The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (3 page)

In this age of the “docu-drama” and the “non-fiction novel,” I should also state explicitly that I have in no deliberate way fictionalized Ibn Battuta’s life story. The words that he speaks, the attitudes that he holds, the actions that he takes are either drawn directly from the
Rihla
or can be reasonably inferred from it or other historical sources.

This book is my interpretation of Ibn Battuta’s life and times and not a picture of the fourteenth century “through his eyes.” It is not a commentary on his encyclopedic observations, not, in other words, a book about his book. Its subject matter does, however, largely reflect his social experience and cultural perceptions. He was a literate, urbane gentleman interested for the most part in the affairs of other literate, urbane gentlemen. Though as a pious Muslim he by no means despised the poor, he did not often associate with peasants, herdsmen, or city working folk. Nor does he have much to say about them in the
Rihla
. Moreover, he traveled in the circles of world-minded people for whom the universalist values and cosmopolitan institutions of Islam—the mosques, the colleges, the palaces — were more important than the parochial customs and loyalties that constricted the cultural vision of the great majority. Some readers, therefore, will not fail to notice two conceptual biases. One is that political and cultural elites dominate the story at the expense of “the masses,” even though the social history of ordinary Muslim folk is no less worthy of the historian’s attention. The other is that the cosmopolitan tendencies within Islamic civilization are our primary theme rather than the admittedly great cultural diversity among Muslim peoples, even though one of the strengths of an expanding Islam was its successful adaptability to local patterns of culture.

A few technical matters need to be mentioned. In order to simplify the footnote apparatus, I have not for the most part given page citations for direct quotes from English translations of the
Rihla
. Unless otherwise noted, quotations are taken from the published translations as follows:
Chapters 1
–
8
and
14
, H. A. R. Gibb,
The Travels of Ibn Battuta A.D. 1325–1354
, 3 vols.;
Chapters 9
–
11
, Agha Mahdi Husain,
The Rehla of Ibn Battuta
; and
Chapter 13
, N. Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (eds.),
Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History
. For the sake of uniformity I have made a few orthographic changes in quotations
from the
Rihla
translations. I have “americanized” the spelling of a number of English words (e.g., “favor” rather than “favour”), and I have changed the spelling of a few Arabic terms (e.g., “Koran” rather than “Qur’an” and “vizier” rather than “vizir” or “wazir”). In transliterating Arabic terms, I have eliminated all diacritical marks, excepting “’” to indicate the two Arabic letters “hamza” and “’ayn.”

Ibn Battuta has led me so far and wide in the Eastern Hemisphere that in the course of writing this book I have asked for advice and criticism from an unusually large number of scholars and colleagues. I cannot mention them all, but I would like to thank the following individuals for reading and criticizing, sometimes in great detail, all or part of the manuscript: Jere Bacharach, Edmund Burke, P. C. Chu, Julia Clancy-Smith, Michael Dols, Jeanne Dunn, Richard Eaton, G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville, Kathryn Green, David Hart, James Kirkman, Howard Kushner, Ira Lapidus, Michael Meeker, David Morgan, William Phillips, Charles Smith, Ray Smith, Peter von Sivers, and Robert Wilson. I am especially grateful for the enduring support of Professor C. F. Beckingham, a man of learning and urbanity with whom Ibn Battuta would have found much in common. If I failed to understand or heed good advice these individuals gave me, I alone bear the responsibility.

I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for awarding me a fellowship that funded research and writing in 1980–81. During that year I enjoyed the privilege of affiliation with the Middle East Centre at Cambridge University, thanks to Professor R. B. Serjeant and Dr Robin Bidwell. I am also indebted to the Fellows of Clare Hall for extending me membership in the college as a Visiting Associate. San Diego State University generously supported this project with a sabbatical leave and several small grants. For research assistance or typing services I would like to express my appreciation to Lorin Birch, Veronica King, Richard Knight, Helen Lavey, and Jill Swalling Harrington. Finally, I want to thank Barbara Aguado for making the maps.

Ibn Battuta reports the dates of his travels according to the Muslim calendar, which is based on the cycles of the moon. The Muslim year is divided into twelve lunar months of 29 or 30 days each. The year is approximately 354 days long, that is, ten or eleven days shorter than a solar year. Consequently, dates of the Muslim calendar have no fixed relationship either to dates of the Gregorian (Western) calendar or to seasons of the year. For example, Christmas is always celebrated in winter in Europe and the United States. By contrast, a Muslim religious holiday will, over time, occur in all four seasons of the year. The base-year of the Muslim calendar is 622 A.D., when the Prophet Muhammad and his followers made the
hijra
, or “migration,” from Mecca to Medina. The abbreviation A.H., for
anno Hejirae
, denotes years of the Muslim calendar. In this book I have given key dates according to both calendars. Converting precise dates from one system to the other requires the use of a formula and a series of tables. These may be found in G. S. P. Freeman-Grenville,
The Muslim and Christian Calendars
(London, 1963).

