The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (18 page)

The Mongols’ accommodation to the native Irano–Muslim bureaucracy spurred their conversion to Islam, itself an inevitable step in their Persianization. Chinggis had set a policy of toleration for all religions within the empire, and ultimately the formless tribal shamanism to which he remained loyal withered under a barrage of divine truths which missionaries of all the world-universalist faiths fired at his various successors. In Persia the proselytizers of several varieties of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam competed for the attention of the Ilkhans like so many peddlers determined to make a sale. The Mongols at first swung erratically from one religious preference to another, depending upon which rite could muster the most influence at court.

Ghazan was the first ruler to proclaim Islam the state religion. He required the entire court to convert, put up mosques throughout the country, and endowed numerous pious institutions in the cities. With Mongol military power and Persian popular sentiment behind him, he wiped out Buddhism in that land. He also pulled down Nestorian Christian churches and put an end once and for all to naive European hopes that the Tatars could be brought over to Rome. Oljeitu (1304–16), Ghazan’s successor and the most spiritually erratic of all the Ilkhans, was born a Nestorian, took up Buddhism, then converted to Islam. He first adopted Hanafi Sunnism, then Shafi’i; in 1310 he became a militant Shi’i and started a violent campaign to persecute Sunnis in general. His young son Abu Sa’id (1316–35), however, brought the court quickly back to Sunnism. What is more, he kept it that way. Most of his subjects were relieved and satisfied. Though Shi’ism has been the state religion of Iran since the sixteenth century, the great majority of Persians and Iraqis were still Sunnis (mostly Hanafi or
Shafi’i) in the fourteenth. Ibn Battuta, dyed-in-the-wool Sunni that he was, could not have picked a more felicitous time to visit the Ilkhanid state than in the reign of Abu Sa’id.

When the Mongols converted to Islam, they also became both the disciples and the patrons of Persian art and culture. The decades of the holocaust had snuffed out intellectual and artistic life over much of the land, but it came to life so quicky after 1260 that the brief eighty years of the Ilkhanid age turned out to be an era of impressive cultural achievement, especially near the end when Ibn Battuta was there to bear witness to it. Like their steppe cousins in Cairo, the Mongol rulers did not hesitate to commit unspeakable barbarisms with one hand while with the other paying out large sums to promote refined craft and learning. Just a year after setting fire to Baghdad and a fair part of the stored up knowledge of the Abbasid Caliphate, Hulegu founded an observatory at Maragheh in which Persian and Chinese scholars collaborated to work out astronomical tables that would be of immense importance to later generations. Ghazan executed his enemies by having them cloven in half, but he took an avid personal interest in the natural sciences and medicine.

It was notably under Ghazan and his two successors that urban culture in Persia got back much of its old energy. To be sure, no single Persian city rivaled Cairo. But in Tabriz, the premier Mongol center, a great deal of monumental building was undertaken, even the construction of whole new suburbs. Oljeitu Khan founded a new capital at Sultaniya. The world of letters throve again too. The Mongols never had much time for love poetry or advanced theology, but they did appreciate practical science, geography, and history. The master historian of the age was Rashid al-Din, a Jewish convert to Islam who served as minister of state (vizier) under three Ilkhans. During the reign of Oljeitu, he completed his massive
Collection of Histories
, the first truly universal history of humankind ever written, or even imagined. The work embraced not only the whole of the Islamic world but also China, Byzantium, and even the recently civilized kingdoms of western Europe.
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Rashid al-Din’s global vision was a reflection of an internationalist spirit at the Mongol court that reached even beyond the Dar al-Islam. Taking a remarkably large-minded view of the boundaries of civilization, the monarchs reigned over an astonishing transmigration of ideas and technology that made
Ilkhanid culture an eclectic synthesis of Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, and even Tibetan elements. Over the political bridge that Genghis threw across the Asian grassland-sea marched hundreds of Chinese engineers, scientists, doctors, artists, and propagators of Buddhism seeking service and opportunity in Persia. A smaller number of Persians visited China. Though direct communciation between the two regions died down in the late thirteenth century when the Ilkhans converted to Islam and their diplomatic relations with the Peking Mongols deteriorated, Chinese cultural influences left enduring marks on Persian miniature painting, calligraphy, and textile and pottery design. In 1294 Gaykhatu Khan (1291–95) even introduced block-printed paper money on Chinese inspiration, though the Persians rejected this newfangled idea out of hand, resulting in a temporary collapse of the commercial economy.
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The cosmopolitanism of the Ilkhanids, coupled with their enthusiastic adoption of everything Persian, also did much to restore circulation on the routes of scholarship and craft linking Persian and Iraqi cities with the rest of the Islamic world. Indeed the Mongol period witnessed an important expansion of the Persian language as well as Irano–Islamic styles in art and humane letters into both Turkish Anatolia and India, where they increasingly set the standard of what polished culture should be.

