The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (39 page)

Numerous rebel soldiers drowned trying to reach the east bank of the river; others were captured, including ’Ain al-Mulk himself, and brought before the sultan. “Muleteers, peddlars, slaves and persons of no importance” were released, but on the very afternoon
of the battle 62 of the traitorous leaders were thrown to the elephants. “They started cutting them in pieces with the blades placed on their tusks and throwing some of them in the air and catching them,” Ibn Battuta remembers, “and all the time the bugles and fifes and drums were being sounded.” ’Ain al-Mulk must have expected a similar fate, or worse. But what Muhammad Tughluq could take away he could also give. Convinced that his governor had acted rashly “through mistake,” as Barani has it,
²⁷
the emperor pardoned him and gave him the modest post of supervising the royal gardens in Delhi.

Despite his total victory, Muhammad returned to his capital in a fury of despair.
²⁸
The famine raged on, Bengal had broken away from the sultanate or was about to, other revolts were igniting here and there, and all his dreams of a tidy, productive empire were falling to ruin. Thus he lashed out at whatever enemies, real or imagined, happened to be at hand. In such a sinister environment as this, only the most circumspect, inconspicuous officeholder might expect to survive indefinitely. Eager, sociable young
qadis
, on the other hand, were likely to make a disastrous slip sooner or later.

It might well have happened earlier than it did. At some point during his residence in Delhi, Ibn Battuta married a woman named Hurnasab and had a daughter by her. As usual we learn almost nothing in the
Rihla
about his domestic affairs, except that this woman was a daughter of Ahsan Shah, leader of the Ma’bar rebellion, and a sister of Sharif Ibrahim, a court official and governor who had plotted a rebellion and was subsequently executed in the palace while Ibn Battuta was in attendance there. Although the
Rihla
gives no hint that his marriage to Hurnasab brought him under suspicion, having family ties with men guilty of high treason was hardly an advantage at the court of Muhammad Tughluq. Ibn Battuta would later in his travels be a guest of one of Ahsan Shah’s successors in Ma’bar, suggesting that he may well have had some concealed sympathy for the rebellion there.
²⁹

The event that finally got him into trouble was his friendship with Shaykh Shihab al-Din, a venerable Sufi originally from Khurasan. It was a long-held tradition among the most pious and principled divines of Islam to shun relationships with secular rulers on the argument that such collaboration would taint them and detract from their total service to God. Nizam al-Din Awliya, the illustrious master of the Chishti brotherhood who died eight years
before Ibn Battuta came to India, bluntly cold-shouldered both Khalji and Tughluq emperors at every opportunity. “The house of this humble one has two doors,” Nizam al-Din is known to have said. “If the Sultan enters through one, I shall go out by the other.”
³⁰
Such aloofness as this was quite unacceptable to Muhammad Tughluq, whose political theory included the idea that Sufi ascetics and ivory-tower theologians should submit to his will as much as the official
’ulama
.

Whether Shihab al-Din was a Chishti or not is unclear, but twice he brashly refused to obey his sovereign’s commands. In the first incident he spurned a government post offered to him. In retaliation Muhammad had the
shaykh
’s beard plucked out hair by hair, then banished him to Daulatabad. Some time later he had him restored to favor and appointed him to an office, which in that instance Shihab al-Din agreed to accept. When Muhammad went off on the Ma’bar expedition, Shihab al-Din established a farm near the Yamuna River a few miles from Delhi and there dug himself a large underground house complete, as Ibn Battuta describes it, with “chambers, storerooms, an oven and a bath.” Returned to the capital, the sultan ordered Shihab al-Din to appear at court, but the troglodyte refused to emerge. When Muhammad had him summarily arrested, the
shaykh
retorted that the sultan was an oppressor and a tyrant. The court ’
ulama
pleaded with him to recant. When he would not, he was tortured in the most heinous manner, then beheaded.

