Download PDF | The Adventures Of Ibn Battuta A Muslim Traveler Of The Fourteenth Century, by Ross E. Dunn (Author), University of California Press 2004.
376 Pages
Preface to the 2012 Edition
In the seven years since the revised edition of this book appeared, the academic and popular media have continued to polish the reputation of Ibn Battuta, the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveler. Scholars have been writing about him and his extraordinary globetrotting career since the nineteenth century. But in the last couple of decades, he has become something of an icon of globalization. For one thing, his Book of Travels, or Rihla, completed in 1355, demonstrates that economic and cultural interrelations among societies even thousands of miles from one another were much more complex seven hundred years ago than we used to think.
And they have become progressively more complex ever since. Ibn Battuta’s narrative also offers a glimpse of the origins of the planet-girdling flow of information that characterizes the human community today. This is because the Rihla shows the remarkable world-mindedness of educated Muslims in the fourteenth century, perhaps the first group of people in history capable of thinking of the entire Eastern Hemisphere as a single geographical space within which scholars, merchants, missionaries, and diplomats interacted with one another and shared knowledge.
Today, students in schools and universities are being asked to study more world history. When they explore premodern centuries, they almost inevitably meet Ibn Battuta because he witnessed events and described ways of life in so many different places. Here is this same guy, students discover, turning up in Iraq, Russia, India, China, Mali, and Spain. Classroom encounters with Ibn Battuta, a man who walked, rode, and sailed (and at a few points staggered) thousands of miles, might even inspire some young people to find out more about the wider, profoundly intermeshed world around them—and to do some serious traveling.
Apart from dozens of textbooks on world, regional, and Islamic history, where has Ibn Battuta been making a name for himself in the last seven years? Two scholars in Britain have published insightful commentaries on his travels.! A portion of the Rih/a translated from Arabic to English by Samuel Lee back in 1829 has appeared in a new edition.* A professor of Arabic in Uzbekistan has published an English edition of Ibn Battuta’s journeys through Central Asia along with learned commentary.? Googling “Ibn Battuta” pulls up several educational and cultural web sites that describe his career and sing his praises.
The great journeyer also continues to gain at least modest notoriety as a world pop-culture figure. In 2005, Dubai, one of the seven United Arab Emirates, opened the Ibn Battuta Mall, a shopping playground organized around six courts. Each one has an architectural and decorative theme evoking places that the Moroccan visited—Tunisia, Egypt, Persia, India, China, and Andalusia. In 2008, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, an Arabic scholar and travel writer, hosted The Man Who Walked across the World, a series of films for BBC Four that traced Ibn Battuta’s travels. The following year Cosmic Pictures and SK Films premiered Journey to Mecca, a dramatic and documentary feature that tells the story—on giant Imax screens—of Ibn Battuta’s overland trip to the holy city of Mecca. The film also gives viewers spectacular images of the Islamic pilgrimage, the object of the young Moroccan’s first journey in 1324-26. In 2011, Time magazine published a special issue that explored ways in which the Muslim world has changed since the era when Ibn Battuta traveled.* Finally, his adventures will be dramatized in a full-length feature film that, as of this writing, is in preproduction.
As all scholars of the Rihla know, Ibn Battuta himself, along with the Muslim gentleman from Andalusia (southern Spain) who helped him write his story, tells us almost everything we know about his life and personality. Independent sources dating from his own era that attest to his existence are few and brief. When I published the first edition of The Adventures of Ibn Battuta in 1987, I assumed that additional evidence of his career was unlikely ever to turn up. In 2010, however, Tim Mackintosh-Smith completed his scholarly and marvelously entertaining three-volume narrative of his several years spent visiting dozens of Ibn Battuta’s old haunts from China to West Africa.° In the final volume, Mackintosh-Smith reports on three additional documents in which the traveler comes to life independently of the Rihla.
