and divines resident in Jerusalem. One of these, a Sufi master of the Rifa’i brotherhood named ’Abd al-Rahman ibn Mustafa, took a special interest in the young man and was apparently impressed enough by his sincerity and learning to give him a
khirqa
, the woolen, patch-covered cloak worn by Sufi disciples as a sign of their allegiance to a life of God-searching and self-denial. In the few days that Ibn Battuta stayed in Jerusalem he obviously could not have gone through any of the rigorous spiritual training required of initiates prior to receiving their
khirqas
. A master could, however, bestow a lower form of investiture upon a person whom he wished to encourage in the mystical path.
²⁵
The incident seems to be one more bit of evidence that Ibn Battuta’s piety and knowledge of Sufism were conspicuous enough, even in his youth, to place him on occasion in the graces of the most august saints and wise men, even though he had no plans to give himself wholeheartedly to the mystical life.

In his time Sufism was becoming intricately melded into the everyday religious life of Muslims. Although there were those who adopted asceticism or celibacy as methods personally suitable for drawing closer to God, Sufism was in no general way “monkish” or confined to a spiritually militant minority. Rather it was the intimate, inward-turning, God-adoring dimension of Muslim faith, complementing outward, public conformity to the ritual and moral duties of the Sacred Law. It could take expression, depending on the individual’s personal inclination, in everything from a life of mendicant wandering to occasional attendance at brotherhood meetings where mystical litanies were recited. Sufi masters, such as Ibn Battuta’s friend in Jerusalem, rarely limited their patronage to their formal disciples, but rather gave freely of their spiritual guidance and
baraka
to ordinary men and women who needed the solace or healing that only a surer feeling of God’s presence could provide. Although Ibn Battuta’s life of worldly adventure had little in common with that of a cloistered dervish, he associated with mystics whenever he could, as if to fortify himself with a deeper calming grace before taking to the road again.

Jerusalem, however, was not to be the place for a devotional retreat, for the
hajj
season was drawing nearer and Damascus beckoned. Ibn Battuta’s exact route northward is uncertain, but he very likely traveled through Nablus, Ajlun, and the Galilee and from there across the Golan Heights to the Syrian capital.
²⁶
This journey was probably accomplished in a few days’ time since the entire trip from Cairo to Damascus, if the dates he gives us are correct, took no more than 23 days. By his own reckoning he arrived in Damascus on 9 August 1326 (9 Ramadan 726).

[Damascus] stands on the place where Cain killed his brother Abel, and is an exceeding noble, glorious, and beauteous city, rich in all manner of merchandise, and everywhere delightful, . . . abounding in foods, spices, precious stones, silk, pearls, cloth-of-gold, perfumes from India, Tartary, Egypt, Syria, and places on our side of the Mediterranean, and in all precious things that the heart of man can conceive. It is begirt with gardens and orchards, is watered both within and without by waters, rivers, brooks, and fountains, cunningly arranged, to minister to men’s luxury, and is incredibly populous, being inhabited by divers trades of most cunning and
noble workmen, mechanics, and merchants, while within the walls it is adorned beyond belief by baths, by birds that sing all the year round, and by pleasures, refreshments, and amusements of all kinds.

Thus wrote Ludolph von Suchem,
²⁷
a German priest who visited the city on his way home from the Holy Land in 1340–41. Muslims honored Damascus as the earthly equivalent of Paradise, and so it must have seemed to any haggard pilgrim tramping out of the Syrian waste. Quite unlike Jerusalem, bone dry on its craggy hill, Damascus lay in an oasis of extravagant greenness, a garden, in the gushy phrases of Ibn Jubayr, “bedecked in the brocaded vestments of flowers.”
²⁸
Although bordered by desert on three sides and by the Mountains of Lebanon on the west, which all but blocked rain-bearing clouds from the Mediterranean, the city drew life from the river that flowed down the slopes of the Anti-Lebanon and onto the plain, where Damascene farmers distributed its waters to the channels that fed thousands of orchards and gardens. Because the mountains prevented easy communication with the coast, Damascus was not in a choice geographical position to handle long-distance trade between East and West. But it prospered as an international emporium in spite of this, owing to the profuse fertility of its oasis (al-Ghuta), which supported a population of about 100,000.
²⁹

Indeed Ibn Battuta saw Damascus in the flush of a new prosperity. During most of the preceding half century, hostilities between the Mamluks and the Mongol Ilkhans of Persia had weakened Syrian trade links to India. But the Mongol threat had dissipated by 1315. Diplomatic relations between the two states improved and trade routes from Damascus to Iraq and the Persian Gulf were opened once again. Furthermore, the city had developed a thriving trade with Asia Minor and the Black Sea region, specially in horses, furs, metals, and slaves, including, of course, Mamluk recruits.

The visible splendor of Damascus, however, was a reflection not so much of international trade as of the city’s status as the Mamluk capital-in-Asia with its enormous garrison and the magnificent households of the high commanders. The royal armies, passing continually in and out of the city, required the production of huge quantities of provisions and weapons, while the ruling elite, together with their counterparts in Cairo, kept Damascene
craftsmen busy day and night turning out exquisite wares and finery.