Ibn Battuta, by contrast, was hardly the sort to martyr himself for rigid principles. The odor of politics did not bother him at all, and official service and reward were his ambition. Unfortunately, he had made the mistake of going out one day to see Shihab al-Din and his marvelous cave. Following the
shaykh
’s arrest, the sultan demanded a list of all who had visited him, and the Maghribi’s name was on it. “Thereupon,” Ibn Battuta recalls, “the sultan gave orders that four of his slaves should remain constantly beside me in the audience-hall, and customarily when he takes this action with anyone it rarely happens that the person escapes.” For nine days Ibn Battuta remained under guard, imagining in cold horror his short final journey to the main gate of the Jahanpanah palace where executions were carried out and the corpses left to lie three days in public view.

The day on which they began to guard me was a Friday and God Most High inspired me to recite His words
Sufficient for us is God and excellent the Protector
. I recited them that day 33,000 times and
passed the night in the audience-hall. I fasted five days on end, reciting the Qur’an from cover to cover each day, and tasting nothing but water. After five days I broke my fast and then continued to fast for another four days on end.

Then, just after Shihab al-Din was executed, the terrified
qadi
, much to his surprise, was suddenly released and allowed to go home.

Shaken by this dreadful experience, he secured permission a short time later to withdraw from his official duties and seclude himself with Kamal al-Din ’Abdallah al-Ghari, a well-known Sufi who occupied a hermitage, indeed another cave, on the outskirts of Delhi. Kamal al-Din was a rigorous ascetic, living in extreme poverty and performing awesome feats of self-denial. Ibn Battuta had gone into brief periods of spiritual retreat previously in his career, but this time he threw himself into the abstinent life, ridding himself of his possessions, donning the clothes of a beggar, and fasting to the point of collapse. He remained in these penitent circumstances for five months, probably unsure of what he would do next. Apparently he had decided at least that life with Muhammad Tughluq was far too dangerous to continue.

Meanwhile, the sultan went on a military tour to Sind and from the town of Sehwan summoned his
qadi
to appear before him. Ibn Battuta presumably made the journey immediately, though the
Rihla
has no comment on it or the route.
³¹
When he arrived, Muhammad received him “with the greatest kindness and solicitude” and pressed him to return to his judgeship and rejoin the palace circle. Determined to avoid that fate at all costs, Ibn Battuta countered with a request to make the
hajj
, the most persuasive reason he could come up with for getting permission to leave the country. Much to his relief, the sultan agreed. For several weeks thereafter, beginning in June 1341, he resided in another Sufi
khanqa
, this time progressively extending his periods of self-denial until finally he could fast for 40 days at a stretch.

Then suddenly he was called into the royal presence again, this time to hear an astounding proposal. Knowing his “love of travel and sightseeing,” the sultan wished to make his North African
qadi
ambassador to the Mongol court of China. His mission would be to accompany 15 Chinese envoys back to their homeland and to carry shiploads of gifts to the Yuan emperor. Ibn Battuta was preparing to leave for Mecca and until that moment probably had no thought
of traveling eastwards of India. Now he was being handed an opportunity, not only to get away from Muhammad Tughluq and the gloom of Delhi, but to visit the further lands of Islam and beyond — and to do it in grander style than he had ever traveled before. It was an offer much too promising to refuse.

1
. Quoted in P. Hardy,
Historians of Medieval India
(London, 1960), p. 98.

2
. Ibn Fadl Allah al-’Umari,
A Fourteenth Century Arab Account of India under Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq
, trans. and ed. Iqtidar Husain Siddiqi and Qazi Mohammad Ahmad (Aligarh, 1971), p. 36.

3
. Since IB lived and traveled in India for about a decade and since he and his editor expected literate Moroccans to be particularly interested in facts about that distant land, he devotes nearly a fifth of the
Rihla
to a description of the history, political affairs, social customs, class relations, and Muslim religious life of the sultanate and other regions of the subcontinent. The
Rihla
is one of a very few contemporary literary sources on fourteenth-century India, especially the life and times of Muhammad Tughluq. IB is indeed the sole source of information on a number of historical events, including some of the rebellions against the sultan. He also gives a brief dynastic history of the kingdom, based, as he reveals, on information supplied to him mainly by Kamal al-Din ibn al-Burhan, the chief judge. Where IB’s reporting has been checked against the other contemporary sources, he has been found reasonably accurate. For the modern historian, however, the value of the narrative has been restricted by the lack of a clear chronological framework and almost no references to either absolute or relative dates. The other chronicles of the time suffer from the same deficiency.

