The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (23 page)

After probably a brief sojourn in Zabid, Ibn Battuta decided to visit the tomb of this celebrated saint in the village of Bayt al-Faqih (Ghassana) about 25 miles north along the coastal plain. While he was there, he made friends with a son of the
shaykh
, who invited him to travel to the mountain town of Jubla (Jibla) southwest of Zabid to visit another scholar. He remained there for three days, then continued southward in the company of a Sufi brother assigned to lead him along the mountain trails to Ta’izz, the Rasulid capital. If Ibn Battuta remembers his route through the Yemen accurately, he was behaving in his characteristic way of meandering first in one direction, then in another, relying on serendipitous discoveries of good companionship to determine his itinerary.
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Ta’izz lay at an altitude of 4,500 feet on the northern slope of the mountain called Jabal Sabir. Ibn Battuta describes the town as
having three quarters, one for the sultan’s residence and his slave guards, high officials, and courtiers; a second for the
amirs
and soldiers; and a third for the common folk and the main bazaar. Though he does not mention it, he must have prayed in the beautiful three-domed mosque called the Muzaffariya, which still serves as the Friday mosque of the city.
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Finding the citizenry of Ta’izz on the whole “overbearing, insolent and rude, as is generally the case in towns where kings have their seats,” Ibn Battuta nevertheless got the usual warm welcome from the scholars. He was even given the privilege of meeting the king himself at one of the public audiences held every Thursday. Just as the Ilkhan Abu Sa’id had done, Malik Mujahid questioned the visitor about Morocco, Egypt, and Persia, then gave instructions for his lodging. Ibn Battuta has left in the
Rihla
a precious eye-witness description of the ceremonial of the Rasulid sovereign:

He takes his seat on a platform carpeted and decorated with silken fabrics; to right and left of him are the men-at-arms, those nearest him holding swords and shields, and next to them the bowmen; in front of them to the right and left are the chamberlain and the officers of government and the private secretary . . . When the sultan takes his seat they cry with one voice
Bismillah
, and when he rises they do the same, so that all those in the audience-hall know the moment of his rising and the moment of his sitting . . . The food is then brought, and it is of two sorts, the food of the commons and the food of the high officers. The superior food is partaken of by the sultan, the grand
qadi
, the principal
sharifs
and jurists and the guests; the common food eaten by the rest of the
sharifs
, jurists and
qadis
, the
shaykhs
, the
amirs
and the officers of the troops. The seat of each person at the meal is fixed; he does not move from it, nor does anyone of them jostle another.

Ibn Battuta left Ta’izz on a horse given him by the sultan, but his immediate destination is none too certain at this point in the narrative. He may have journeyed 130 miles north along the backbone of the Yemeni mountains to San’a, spiritual capital of the Zaydis, and then back to Ta’izz again. But this excursion along treacherous trails through some of the grandest scenery in the world is described with such brevity and nebulous inexactitude as
to raise serious doubts about its veracity.
¹⁷
It is more likely that he went directly from Ta’izz to Aden on the south coast of Arabia, arriving there sometime around the end of 1328 (1330) or early part of 1329 (1331).
¹⁸

Looking out upon the Arabian Sea, Ibn Battuta was about to enter a world region where the relationship of Islamic cosmopolitanism to society as a whole was significantly different from what he had hitherto experienced. Up to that point he had traveled through the Irano–Semitic heartland of Islam, where the cosmopolitan class set itself apart from the rest of society in terms of its standards — urbane, literate, and committed to the application of the
shari’a
as the legal and moral basis of social relations. This class was the guardian of high culture and the means of its transmission within the Dar al-Islam. But it also shared its religious faith and its broader cultural environment with the less mobile and nearer-sighted peasants and working folk who constituted the vast majority. The lands bordering the Indian Ocean, by contrast, displayed a greater diversity of language and culture than did the Irano–Semitic core, and the majority of people inhabiting these lands adhered to traditions that were neither Irano–Semitic nor Muslim. In this immense territory Islamic cosmopolitanism communicated more than the unity and universality of civilized standards; it also expressed the unity of Islam itself in the midst of cultures that were in most respects alien. In the Middle East an individual’s sense of being part of an international social order varied considerably with his education and position in life. But in the Indian Ocean lands where Islam was a minority faith, all Muslims shared acutely this feeling of participation. Simply to be a Muslim in East Africa, southern India, or Malaysia in the fourteenth century was to have a cosmopolitan frame of mind.