One bit of evidence is a letter that the eminent Andalusian scholar Ibn alKhatib wrote to Ibn Battuta in the early 1360s, that is, several years after the traveler had definitively returned home, on the mundane subject of a land purchase. From this testimony (which I also noted in the preface to the revised edition), we learn that the aging Ibn Battuta served as a judge in Tamasna, an old place name associated with the region around modern Casablanca. This letter is the only source that reveals anything concrete about Ibn Battuta’s later life. Mackintosh-Smith learned about the letter from Abdelhadi Tazi, Morocco’s most eminent Ibn Battuta scholar.
The second revelation is a set of two manuscripts, the second and third volumes of a work on Islamic law housed in the library of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University. As Mackintosh-Smith writes. Professor Tazi showed him two photocopied pages from these documents. These were colophons, or descriptions placed at the end of the manuscripts indicating when, where, and by whom the work was copied. Ibn Battuta, definitely our journeyer, is the author of both colophons. They tell us that he copied the manuscripts in Damascus. Each colophon has a different date in 1326, a year when Ibn Battuta was by his own account in Syria. The two colophons together demonstrate first that Ibn Battuta visited the city when he says he did. The two dates, which are independent of the Rihla, also open up new questions and solve a puzzle or two about the complicated chronology of his peregrinations in Syria and Palestine.
The third piece of evidence is arresting, though speculative. Ibn al-Khatib’s letter to Ibn Battuta suggests that the two men became friends in Morocco for a few years. Mackintosh-Smith reports that he found and read a book that Ibn alKhatib published on topographical subjects. In it, he describes in rhyming prose a fictionalized encounter at a caravan stop with a gray-headed old traveler. This man boasts of his journeys to many countries but laments that his life is ending in poverty and friendlessness. In Ibn al-Khatib’s story, the old man reveals personality traits that are also evident in the Rih/a—an attraction to Sufi mysticism, an ability to charm, a tendency to pontificate, and a love of money. Mackintosh-Smith is sure that Ibn Battuta inspired Ibn al-Khatib’s fictional portrait.
We do not know that the real traveler, as opposed to the old-timer in the story, ended his life in such a forlorn state. But the tale suggests that his return home left him not at ease and satisfied, but malcontent, restless, and regretful, still yearning for the road. The story adds a poignant touch to the portrait of Ibn Battuta we get in the Rihla, not only the descriptions of his thrilling adventures but also his opinions and feelings—his likes, dislikes, pious prejudices, physical courage, sexual appetites, and cravings for friendship with powerful people. An epic movie about him is a good idea, and it could be done without inventing a single scene not taken directly from his own amazing narrative.
November 2011
Preface to the Revised Edition
The year 2004 marks the seven hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abu ’Abdallah ibn Battuta, the Muslim lawyer who crisscrossed the Eastern Hemisphere in the second quarter of the fourteenth century and, with the help of a literary collaborator, wrote a lengthy account of what he saw and did. The world should take note of the septicentenary of this pious and educated Moroccan traveler. Not only did he give us a precious description of places, people, politics, and lifeways in nearly all the urbanized lands of Eurasia and Africa in the later medieval era, he also exposed the premodern roots of globalization. His tale reveals that by the fourteenth century the formation of dense networks of communication and exchange had linked in one way or another nearly everyone in the hemisphere with nearly everyone else. From Ibn Battuta’s Rihla, or Book of Travels, we discover the webs of interconnection that stretched from Spain to China and from Kazakhstan to Tanzania, and we can see that already in the Moroccan’s time an event occurring in one part of Eurasia or Africa might reverberate, in its effects, thousands of miles away.