Since the
Rihla
is a book for Muslims about Muslims, indeed literate Muslims, it is an inadequate source on Hindu society and civilization. Though IB does describe certain Hindu customs and gives some examples of the interpenetration of Hindu and Muslim culture, he is generally disinclined to examine the life of Muslim peasant folk, much less infidel peasant folk. Despite the thread of amiable tolerance that runs through the
Rihla
, IB’s perspective is identical with that of the other Muslim writers of the time. “For them, indeed as for Muslim historians outside India,” Peter Hardy writes, “the only significant history is the history of the Muslim community; they are historians of the
res gestae
of the politically prominent members of a group united by ties of common faith rather than historians of the whole people of the area controlled by the Delhi sultan.”
Historians of Medieval India
, p. 114.

4
. Muhammad Tughluq was also suspected of being under the pernicious influence of a disciple of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), a famous theologian and exponent of the Hanbali
madhhab
who had lived in Damascus. Ibn Taymiyya incurred the opposition of the orthodox scholars by his critical rejection of Sufi mysticism and by his insistence on the right of
ijtihad
, that is, the freedom to inquire into the foundations of particular points of law even where an authoritative
madhhab
decision already existed. IB claims to have heard him preach in Damascus in 1326 and characterizes him as having, according to Gibb’s translation, “some kink in his brain.” Gb, vol. 1, p. 135. The validity of IB’s remark is examined by D. P. Little, “Did Ibn Taymiyya Have a Screw Loose?”
Studia Islamica
41 (1975): 39–111.

5
. Peter Jackson links the plan for the conquest of Chagatay with an abortive invasion of Kashmir, called the Qarachil expedition. “The Mongols and the Delhi Sultanate in the Reign of Muhammad Tughluq (1325–51).”
Central Asiatic Journal
19 (1975): 128–43.

6
. Ziya al-Din Barani,
Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi
, trans. and ed. H. M. Elliot and John Dowson,
The History of India as Told by its Own Historians
, vol. 3 (Allahabad, 1964), p. 236. Barani was a courtier at the court of Muhammad Tughluq and perhaps an acquaintance of IB. Under the patronage of Firuz Shah, Muhammad’s successor, he wrote a history of the sultanate from 1266 to 1351. He interprets each reign in the light of his own orthodox morality and finds Muhammad Tughluq badly wanting. Barani does not mention IB.

7
. Quoted in K. M. Ashraf,
Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan
, 2nd edn (New Delhi, 1970), p. 150.

8
. See Chapter 8, note 25.

9
. IB states that his first visit to Sind took place shortly after the suppression of a local uprising, the Sumra revolt, by the military governor Imad al-Mulk Sartiz. This official was not appointed, however, until about 1337. Peter Jackson, “The Mongols and India (1221–1351),” Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1977, pp. 225–26. IB may therefore be confusing this alleged tour of Sind with the trip he took there from Delhi shortly before July 1341. He also says that he visited Sind for the first time during the “hottest period of the summer.” Such a remark fits poorly into the chronological scheme of his arrival in India, which he claims began on 12 September 1333. There is no evidence that he remained in the Punjab and Sind from then until the following summer. The 1341 visit, however, apparently did take place in early summer, which was indeed the time of the scorching southwesterly winds. Jackson develops a line of argument about IB’s chronology to suggest that he did not visit China at all, that he stayed in India until 1346–47 (747–48 A.H.), and that he left there definitively by way of an overland route through Sind and Khurasan. Jackson admits, however, that if IB did pass through Sind as late as 1346–47, Sartiz was no longer governor there, having been transferred to the Deccan in 1345 (p. 226). Thus the Sumra rebellion, for which IB offers the only description, may well have taken place in 1341 rather than 1333. M. R. Haig discusses IB’s itinerary in Sind and struggles unsuccessfully with the chronological difficulties. “Ibnu Batuta in Sindh,”
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
19 (1887): 393–412. C. F. Beckingham suggests the Sind visit may have taken place in 1341 rather than 1333–34. “Ibn Battuta in Sind” in Hamida Khuhro (ed.),
Sind through the Centuries: Proceedings of an International Seminar, Karachi 1975
(Karachi, 1981), pp. 139–42.