This mentality may be partly attributed to the general tendency of minority groups in foreign societies to preserve and strengthen links with the wider cultural world of which they feel themselves members. But more to the point was the fact that Muslim minorities of the Indian Ocean were heavily concentrated in coastal towns, all of whose economies turned on long-distance seaborne trade. The intensity of this trade continuously reinforced the world-awareness of the populations of these towns, and compelled anyone with a personal stake in mercantile ventures to keep himself keenly informed of market conditions throughout the
greater maritime world. A measure of the internationalism of Indian Ocean ports, whether in India, Africa, Malaysia, or the Arab and Persian lands, was the degree to which the inhabitants responded more sensitively to one another’s economic and political affairs than they did to events in their own deep hinterlands.

In the high age of the Abbasid Caliphate Muslim mariners, mostly Arabs and Persians, penetrated the southern seas, establishing trading colonies as far distant as China. The decline of the Caliphate undercut the dominant role of these merchants, but it had no contrary effect on the prestige of Islam as the religion of trade. In Ibn Battuta’s time the western half of the Indian Ocean was every bit a Muslim lake, and the seas east of India were becoming more so with every passing year.

The ascendancy of Muslim trade is partly to be explained by simple Eurasian geography — the central position of the Irano–Semitic region in funneling goods between the Mediterranean and the spice and silk lands. But equally important was the ease with which Muslim merchants set themselves up in alien territories. The
shari’a
, the legal foundation on which they erected their communities and mercantile enterprises, traveled along with them wherever they went, irrespective of any particular political or bureaucratic authority. Moreover a place in the commercial community was open to any young man of brains and ambition, whatever his ethnic identity, as long as he were first willing to declare for God and the Prophet. As the repute of Muslims as the movers and shakers of international trade and the prestige of Islam as the carrier of cosmopolitan culture spread across the southern seas, more and more trading towns voluntarily entered the Islamic orbit, producing what the historian Marshall Hodgson calls a “bandwagon effect” of commercial expansion.
¹⁹
Concomitant to this was a great deal of conversion in coastal regions and the rise of scholarly establishments and Sufi orders having their own webs of international affiliation overlaying the mercantile network.

The Muslim communities of these maritime towns kept their faces to the sea, not the interior forest and bush, since the difference between prosperity and survival depended urgently on the arrivals and departures of ships. The development of complex interrelations among urban centers as far distant from one another as Aden and Malacca followed upon a basic natural discovery known among peoples of the ocean rim since ancient times. Across the expanse of the sea the direction of winds follows a regular,
alternating pattern. During the winter months, from October to March, the northeast monsoon wind blows from off the Eurasian continent, passing across India and both the eastern and western seas in the direction of East Africa. In the west the wind extends about as far as 17 degrees south latitude, that is, near the mid point of the Mozambique Channel. In summer, from April to September, the southwest monsoon prevails and the pattern is reversed. Centuries before Islam, mariners of the Arabian Sea possessed a rich body of technical information on the monsoons in relation to other climatic and geographic factors, data on whose strength they could plan, and survive, long-distance voyages. By the later Middle Period, Muslim knowledge of the timing and direction of the monsoons had advanced to a state where almanacs were being published with which port officials and wholesale bazaar merchants could predict the approximate time trading ships would arrive from points hundreds or even thousands of miles away.

