The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (46 page)

Since the entire Muslim population of Ma’bar was small, limited to the military aristocracy, coastal merchants, and a modest bureaucratic and religious corps, Ghiyath al-Din would likely have welcomed the former
qadi
of Delhi to his court whether the marriage connection existed or not. Beyond that, Ibn Battuta arrived with a fascinating proposal that Ghiyath al-Din was only too happy to entertain:

I had an interview with the sultan in the course of which I broached the Maldive affair and proposed that he should send an expedition to those islands. He set about with determination to do so and specified the warships for that purpose.

The plan the two men devised was to have Ibn Battuta lead a naval invasion of the atolls and intimidate Queen Khadija into accepting an unequal alliance with the sultanate. Ghiyath al-Din would marry one of the queen’s sisters while men loyal to him, Ibn Battuta among them, would run the kingdom as a satellite of Ma’bar. The plot had only to await preparation of an attack fleet, which, the sultan’s naval chief reported, would take at least three months.
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Presumably the admiral set to work fitting out the warships, but the plan began to go awry almost as soon as it was hatched. From the outset, Ibn Battuta took a dislike to Ghiyath al-Din, whose troops went about the land rounding up Tamil villagers and indiscriminately impaling them on sharpened stakes, the sort of political atrocity absolutely forbidden to Muslim rulers by Qur’anic injunction. Ibn Battuta and his retinue spent some time in Pattan (Fattan), the main port of Ma’bar,
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then traveled upcountry to Madurai, the capital of the sultanate and one of the major towns of southeastern India. There he found the population in the throes of an epidemic so lethal that “whoever caught infection died on the morrow, or the day after, and if not on the third day, then on the fourth.” He purchased a healthy slave girl in the city, but she died the following day. Ghiyath al-Din, who was already ill from taking a love potion containing iron filings, witnessed the loss of his mother and son to the epidemic. A week later he himself died.
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Nasir al-Din, a nephew of the dead sultan and a soldier of apparently low origins, quickly seized the throne and got to the business of dismissing or murdering various political enemies.

The new ruler was happy enough to retain the services of his predecessor’s brother-in-law and pressed him to carry on with the expedition. Ibn Battuta might at that point have been willing to move ahead, but he suddenly fell seriously ill himself, probably not with the disease that had killed so many in Madurai but from the malaria he had contracted in the Maldives. By the time he recovered he had lost all interest in the conspiracy, disliked Madurai intensely, and wanted only to get out of Ma’bar. He never explains why he had such a drastic change of heart, but he gives the impression that he had little confidence in Nasir al-Din and liked him even less than Ghiyath al-Din. Whatever the reason, he refused the sultan’s urgings to launch the war fleet and finally got permission to leave Ma’bar with his little entourage. His original plan of travel — before he got involved in Maldivian
politics — was to visit Ceylon and Ma’bar, then go directly on to Bengal. But if he was leaving from Pattan about December 1344, he would not have found any vessels sailing into the Bay of Bengal until the start of the summer winds in May.
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Ships were going in the other direction, however — westward around Ceylon to Malabar and Aden. If his immediate object was to flee the Sultanate of Ma’bar as fast as possible, then he and his companions would go wherever the monsoon blew.
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And so he returned once again to Quilon on the Malabar coast.

His career at sixes and sevens, he stayed in Quilon for three months, still recovering from his illness. Then he decided to try his luck with his old patron Jamal al-Din of Honavar. The sultan might well have been less than delighted to see the man who had abandoned him so abruptly during the siege of Sandapur two and a half years earlier, but in any case the reunion was not to be. Ibn Battuta and his group took passage on a ship bound for Honavar, well enough aware that storms and shallows were not the only perils on the west Indian coast. Marco Polo had passed through the region about a half century earlier and described the danger well:

