The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (5 page)

The spread of Islam into new areas of the hemisphere during the Middle Period was given impetus by two major forces. One of these was the advance of Turkish-speaking Muslim herding
peoples from Central Asia into the Middle East, a movement that began on a large scale with the conquests of the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century. In the ensuing 300 years Turkish cavalry armies pushed westward into Asia Minor and southern Russia and eastward into India. The second force was the gradual but persistent movement of Muslim merchants into the lands rimming the Indian Ocean, that is, East Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and China, as well as into Central Asia and West Africa south of the Sahara.

Yet the principal contribution of both warriors and merchants, establishing in some places Muslim military dominance and in other places only communities of believers under non-Muslim authority, was to prepare the ground for influxes of Muslim religious and intellectual cadres. It was they, over the longer term, who founded the basic institutions of Islamic civilization in these new areas and who carried on the work of cultural conversion among non-Muslim peoples.

A close look at the patterns of travel and migration in the post-Abbasid centuries reveals a quiet but persistent dispersion of legal scholars, theologians, Sufi divines, belle-lettrists, scribes, architects, and craftsmen outward from the older centers of Islam to these new frontiers of Muslim military and commercial activity. At the same time, the members of this cultural elite who were living and traveling in the further regions consistently maintained close ties with the great cities of the central Islamic lands, thereby creating not merely a scattering of literate and skilled Muslims across the hemisphere, but an integrated, growing, self-replenishing network of cultural communication.

Moreover, the most fundamental values of Islam tended to encourage a higher degree of social mobility and freer movement of individuals from one city and region to another than was the case in the other civilizations of that time. Islamic culture put great stress on egalitarian behavior in social relations based on the ideal of a community of believers (the
umma
) having a common allegiance to one God and his Sacred Law. To be sure, a great gulf separated the rich and powerful from the poor and weak, as was the case in all civilized societies until very recent times. But Islam mightily resisted the institutionalizing of ascribed statuses, ethnic exclusivities, or purely territorial loyalties. The dynamics of social life centered, not on relations among fixed, rigidly defined groups as was the case in Hindu India or even, to a lesser degree, the medieval West, but on what Hodgson calls “egalitarian contractualism,”
the relatively free play of relations among individuals who tended to size one another up mainly in terms of personal conformity to Islamic moral standards.
¹³
Consequently, wherever in the Dar al-Islam an individual traveled, pursued a career, or bought and sold goods, the same social and moral rules of conduct largely applied, rules founded on the
shari’a
.

The Islamic world in Ibn Battuta’s time was divided politically into numerous kingdoms and principalities. Rulers insisted that their administrative and penal codes be obeyed, but they made no claims to divine authority. For the most part, Muslims on the move — merchants, scholars, and skilled, literate individuals of all kinds — regarded the jurisdictions of states as a necessary imposition and gave them as little attention as possible. Their primary allegiance was to the Dar al-Islam as a whole. The focal points of their public lives were not countries but cities, where world-minded Muslims carried on their inter-personal affairs mainly with reference to the universalist and uniform standards of the Law.

The terrible Mongol conquests of Persia and Syria that occurred between 1219 and 1258 appeared to Muslims to threaten the very existence of Islamic civilization. Yet by the time Ibn Battuta began his traveling career Mongol political dominance over the greater part of Eurasia was proving conducive to the further expansion of Islam and its institutions. The powerful Mongol
khans
of Persia and Central Asia converted to the faith, and the conditions of order and security that attended the Pax Mongolica of the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries gave freer play than ever to the movement of Muslims back and forth across Eurasia.

It was in the late decades of the Pax Mongolica that Ibn Battuta made his remarkable journeys. In a sense he participated, sometimes simultaneously, in four different streams of travel and migration. First, he was a pilgrim, joining the march of pious believers to the spiritual shrines of Mecca and Medina at least four times in his career. Second, he was a devotee of Sufism, or mystical Islam, traveling, as thousands did, to the hermitages and lodges of venerable individuals to receive their blessing and wisdom. Third, he was a juridical scholar, seeking knowledge and erudite company in the great cities of the Islamic heartland. And finally, he was a member of the literate, mobile, world-minded elite, an educated adventurer as it were, looking for hospitality, honors, and profitable employment in the more newly established centers
of Islamic civilization in the further regions of Asia and Africa. In any of these traveling roles, however, he regarded himself as a citizen, not of a country called Morocco, but of the Dar al-Islam, to whose universalist spiritual, moral, and social values he was loyal above any other allegiance. His life and career exemplify a remarkable fact of Afro–Eurasian history in the later Middle Period, that, as Marshall Hodgson writes, Islam “came closer than any other medieval society to establishing a common world order of social and even cultural standards.”
¹⁴

1
. Henri Cordier, quoted in Joseph Needham,
Science and Civilization in China
, vol. 4, part 3:
Civil Engineering and Nautics
(Cambridge, 1971), p. 486.

2
. Approximate. Henry Yule estimates that IB traveled more than 75,000 miles during his career, not counting journeys while living in India.
Cathay and the Way Thither
, 4 vols. (London, 1913–16), vol. 4, p. 40. Mahdi Husain (MH, p. liii) suggests 77,640 miles.