When the Mongol–Mamluk military struggle for Syria finally ended about 1315, intellectual links were quicky restored between Cairo, the new capital of Arab letters, and both the Arabic-speaking towns of Iraq and the Persian cities of the Iranian plateau. In the central Islamic lands Arabic and Persian continued to share the status of intellectual
linguae francae
. Many important writers, such as the historian Rashid al-Din, saw to it that their works were made available in both languages.
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Thus, when Ibn Battuta entered Iran, his first excursion beyond the Arabic-speaking world, his inability to speak the native tongue was no particular disadvantage as long as he kept to the network of the learned, where bilingualism was common and where, at the very least, the symbolic language of religious observance, civilized manners, and Sunni erudition could always see him through. Indeed, for an educated Muslim traveler with good urban connections, it was almost as if the assault of the pagan Mongols had never even happened.

Ibn Battuta left Mecca on 17 November 1326 (20 Dhu l’Hijja 726) in the company of the pilgrims returning to Iraq and the wider region of
eastern Islam. This was the official caravan of the Ilkhanid state, similar in organization to the Mamluk caravans sent from Damascus and Cairo. He had the good fortune to travel under the formal protection of the
amir al-hajj
, one Pehlewan Muhammad al-Hawih, who paid out of his own purse the cost of hiring half a double camel litter for the young man. Why should the
amir
, a favored official at the court of the Ilkhan of Persia, take an interest in this 22-year-old nonentity from Morocco? Part of the reason is that the caravan commander commonly patronized scholarly personages in the pilgrim company, especially if they were needy. Beyond that, Ibn Battuta did develop something of a personal acquaintanceship with the
amir
, as would be demonstrated in the following year. There may be a further hint here of the lad’s natural flair for disarming important people with his earnest piety and gregarious personality. In any case the enclosed camel litter was a godsend of comfort, far preferable to crossing the Arabian Peninsula on foot.

By Ibn Battuta’s reckoning the pilgrim train was enormous: “Anyone who left the caravan for a natural want and had no mark by which to guide himself to his place could not find it again for the vast number of people.” But the enterprise was also as efficiently organized as the Mamluk caravan from Syria had been. “Great supplies of luxuries” were readily available, and the poorer
hajjis
were entitled to free food, water, and medicine. “They used to march during the night and light torches in front of the file of camels and litters,” Ibn Battuta recalls, “so that you saw the countryside gleaming with light and the darkness turned into radiant day.”