You must know that from this kingdom of Melibar, and from another near it called Gozurat, there go forth every year more than a hundred corsair vessels on cruise . . . Their method is to join in fleets of 20 or 30 of these pirate vessels together, and then they form what they call a sea cordon, that is, they drop off till there is an interval of 5 or 6 miles between ship and ship, so that they cover something like a hundred miles of sea, and no merchant ship can escape them. For when any one corsair sights a vessel a signal is made by fire or smoke, and then the whole of them make for this, and seize the merchants and plunder them. After they have plundered them they let them go, saying: “Go along with you and get more gain, and that mayhap will fall to us also!” But now the merchants are aware of this, and go so well manned and armed, and with such great ships, that they don’t fear the corsairs. Still mishaps do befall them at times.
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For Ibn Battuta and his luckless friends, the “mishap” occurred near a small island just south of Honavar.
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Caught in the corsair’s net, twelve ships suddenly converged on the lonely vessel and attacked at once. Clambering over the gunwales from all directions,
the pirates quickly overpowered the hapless crew, and stripped the passengers of everything they had. “They seized the jewels and rubies which the king of Ceylon had given me,” Ibn Battuta remembers, “and robbed me of my clothes and provisions with which pious men and saints had favored me. They left nothing on my body except my trousers.”
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Then, with an encouraging word to their terrified victims to pass that way again sometime, the brigands politely dropped them all off on the nearby shore unharmed.

Dispossessed and humiliated once again, Ibn Battuta did not walk the short distance up the Kanara coast to Honavar, probably concluding that it would be impolitic, if not thoroughly boorish, to appear before Jamal al-Din a second time in a state of destitution. Somehow he and his party managed to make their way back down the coast to Calicut — no details are given — where “one of the jurists sent me a garment, the qadi sent me a turban, and a certain merchant sent me another garment.”

While recuperating in Calicut he learned through the port gossip that the other Jamal al-Din, the grand vizier of the Maldives, had died and that the pregnant woman Ibn Battuta had divorced had given birth to a son shortly after his departure the previous year.
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He also learned that his old nemesis, the vizier ’Abdallah, had married Queen Khadija and assumed the office of chief minister. By this time Ibn Battuta had given up any idea of returning to the islands at the head of the Ma’bar navy, but he did have an urge to claim his son, a right he had in Muslim law. Well knowing that ’Abdallah could make considerable trouble for him if he turned up on Male again, especially if the Ma’bar conspiracy had become known, he decided nonetheless to chance a visit. Sailing from Calicut, presumably no later than May 1345, he reached the atolls in ten days.
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Landing first on Kinalos Island then sailing southward to Male, he found ’Abdallah reasonably well disposed toward him, though a bit suspicious. He dined with the vizier and was given lodgings near the royal palace, but he says nothing in the
Rihla
of renewing his political contacts. When his ex-wife learned that she was about to lose her son, probably for all time, she complained bitterly to ’Abdallah, who was nevertheless disinclined to stand in the father’s way. The father, however, was a man with a long history of abandoning we may only guess how many sons and daughters in various parts of the Muslim world. After seeing the little boy and,
we might hope, responding to the pleas of his wretched mother, he “deemed it fit for him to continue with the islanders.” And so, after staying in the Maldives only five days, he boarded a junk bound for Bengal. He was not to return again, much to the relief, we may suppose, of all concerned.

Sailing round the southern tip of Ceylon into the Bay of Bengal, Ibn Battuta was joining a surge of Muslim migration into the maritime lands of greater southeastern Asia. The fourteenth was a century of bright opportunities for any believer seeking career, fortune, or spiritual self-mastery out beyond the frontier of the Dar al-Islam, where the Sacred Law and the rightly guided society it embodied had yet to be introduced to benighted millions. It was the century when Islamic urban culture secured itself firmly in Bengal, when Muslim mercantile settlements took charge of the international trade through the Strait of Malacca, and when cosmopolitan Islam reached its zenith of influence and prosperity in China.