3
. On
rihla
literature in North Africa see M. B. A. Benchekroun,
La Vie intellectuelle marocaine sous les Merinides et les Wattasides
(Rabat, 1974), pp. 9–11, 251–57; André Michel, “Ibn Battuta, trente années de voyages de Pekin au Niger,”
Les Africains
1 (1977): 134–36; A. L. de Prémare,
Maghreb et Andalousie au XIVe siècle
(Lyon, 1981), pp. 34, 92–93.

4
. Samuel Lee,
The Travels of Ibn Battuta
(London, 1929). See also D&S, vol. 1, pp. xiii–xxvi.

5
. C. Défrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti (trans. and eds.).
Voyages d’Ibn Battuta
, 4 vols. (Paris, 1853–58; reprint edn., Vincent Monteil [ed.], Paris, 1979).

6
. H. A. R. Gibb,
The Travels of Ibn Battuta A.D. 1325–1354, Translated with Notes from the Arabic Text Edited by C. Defremery and B. R. Sanguinetti
, 5 vols. Vols. 1–3: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, 1958, 1961, and 1971. Vol. 4: Translation Completed with Annotations by C. F. Beckingham. London: Hakluyt Society, 1994. Vol. 5: Index, A. D. H. Bivar, Compiler, Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2001.

7
. The final volume was translated by C. F. Beckingham, Gibb’s former student.

8
. Gibb,
Travels in Asia and Africa
, p. 12.

9
. A. G. Hopkins,
An Economic History of West Africa
(New York, 1973), p. 78.

10
. On the medieval sources that mention IB see Chapter 14.

11
. Marshall G. S. Hodgson,
The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in World Civilization
, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974); William H. McNeill,
The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community
(Chicago, 1963). The concept of trans-regional “intercommunicating zones” is also important in the writings of Philip D. Curtin, notably
Cross-Cultural Trade in World History
(Cambridge, England, 1984).

12
. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, “Hemispheric Inter-regional History as an Approach to World History,”
Journal of World History
1 (1954): 717.

13
. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, “The Role of Islam in World History,”
International Journal of Middle East Studies
1 (1970): 116.

14
. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, “The Unity of Later Islamic History,”
Journal of World History
5 (1960): 884.

The learned man is esteemed in whatever place or condition he may be, always meeting people who are favorably disposed to him, who draw near to him and seek his company, gratified in being close to him.
¹

’Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi

The white and windy city of Tangier lies on the coast of Morocco at the southwestern end of the Strait of Gibraltar where the cold surface current of the Atlantic flows into the channel, forming a river to the Mediterranean 45 miles away. According to legend, Hercules founded the city in honor of his wife, after he split the continents and built his pillars, the mountain known as Jebel Musa on the African shore, the Rock of Gibraltar on the European. For travelers sailing between Morocco and the Iberian Peninsula the strait was indeed a river, only 16 miles across at its narrowest point and traversed in as little as three hours in fair weather. To sail east or west from one sea to the other was a more dangerous and exacting feat than the crossing, owing to capricious winds and currents as well as reefs and sandbars along the shores. Yet merchant ships were making the passage with more and more frequency in medieval times, and Tangier was growing along with the other ports of the strait as an entrepôt between the commercial networks of the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic. Tangier was a converging point of four geographical worlds — African and European, Atlantic and Mediterranean. It was an international town whose character was determined by the shifting flow of maritime traffic in the strait — merchants and warriors, craftsmen and scholars shuttling back and forth between the pillars or gliding under them between the ocean and the sea.

We have only a faint idea of the local history of Tangier (Tanja) in the first quarter of the fourteenth century when Ibn Battuta was growing up there, being educated, and moving in the secure circles of parents, kinsmen, teachers and friends.
²
But there is no doubt that life in the town was shaped by the patterns of history in the wider world of the strait. If the young Ibn Battuta, preoccupied with his Koranic lessons, was indifferent to the momentous comings and goings in the region of the channel, these must have had, nonetheless, a pervading influence on the daily affairs of the city and its people.

Map 2: Region of the Strait of Gibraltar

The early fourteenth century was a time of transition for all the towns bordering the strait, as prevailing relationships between Africa and Europe on the one hand and the Atlantic and Mediterranean on the other were being altered, in some ways drastically. Most conspicuous was the retreat of Muslim power from Europe in the face of the Christian
reconquista
. During the half millennium between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, all of the Maghrib (North Africa from Morocco to western Libya) and most of Iberia were under Muslim rule. On both sides of the strait there developed a sophisticated urban civilization, founded on the rich irrigated agriculture of Andalusia (al-Andalus), as Muslim Iberia was called, and flourishing amid complex cultural and commercial interchange among cities all around the rim of the far western Mediterranean. The unity of this civilization reached its apogee in the twelfth century when the Almohads, a dynasty of
Moroccan Berbers impelled by a militant ideology of religious reform, created a vast Mediterranean empire, whose lands spanned the strait and stretched from the Atlantic coast to Libya.