Sailing the Arabian Sea in a two-masted dhow or leading his horse over a snow-covered pass in the Hindu Kush, Ibn Battuta could not have dreamed of the speed and intensity of human interchange today. Even since 1987, when the first edition of this book appeared, humankind has made astonishing advances in electronic technology and communication. One small irony of this “information revolution” is that Ibn Battuta himself has journeyed deeper into the popular imagination. He is today a more familiar historical figure among both Muslims and non-Muslims than he was twenty-five years ago. This has happened, I think, partly because of the increasing intensity of political and cultural relations between Muslim and Western countries and partly because of the broadening of international curriculums in schools and universities, notably in the United States, to embrace Asian and African societies, including famous men and women of the Muslim past.
In the United States, virtually all high school and college world history textbooks introduce Ibn Battuta, and in the past several years I have had numerous invitations to talk about his adventures with middle and high school teachers and students. In 1994, the Hakluyt Society published the fourth and final volume of the English translation of the Rihla, bringing to conclusion a project that began in 1929!! Other publications of recent years include a travel writer’s account of journeys tracing Ibn Battuta’s path across the Eastern Hemisphere, an abridged edition of the Hakluyt Society translation, a new edition of an English translation of the Moroccan’s East and West African trips, and an attractively illustrated commentary in Danish.
Several popular magazines have featured Ibn Battuta, including National Geographic.? A Spanish-Moroccan production team made a documentary film about him in the mid-1990s, and currently at least two film projects are in the works. In 1993, Moroccan scholars organized an international conference on their native son in Tangier, his birthplace. In 1999, the Islamic Museum of Kuwait produced an enchanting one-man act and multimedia show called “The Travels of Ibn Battuta.” Several publications for young people have appeared in English, including a teaching unit for high school students, an issue of the world history magazine Calliope, and a fantasy of the “Indiana Jones” variety titled /bn Battuta in the Valley of Doom.* In San Francisco a middle school teacher has developed a detailed Ibn Battuta website.° Finally, I must mention that in 1976, the International Astronomical Union honored the traveler by naming a lunar crater after him. It is eleven kilometers wide and on the near side of the moon.
I was pleased indeed when the University of California Press agreed to publish this new edition, a seven-hundredth-birthday present to Ibn Battuta. I have made limited changes. I have taken account of the scholarly literature in Western languages that has appeared since 1987, as well as the insights and corrections published in reviews of the first edition. With the exception of an essay by Amikam Elad, who demonstrates that much of Ibn Battuta’s description of Syria and Palestine is copied from the travel account of the thirteenth-century traveler Muhammad al-’Abdari, I have seen no new research that significantly alters what we know about the Rihla or Ibn Battuta’s life.© Some new work, however, has offered insights on the Rihla’s chronology, itinerary, and reliability. My references to new work are mainly in the chapter endnotes.
The only change I have made to the bibliography is the addition of a new section, “Supplemental Sources for the 2004 Edition.” I have also retained the same sources of translations from the Rih/a, which mainly means that I have not quoted from volume four of the Hakluyt Society edition. I have made certain spelling changes—for example, “Qur’an” instead of “Koran’—and I have replaced the Wade-Giles with the pinyin system for romanizing Chinese place names.
I am indebted to reviewers who pointed out mistakes and interpretive flaws in the first edition, and I would like to thank Tim Macintosh-Smith for meticulously rereading the book and sending me valuable comments. I greatly appreciate the efforts of Mari Coates, my University of California Press editor, whose enthusiasm for the new edition helped me meet her timetable for revisions. Finally, I thank Laura Ryan for research assistance.
Ross E. Dunn March 2004
Preface to the First Edition
Staring at the wall of my windowless office one day in 1976, I suddenly got the idea to write this book. I was teaching world history to undergraduates and trying to give them an idea of Islam in the medieval age as a civilization whose cultural dominance extended far beyond the Middle East or the lands inhabited by Arabs. It occurred to me that the life of Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta, the famous Moroccan traveler of the fourteenth century, wonderfully illustrated the internationalist scope of Islamic civilization. He toured not only the central regions of Islam but also its far frontiers in India, Indonesia, Central Asia, East Africa, and the West African Sudan. The travel book he produced at the end of his career is both a tale of high adventure and an expansive portrait of the eminently cosmopolitan world of Muslim princes, merchants, scholars, and theologians within which he moved during 29 years on the road.