The Muslim lunar months are as follows:

In the course of his career Ibn Battuta received numerous gifts and salary payments in gold or silver coins. He usually refers to these coins as dinars, though sometimes distinguishing between “gold dinars” and “silver dinars.” In the early Islamic centuries the weight of a gold dinar was set at 4.25 grams. In Ibn Battuta’s time, however, the weight and fineness of both gold and silver coins, as well as the exchange rate between them, varied greatly from one period or country to the next. It would be futile, therefore, to express the value of money he received in terms of modern dollars or pounds sterling. In fourteenth-century India, where he was paid large sums from the public treasury, a “silver dinar” (or silver
tanka
) was valued at about one-tenth of a gold dinar.

Westerners have singularly narrowed the history of the world in grouping the little that they knew about the expansion of the human race around the peoples of Israel, Greece and Rome. Thus have they ignored all those travellers and explorers who in their ships ploughed the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, or rode across the immensities of Central Asia to the Persian Gulf. In truth the larger part of the globe, containing cultures different from those of the ancient Greeks and Romans but no less civilized, has remained unknown to those who wrote the history of their little world under the impression that they were writing world history.
¹

Henri Cordier

Abu ’Abdallah ibn Battuta has been rightly celebrated as the greatest traveler of premodern times. He was born into a family of Muslim legal scholars in Tangier, Morocco, in 1304 during the era of the Marinid dynasty. He studied law as a young man and in 1325 left his native town to make the pilgrimage, or
hajj
, to the sacred city of Mecca in Arabia. He took a year and a half to reach his destination, visiting North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria along the way. After completing his first
hajj
in 1326, he toured Iraq and Persia, then returned to Mecca. In 1328 (or 1330) he embarked upon a sea voyage that took him down the eastern coast of Africa as far south as the region of modern Tanzania. On his return voyage he visited Oman and the Persian Gulf and returned to Mecca again by the overland route across central Arabia.

In 1330 (or 1332) he ventured to go to India to seek employment in the government of the Sultanate of Delhi. Rather than taking the normal ocean route across the Arabian Sea to the western coast of India, he traveled north through Egypt and Syria to Asia Minor. After touring that region, he crossed the Black Sea to the plains of West Central Asia. He then, owing to fortuitous circumstances, made a westward detour to visit Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, in the company of a Turkish princess. Returning to the Asian steppes, he traveled eastward through Transoxiana, Khurasan, and Afghanistan, arriving at the banks of the Indus River in September 1333 (or 1335).

Map 1: Cities of Eurasia and Africa in the Fourteenth Century

He spent eight years in India, most of that time occupying a post as a
qadi
, or judge, in the government of Muhammad Tughluq, Sultan of Delhi. In 1341 the king appointed him to lead a diplomatic mission to the court of the Mongol emperor of China. The expedition ended disastrously in shipwreck off the southwestern coast of India, leaving Ibn Battuta without employment or resources. For a little more than two years he traveled about southern India, Ceylon, and the Maldive Islands, where he served for about eight months as a
qadi
under the local Muslim dynasty. Then, despite the failure of his ambassadorial mission, he resolved in 1345 to go to China on his own. Traveling by sea, he visited Bengal, the coast of Burma, and the island of Sumatra, then continued on to Guangzhou. The extent of his visit to China is uncertain but was probably limited to the southern coastal region.

In 1346–47 he returned to Mecca by way of South India, the Persian Gulf, Syria, and Egypt. After performing the ceremonies of the
hajj
one last time, he set a course for home. Traveling by both land and sea, he arrived in Fez, the capital of Morocco, late in 1349. The following year he made a brief trip across the Strait of Gibraltar to the Muslim kingdom of Granada. Then, in 1353, he undertook his final adventure, a journey by camel caravan across the Sahara Desert to the Kingdom of Mali in the West African Sudan. In 1355 he returned to Morocco to stay. In the course of a career on the road spanning almost thirty years, he crossed the breadth of the Eastern Hemisphere, visited territories equivalent to about 40 modern countries, and put behind him a total distance of approximately 73,000 miles.
²

Early in 1356 Sultan Abu ’Inan, the Marinid ruler of Morocco, commissioned Ibn Juzayy, a young literary scholar of Andalusian origin, to record Ibn Battuta’s experiences, as well as his observations about the Islamic world of his day, in the form of a
rihla
, or book of travels. As a type of Arabic literature, the
rihla
attained something of a flowering in North Africa between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. The best known examples of the genre recounted a journey from the Maghrib to Mecca, informing and entertaining readers with rich descriptions of the pious institutions, public monuments, and religious personalities of the
great cities of Islam.
³
Ibn Battuta and Ibn Juzayy collaborated for about two years to compose their work, the longest and in terms of its subject matter the most complex
rihla
to come out of North Africa in the medieval age. His royal charge completed, Ibn Battuta retired to a judicial post in a Moroccan provincial town. He died in 1368.