The seasonal rhythm of the winds gave Indian Ocean trade and travel an element of symmetry and calculability not possible in the Mediterranean. There, the wind patterns were more complicated, and the fury of the winter storms, howling down through the mountain passes of Europe, all but prohibited long-distance shipping for a few months each year. The Indian Ocean, lying astride the equator, was a warmer, calmer, friendlier sea. It was especially so in the months of the northeast monsoon, when, notwithstanding the possibility of hurricanes, waters were placid and skies clear for weeks at a time, and when navigators could depend on a long succession of starry nights to make astronomical calculations of their position. Shipping activity was greater in the winter season than it was in summer, when the rain-bearing southwest monsoon brought stormier conditions. Still, trans-oceanic circulation depended on the full annual cycle of the winds, by which ships sailed to a distant destination during one half of the year and home again in the other.
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We may suspect that when Ibn Battuta arrived in Aden, he did not know exactly what his next move would be. If India and a job at the court of Delhi were already in his mind, he may have changed his plans on the strength of the sailing schedules. Presuming he reached Aden about mid January 1329 (1331),
²¹
the northeast monsoon would have been at its peak, producing strong easterly
winds. This was not a normal time for ships to embark from that port on direct voyages to the western coast of India. Nor was it the ideal time to set out for Africa, though some vessels did so. The problem was getting out of the Gulf of Aden against the wind. Once a ship beat eastward far enough to round Ras Asir (Cape Guardafui), the headland of the Horn of Africa, it could run before the northeast wind all the way to Zanzibar and beyond.
²²
There is no evidence in the
Rihla
that before reaching Aden Ibn Battuta had a plan to visit tropical Africa. But his past record of impulsive side-tripping suggests that he may have been improvising his itinerary once again. If a ship were embarking for the East African coast, then he would go along too.

In the meantime he rested at Aden for at least several days. Part of the time he stayed as a guest in the home of one of the rich international merchants:

There used to come to his table every night about twenty of the merchants and he had slaves and servants in still larger numbers. Yet with all this, they are men of piety . . . doing good to the stranger, giving liberally to the poor brother, and paying God’s due in tithes as the law commands.

When the young scholar was not sharing in this bounty, he was probably exploring the city and the harbor and perhaps sizing up the reliability of any ships bound for Africa. In the Middle Period the commercial life of Aden was concentrated at the eastern end of a mountainous, balloon-shaped peninsula jutting out from the South Arabian coast. Part of this
presque-isle
was an extinct volcano, Aden town occupying its crater, which on the eastern side was exposed to the sea. The harbor, facing the town, was enclosed within a stone wall with sea-gates, which were kept padlocked at night and opened every morning on the order of the governor.
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Like ’Aydhab, Aden was an international transit center whose famed prosperity had little to do with the trade of its local hinterland, whose contribution to the import–export economy was modest. It controlled the narrows of Bab al-Mandeb and skimmed off the tariffs on a continuous flow of low-bulk luxury goods moving predominantly westward: spices, aromatics, medicinal herbs, plants for dyeing and varnishing, iron, steel, brass and bronze containers, Indian silks and cottons, pearls, beads, ambergris, cowrie shells, shoes, Chinese porcelain, Yemeni stoneware,
African ivory, tropical fruits, and timber. In the
Rihla
Ibn Battuta gives a list of ten different Indian ports from which merchants commonly sailed to Aden.

Walking along Aden beach, Ibn Battuta is likely to have seen a crowd of ships moored in the harbor or laid up on the beach, since mid winter was a season for cleaning hulls and refitting. The scene would not have been the same as the one he grew up with in Tangier bay, since Mediterranean and Indian Ocean shipbuilding traditions were as different as the patterns of wind and climate. For one thing, he would probably not have seen any galleys, whose use in the Indian Ocean was confined mainly to pirate gangs and navies. He would certainly not have seen any of the square-rigged round ships, which were just beginning to enter the Mediterranean from Atlantic Europe in his time. To his untrained eye the dhows of Aden might have looked tediously alike, except for variations in size and hull design. All of them would have been double-ended, that is, their hulls would have come to an edge at both ends of the ship, the square, or transom, stern being a sixteenth-century development introduced by the Portuguese. All of them would have been carvel built, that is, the teak or coconut wood planks of the hull laid edge to edge and lashed together with coir cord rather than nails. And most of them would have carried two triangular, or lateen, sails, a big mainsail and a smaller one on a mizzenmast aft. The largest of fourteenth-century trading vessels were as big as the dhows of modern times, having cargo capacities of up to 250 tons and mainmasts reaching 75 feet or more above the deck.
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