The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (35 page)

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. IB’s statement that he arrived at the Indus River on 1 Muharram 734 (12 September 1333) is probably more or less accurate. The date is open to question, however, since he claims to have left Mecca at the end of 732 A.H. (12 September 1332), yet he took about three years traveling from there to India. Therefore, one date or the other must be wrong, and if the Mecca departure date is correct he would not have reached India until the autumn of 1335. (See Chapter 6, note 2 for a fuller discussion of this issue.) On the whole, the indications that he crossed the Indus by the autumn of 1333 are more compelling than the arguments supporting his departure from Arabia in 1332. The evidence for the 1333 arrival may be summarized as follows:

(a) IB reports events surrounding the departure of Sultan Muhammad Tughluq from Delhi in order to suppress a rebellion in Ma’bar in the far south of India (see Chapter 9). The revolt broke out in 1334. IB states that the sultan left the capital on 9 Jumada I, which was 5 January in 1335 (see Chapter 9, note 21). IB had clearly been living in the capital for some time when this event occurred. If the dating here is correct, he must have entered India in 1333, or at least many months before the fall of 1335.

(b) Muslim medieval sources date the deposition and death of Tarmashirin, Khan of Chagatay, in 1334–35 (735 A.H.). IB states that he heard about the khan’s being overthrown “two years” after his arrival in India (Gb, vol. 3, p. 560). This would accord with IB’s having visited the ruler’s camp in the late winter of 1333. If he had been there in 1335, that is, very shortly before Tarmashirin was overthrown, he would likely have heard the news within a short time of reaching India, not two years.

(c) Passing through Ajodhan (Ajudahan) on his way from the Indus to Delhi, IB recounts that he met the holy man Farid al-Din al-Badhawuni. Mahdi Husain (MH, p. 20) explains that no
shaykh
of that name existed at that time and that IB must have
been referring to his grandson ’Alam al-Din Mawj-Darya. Mahdi Husain also notes that this latter personage died in 734 A.H. Assuming Mahdi Husain is right on the question of the saint’s identity, then IB must have crossed the Indus no later than that year. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 529n and vol. 3, p. 613n) also argues this point.

Many genuine descendants of the Prophet arrived there from Arabia, many traders from Khurasan, many painters from China . . . many learned men from every part. In that auspicious city they gathered, they came like moths around a candle.
¹

Isami

Arriving at the western edge of the Indo–Gangetic plain, Ibn Battuta was entering a world region where his co-believers made up only a small minority of the population. They were, however, the minority that ruled the greater part of the subcontinent of India. Over the very long term the fundamental patterns of Indian society and culture had been defined by the repeated invasions of barbarian charioteers or cavalrymen from Afghanistan or the steppe lands beyond. In the eleventh century, about the same time that the Seljuks were radically changing the political map of the Middle East, the Muslim Turkish rulers of Afghanistan began dispatching great bands of holy warriors against the Hindu cultivators of the Indus and Ganges valleys. These
ghazis
seized the main towns of the Punjab, or upper Indus region. Lahore became a capital of two Turko–Afghan dynasties, first the Ghaznavids and later the Ghurids.

In 1193 Qutb al-Din Aybek, a Ghurid slave commander, captured Delhi, then a small Hindu capital strategically located on the Yamuna River at the eastern end of the natural military route through the Punjab plain to the fertile Ganges basin. In 1206 he seized power in his own right, proclaiming Delhi the capital of a new Muslim military state. During the ensuing century the sultans of the Slave Dynasty, as it was called after the
mamluk
origins of its rulers, defeated one after another the Hindu kingdoms into which North India was fragmented and founded an empire extending from the Indus to the Bay of Bengal.