Arab and Iranian seamen of the eighth century had first introduced Islam in the Far East during bold, year-and-a-half trading voyages from the Persian Gulf to the South China coast and back again. Yet these missions were given up by the tenth century as the Abbasid state and the T’ang empire of China deteriorated simultaneously. The Arabo–Persian settlement at Guangzhou virtually disappeared, and the voyages left hardly any Islamic impress on eastern Asia. Historians used to suppose that the cessation of these direct, long-distance links between the Middle East and China was evidence of a protracted “decline” of Muslim trade with the farther East. On the contrary, the long run of commercial developments between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries involved a more or less steady increase in the variety, and no doubt volume, of goods exchanged along the chain of southern seas, as well as proliferation of ports and local hinterlands incorporated into the inter-regional system. By the eleventh or twelfth centuries a Muslim network of trust, friendship, and social expectation ruled the commerce of the western Indian Ocean. Since the sea routes from there through the Bay of Bengal to the China Seas had since ancient times constituted a continuum of commercial exchange, it was almost inevitable that the network should push out along the shores north and east of Ceylon in search of new bases of operation. Sharing as they did an unusual
esprit de corps
and
monopolizing the routes leading to the markets of Africa, Persia, and the Mediterranean basin, upstart Muslim merchants had powerful advantages over Indian, Malay, or Chinese trading groups, who found themselves gradually superseded by or, more likely, coopted into the Muslim club.

During the era of the two Sung dynasties (960–1279), China experienced spectacular economic growth. Agricultural and industrial output shot up, population soared, cities multiplied, and the internal network of roads and canals was vastly improved. A remarkable expansion of overseas trade accompanied these trends. Chinese nautical and naval technology was well in advance of the Arabian Sea tradition and could conceivably have been wielded to enforce a monopoly over the eastern sea routes. In fact, the Sung emperors embraced a dual policy. They encouraged Chinese merchants to trade directly to India (or in some isolated instances as far west as the Red Sea). But at the same time they invited foreign traders, notably Muslims, to establish, or in the case of Canton re-establish, settlements in the cities of South China.

Moreover, Chinese overseas mercantile operations tended to be hampered by the Sung government’s insistence on close regulation and control. By contrast, the alien Muslim trading groups were fluid, versatile, and unimpeded by any central bureaucratic authority. They could therefore move goods across the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea more speedily, more efficiently, and probably at lower cost than could the Chinese junk masters. Thus, the “commercial revolution” of Sung China stimulated the expansion of Muslim shipping east of Malabar and the growth of busy, multinational settlements in Quanzhou (Zaitun), Guangzhou (Canton), and other south coast ports. Muslim mercantile communities even sprang up in Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Sung Dynasty (1127–1279), and other major towns along the interior land and water routes. Indeed, a significant proportion of Chinese merchants in the international trade appear to have converted to Islam, improving, as it were, their credit rating.

The Mongol invasion of China and overthrow of the Sung only reinforced these trends. The Yuan dynasty was the only one of the four great Mongol khanates whose rulers never converted to Islam. Nevertheless, the khans of the early Yuan period, distrusting, as well they might have, the loyalty and commitment of
the sullen, hyper-civilized class of Chinese scholar-bureaucrats, brought in numerous foreigners of diverse origins and religions and placed them in responsible, even powerful, positions of state. These men depended completely on their Mongol masters to protect them and promote their careers and were expected to give unquestioning loyalty in return. The influence of foreign cadres reached its peak in the reign of Khubilai Khan (1260–94), when hundreds of Muslims of Central Asian or Middle Eastern origin (not to mention a few European adventurers such as Niccolo Polo and his son Marco) held jobs as tax-collectors, finance officers, craftsmen, and architects.

The Yuan “open door” policy on foreign recruitment, combined with their enthusiastic promotion of pan-Eurasian trade, attracted Muslim merchants into China’s vast, largely unexploited market as never before. They came not only to the China Sea ports and the cities of the populous south, but also across Inner Asia and through the gates of the Great Wall to found settlements in the northern towns, including even Korea. The largest communities were in Quanzhou and Guangzhou on the southern coast. These groups largely governed the internal affairs of their own city quarters, and Muslim merchant associations, called
ortakh
, even took loans from the Yuan government to capitalize their foreign trade enterprises. Mosques, hospitals,
khanqas
, and bazaars rose up in the Muslim neighborhoods of Ch’üan-chou and Canton, and
qadis
were appointed to adjudicate the Sacred Law in civil and business affairs.
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