The route north was more or less the one that pilgrims had followed ever since the early days of the Caliphate, when Zubayda, wife of the illustrious Harun al-Rashid, endowed the construction of a chain of water tanks and wells along the trail to keep the caravans safely supplied. From Medina, where the company laid over for six days, the track ran northeastward across the Nejd plateau, through the oasis of Faid, then along the eastern edge of the great Nafud sand desert. At a place called Waqisa on the desert edge of the Mesopotamian basin, greeting parties from the Iraqi city of Kufa met the caravan with fresh provisions of flour, bread, dates, and fruit. About six days later the column reached the Kufa region, halting at al-Najaf (Mashhad ’Ali) just a few miles south of the Euphrates. The entire journey from Mecca to Mesopotamia took approximately 44 days.
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Ibn Battuta rested at al-Najaf for a few days since it was the burial
place of ’Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth Caliph and son-in-law of the Prophet. ’Ali’s grand mausoleum in the heart of the town was a place venerated by all Muslims, but for the Twelver Shi’a, the largest of the Shi’i sects in Islam, it was a center of holy pilgrimage second only to Mecca. Though most of the population of greater Iraq and Persia were still Sunni in the fourteenth century, important Shi’i communities were scattered throughout the Ilkhanid realm, with the largest concentrations in lower Mesopotamia.”
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The theological breach between the two groups centered on the Shi’i doctrine of the Imam, the leader-messiah descended from ’Ali, who would one day reveal himself and fill the earth with truth and righteousness until the time appointed for the Last Judgement. Twelve Imams in the hereditary line of ’Ali through his sons Hasan and Husayn had ruled the early Shi’i community, which started out as a dissident political “party” (the general meaning of the term Shi’a) opposed to the majority leadership. The ’Alid Imams were regarded by their followers as possessing infallible and esoteric knowledge of the prophetic Revelation and as divine-right rulers whose temporal supremacy had been usurped by the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphs. The twelfth Imam in the line, according to the teachings of the “Twelver” variety of Shi’ism, disappeared in the ninth century but did not die. One day he would return. Sunnis, by contrast, believed that the meaning of the Qur’anic revelation in relation to all aspects of both spiritual and mundane experience was to be interpreted by the consensus of the community of believers, a unity collectively described in the four schools of jurisprudence. Sunnis gave ’Ali a hallowed place in Islamic history, but as a Caliph and a Companion of the Prophet, not as the progenitor of a dynasty of theocrats. Shi’i law was not in most respects significantly different from Sunni, and most of the time the two groups managed to live in peace. Except during surges of fanaticism on one side or the other, they treated one another with simple suspicion and the common varieties of religious prejudice.

Ibn Battuta makes it abundantly clear that he had little time for Shi’is, Twelver or otherwise. At several points in the
Rihla
he takes righteous potshots at their beliefs or recounts disparaging little anecdotes about their fanatical and misguided observances. He invariably refers to them as “Rafidis,” or “Turncoats,” a term of deprecation Sunnis commonly used. His intolerance may have
been stiffened by the fact that the Maliki intellectual class in Morocco was inclined to juristic and theological dogmatism, largely in reaction to the anti-Maliki policies of the Almohads. In any case he did not mix much with Shi’i scholars and deliberately avoided visiting certain towns having predominantly Shi’i populations. He probably spent only a few days in al-Najaf (just where he does not say), though in the
Rihla
he gives a thorough and objective description of Ali’s beautiful domed mausoleum.
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From al-Najaf the pilgrim caravan continued on northward to Baghdad, its terminus. But Ibn Battuta, apparently not in the mood to see that city just yet, decided to make for Basra at the far southern end of the Tigris–Euphrates delta. A troop of local Arabs was going that way, so he hired a camel and joined them. Rather than taking a direct route to Basra by following the course of the Euphrates, the party first traveled due east along the northern fringe of the Great Swamp, a region of marshland, creeks, and lakes that covered the delta from the latitude of Kufa almost to the Persian Gulf.
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In five days the caravan reached the city of Wasit. Ibn Battuta’s companions remained there for three days in order to trade, so he took the opportunity to make an overnight excursion to the village of Umm ’Ubaida to visit the tomb of Shaykh Ahmad ibn al-Rifa’i, the twelfth-century founder of the Sufi order with which he had become affiliated during his stay in Jerusalem. At the
zawiya
of Umm ’Ubaida he had the luck to meet one of the Shaykh’s descendants, who was also visiting, and to be treated to a display of ecstatic exercises for which the Rifa’i disciples were well known:

When the afternoon prayers had been said, drums and kettledrums were beaten and the [Sufi] brethren began to dance. After this they prayed the sunset prayer and brought in the repast, consisting of rice-bread, fish, milk, and dates. When all had eaten and prayed the first night prayer, they began to recite their
dhikr
[mystical litany] . . . They had prepared loads of firewood which they kindled into flame, and went into the midst of it dancing; some of them rolled in the fire, and others ate it in their mouths, until finally they extinguished it entirely . . . Some of them will take a large snake and bite its head with their teeth until they bite it clean through.
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