The first phase of the Muslim conquest of North India was a splendid
ghazi
adventure of looting, shooting, and smashing up the gods of Hindu idolators. The new kings of Dehli, however, imposed civil order on the conquered areas and created a structure of despotism designed to tax rather than slaughter the native peasantry. In the rich plains around the capital, the Muslim military elite secured its authority as a kind of ruling caste atop the stratified social system of the Hindus. A pyramid of administration was erected linking the sultan, from whom all power derived by right of conquest, with several levels of officialdom down to the petty Hindu functionaries who supervised tax collections in thousands of farming villages. Like the Turkish rulers of the Middle East and Anatolia, the sultans learned proper Muslim statecraft from the Abbasid tradition, though adding here and there colorful bits of Hindu ceremonial. Within several decades of the founding of the sultanate, these erstwhile tribal chieftains were transforming themselves into Indo–Persian monarchs, secluded from the populace at the center of a maze of intimidating ritual and an ever-growing army of officials, courtiers, and bodyguards.

Map 9: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in India, Ceylon, and the Maldive Islands, 1333–45

Delhi grew rapidly in the thirteenth century, not because it was an important center of industry or a key intersection of trade, but because it was the imperial residence. As Ibn Battuta had witnessed in other leading capitals, the operation of the army, the bureaucracy, and the royal household required an immense supporting staff of clerks, servants, soldiers, construction workers, merchants, artisans, transporters, shopkeepers, tailors, and barbers. Delhi was typical of parasitic medieval capitals, its royal establishment feeding magnificently off the labor of the lower orders and the revenues of hundreds of thousands of Hindu farmers.

In 1290 the Slave dynasty expired and was succeeded by two lines of Turkish sultans. The first were the Khaljis (1290–1320), men sprung from an Afghan tribe of that name. The second were the Tughluqids (1320–1414), called after the founding ruler, Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq. During the first four decades of these kings, the empire expanded spectacularly. ’Ala al-Din Khalji (1296–1316), a brilliant administrator, created a new standing army of cavalry, war-elephants, and Hindu infantry. Advancing to the Deccan plateau of Central India, he conquered one important Hindu state and raided nearly to the tip of the subcontinent. Areas of South India that ’Ala al-Din merely plundered, Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq (1320–25) and his son Muhammad Tughluq (1325–51) invaded again, then annexed to the empire, replacing Hindu tributaries
with Turkish or Afghan governors appointed from Delhi. By 1333 Muhammad Tughluq ruled over most of India. Thus the congeries of ethnic groups, languages, and castes that comprised the civilization of the subcontinent were politically united, however precariously, for the first time since the Gupta empire of the fifth century A.D.

The great danger of dispatching armies as much as 1,300 miles south of Delhi was that the northwest frontier might be inadequately defended against new disturbances emanating from Inner Asia. In 1221–22, just 18 years after the founding of the sultanate, Chinggis Khan advanced across the Hindu Kush and penetrated as far east as the Indus. In the reign of the Great Khan Ogedei, the Tatars invaded again, seizing Lahore in 1241. Later in the century the Khans of Chagatay, hemmed into the steppe by the other three Mongol kingdoms, looked upon India as the most promising outlet for their combative energies. Chagatay armies and raiding parties crossed the Sulayman mountain passes in the 1290s and continued to do so repeatedly for three more decades. About 1329 Tarmashirin, the Chagatay khan whom Ibn Battuta visited a few years later, invaded India and even threatened Delhi. But Muhammad Tughluq chased him back across the Indus, putting an end to further Mongol incursions of any moment (at least until the catastrophic invasion of Tamerlane at the end of the century).

By successfully defending North India against the Tatars over the course of more than a century, the sultans earned well-deserved reputations in the wider world as champions of Muslim civilization, a status akin to their contemporaries, the Mamluks of Egypt. Thus Delhi, along with Cairo and the Turkish-ruled towns of Anatolia, became a refuge for skilled and literate men who had fled Transoxiana or Persia before the Mongols killed or enslaved them. The silver lining around the devastations of the Islamic heartland was the consequent flowering of civilized life in cities just beyond the reach of Mongol cavalry. In the time of the early Slave dynasty, Delhi had been an armed camp, an outpost of hardy faith fighting for its survival against Hindu idolators on three sides and Mongol devils on the fourth. But once the sultans showed they could defend the community of believers against such powers of darkness, Delhi rose quickly as the central urban base for the advance of Islam into the subcontinent. The rulers basked in their hard-won prestige by opening up their court and administration to all Muslims of talent, skill, or spiritual repute
and patronizing them with stipends and gifts, as well as grand public edifices in which to pursue their vocations.