Saif al-Din Tankiz, viceroy of Damascus from 1313 to 1340, was not only a man of exceptional administrative ability (Ibn Battuta refers to him as “a governor of the good and upright kind”), but a builder and city planner whose imagination and energy rivalled that of his sovereign lord al-Nasir Muhammad. Mirroring the sultan’s work in Cairo, Saif al-Din undertook a vast program to beautify and improve his city, endowing numerous mosques,
madrasas
, and other pious institutions, widening streets and squares, directing the expansion of residential areas outside the walls, and even waging an obsessive war against the surplus population of stray dogs.
³⁰
The Damascus that Ibn Battuta saw in 1326 was, like Cairo, a city in the process of transforming itself under the stimulus of a political regime that, at least for the time being, had struck a congenial balance between harsh, swaggering authoritarianism and a love of civilized taste and comfort.

The guardians of Damascene high culture were of course the Arabic-speaking scholars, who, like their colleagues in Cairo, affiliated with numerous religious, educational, and philanthropic foundations scattered throughout the city. Whereas Cairo had no pre-eminent center of learning in the fourteenth century, Damascus had its Great Mosque, called the Mosque of the Umayyads after its eighth-century builders. Around it all the other pious institutions revolved as satellites.

During part of his stay in the city, Ibn Battuta boarded in one of the three Maliki
madrasas
there. (Malikism was the least important of the four legal schools in Syria and was represented by fewer colleges than the others.) But he may have fairly well lived in the Great Mosque, sitting beneath the marble columns of the golden-domed sanctuary, all around him the murmuring voices of lecturers and Qur’anic readers and children in circles reciting their sacred lessons. The prayer hall, a three-aisled nave more than 400 feet long, was open on its northern side and joined to a spacious court rimmed by arcades where, according to the
Rihla
, “the people of the city gather . . . in the evenings, some reading, some conversing, and some walking up and down.” The staff of officials attached to the mosque was huge, including, Ibn Battuta tells us, 70
muezzins
(prayer callers), 13
imams
(prayer leaders), and about 600 Qur’anic reciters. He describes the sanctuary as a place of continuous religious and educational activity, a never-ending celebration of God’s glory and beneficence:

The townspeople assemble in it daily, immediately after the dawn prayer, to read a seventh part of the Qur’an . . . In this mosque also there are a great many “sojourners” who never leave it, occupying themselves unremittingly in prayer and recitation of the Qur’an and liturgies . . . The townsfolk supply their needs of food and clothing, although sojourners never beg for anything of the kind from them.

Ibn Battuta was one among this throng of wandering seekers, and it was during his 24 days in Damascus waiting for the
hajj
caravan to depart that he undertook his first formal studies abroad. Next to Cairo, Damascus possessed the greatest concentration of eminent theologians and jurists in the Arabic-speaking world, many of them refugees from Baghdad and other Mesopotamian or Persian cities who had fled the Mongol tide. So the young scholar had before him a galaxy of luminaries from which he might choose his teachers.

In the advanced curriculum the professor usually read and offered commentary on a classical book, then tested his students’ ability to recite it as well as understand its meaning. He awarded those who performed competently an
ijaza
, or certificate, which entitled them to teach the same text to others. In the
Rihla
Ibn Battuta claims to have taken instruction and received
ijazas
from no less than 14 different teachers. He mentions in particular his “hearing” one of the most venerated texts in Islam, the Book of Sound Tradition of the Prophet (the
Sahih
) by the great ninth-century scholar al-Bukhari. He also details the essential information written on his
ijaza
: the chain of pedagogical authority linking his own teacher through numerous generations of sages back to al-Bukhari himself. This particular course of study, he tells us, took place in the Great Mosque and was completed in 14 daily sessions.

Nothwithstanding the young man’s appetite for knowledge, it strains the imagination to see how he could have carried to completion 14 different courses in the space of 24 days.
³¹
He could not have devoted his every waking moment to his studies since he was by no means free of more mundane concerns. For one thing, his entire stay in Damascus took place during the month of Ramadan, when Muslims are required to fast during daylight hours, a strenuous obligation that upset the normal routines of daily life. He also admits in the
Rihla
that he was down with fever during a
good part of his stay and living as a house guest of one of the Maliki professors, who put him under a physician’s care. On top of that, he found time during this fleeting three and a half weeks to get married again, this time to the daughter of a Moroccan residing in Damascus. Given these preoccupations, we can surmise that he exaggerated the extent of his studies, that he undertook them during subsequent visits to Damascus without making that fact clear in the narrative,
³²
or that some of the
ijazas
were awarded him, as was often done, in recognition of the piety and scholarly potential he demonstrated rather than as diplomas for books mastered.
³³
But there is still no reason to doubt that despite illness and nuptial cares, he spent long August hours in the cool of the ancient mosque, absorbing as much learning as he could and gathering credentials that would contribute several years later to his appointment as a
qadi
to the Sultan of India.