From Khurasan and Transoxiana came theologians and legists who introduced the universalist standards of the Sacred Law. The sultan appointed immigrant scholars as
qadis
and legal advisers and generally deferred to them to enforce the
shari’a
in matters of religious practice and civil disputes involving believers. Since the Hanafi
madhhab
was dominant in Khurasan and Central Asia, it became the basis of juridical practice in the sultanate. As the Muslim population grew, so did the demand for qualified jurists, requiring the construction of colleges offering studies in Hanafi
fiqh
and the other religious sciences. According to the Egyptian scholar al-Umari, who wrote from plainly exaggerated information supplied by travelers returned from India, there were “one thousand
madrasas
in Delhi, one of which is for the Shafi’ites and the rest for the Hanafites.”
²

Also from central Islamdom came belle-lettrists, historians, poets, and musicians to entertain the imperial court, chronicle its achievements, and extol the virtues of the king. Though Hindi, Turkish, Gujarati, and numerous other Indian tongues could be heard in the streets and bazaars of Delhi, Persian was used in polite circles, thus extending its range as the language of literate prestige all the way from Anatolia to Bengal. Speaking and writing in Persian, the Muslim elite of India reaffirmed in effect their cultural and historical connections to the central lands and at the same time created a linguistic barrier of exclusivity and privilege between themselves and the Hindu masses.

Craftsmen migrating from the west imported Arabo-Persian architectural and decorative traditions. Delhi, like other rising Muslim cities of that period, grew outward from a hub of grand public buildings — mosques, palaces, Sufi
khanqas
, colleges, and mausolea — that incorporated the domes, arches, and calligraphic inscriptions characteristic of Middle Period architecture in Persia. Since the immigrant community was small, however, Hindu artisans and laborers had to be hired in large numbers to carry out most of the work. Thus all sorts of native structural and decorative elements found their way into these buildings, some of them built with the sandstone blocks of demolished Hindu temples.

The earliest Muslim Delhi was established within the refortified walls of the old Hindu town, Kil’a Ray Pithora. Here Sultan Qutb al-Din Aybek (and several of his successors) built the congregational
mosque and mausolea complex called the Quwwat al-Islam. Near it rose the Qutb Minar, the great tapering sandstone tower whose bands of Arabic inscriptions proclaimed Koranic truths and the military triumphs of the first Slave sultans. By Ibn Battuta’s time three additional urban aggregations — three more cities of Delhi — had been founded, all on the west bank of the Yamuna River within about five miles of one another. One was Siri, built by ’Ala al-Din Khalji as a military camp and later walled in. The second was Tughluqabad, a walled complex and fortress founded by Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq. The third was Jahanpanah, where Muhammad Tughluq built a magnificent residence, the Palace of a Thousand Pillars.

The prospering of Muslim life in Delhi and numerous other Hindustani towns in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was evidence of a continuous stream of native conversion. India’s immigrant population of Turks, Afghans, Persians, and Arabs never represented more than a small minority of the total. By the time Ibn Battuta visited the country, the great majority of Muslims there were Indian-born. Most of India’s rural population remained true to the Hindu tradition. Though the sultanate required Hindus, at least in theory, to pay special taxes (as Christians and Jews under Muslim authority were required to do), the government for the most part left them alone to live and worship as they wished. Nevertheless, Indo–Muslims were by the late thirteenth century working their way into the intelligentsia and the elite circles of the sultanate. Ministers and provincial governors of Indo–Muslim origin were being appointed. Indian-born scholars, poets, and religious doctors were appearing in the royal court. As Islam in the Indian context matured, the most conspicuous social tensions within the upper strata were occurring, not between Muslim and Hindu, but between the rising Indo–Muslim elite and the still dominant notables who traced their lineages to the older Islamic lands.