Since the mid nineteenth century, when translations of his Arabic narrative began to appear in Western languages, Ibn Battuta has been well known among specialists in Islamic and medieval history. But no scholar had attempted to retell his remarkable story to a general audience. For the non-specialist interested in medieval Islam and the attitudes and preoccupations of its intellectual class the narrative can be absorbing. But the modern reader is also likely to find it puzzlingly organized, archaic, and to some degree unintelligible. My idea, therefore, has been to bring Ibn Battuta’s adventure to general readers and to interpret it within the rich, trans-hemispheric cultural setting of medieval Islam. My hope is not only that the Moroccan journeyer will become as well known in the Western world as Marco Polo is but that readers will also gain a sharper and more panoramic view of the forces that made the history of Eurasia and Africa in the fourteenth century an interconnected whole. Ibn Battuta, we shall see, was a kind of citizen of the Eastern Hemisphere. The global interdependence of the late twentieth century would be less startling to him than we might suppose.
Almost everything we know about Ibn Battuta the man is to be found in his own work, called the Rihla, which is readily available in printed Arabic editions, as well as translations in English and several other languages. I have not rummaged about ancient manuscript collections in Fez, Damascus, or Delhi to piece his life together since, in so far as anyone knows, no such manuscripts exist. Indeed, this book, part biography and part cultural history of the second quarter of the fourteenth century, is a work of synthesis. In tracing Ibn Battuta’s footsteps through the equivalent of some 44 modern countries, I have relied on a wide range of published literature.
I first became interested in Ibn Battuta when I spent the better part of a year translating portions of the narrative in a graduate school Arabic class. I have come to this project, however, with a modest training in that beautiful and intractable language. I have used printed Arabic editions of the Rihla to clarify various problems of nomenclature and textual meaning, but I have largely depended on the major English or French translations in relating and interpreting Ibn Battuta’s career.
The Rihla is not a daily diary or a collection of notes that Ibn Battuta jotted in the course of his travels. Rather it is a work of literature, part autobiography and part descriptive compendium, that was written at the end of his career. In composing the book, Ibn Battuta (and Ibn Juzayy, the literary scholar who collaborated with him) took far less care with details of itinerary, dates, and the sequence of events than the modern “scientific” mind would consider acceptable practice for a travel writer. Consequently, the historian attempting to reconstruct the chronology of Ibn Battuta’s journeys must confront numerous gaps, inconsistencies, and puzzles, some of them baffling. Fortunately, the textual problems of the Rihla have sustained the attention of historians, linguists, philologists, and geographers for more than a century. In trying to untangle Ibn Battuta’s movements from one end of the Eastern Hemisphere to the other, I have therefore relied heavily on the existing corpus of textual commentary. Given the scope and purpose of this book, I could not do otherwise, since any further progress in solving remaining problems of chronology, itinerary, authenticity, and place name identification would require laborious research in fourteenth-century documentary sources. I have, however, tried to address the major difficulties in using the Rihla as a biographical record of events. Most of this discussion has been confined to footnotes in order to avoid digressions into technicalities that would break annoyingly into the story or tax the interest of some general readers.
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 Rih/a. 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.”
Acknowledgements
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.
The Muslim Calendar
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 baseyear 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).
A Note on Money
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 fourteenthcentury 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.
Introduction
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.!
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).
He spent eight years in India, most of that time occupying a post as a gadi, or judge, in the government of Muhammad Tughlugq, 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 gadi 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.
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.> 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.
Written in the conventional literary style of the time, Ibn Battuta’s Rihla is a comprehensive survey of the personalities, places, governments, customs, and curiosities of the Muslim world in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. It is also the record of a dramatic personal adventure. In the four centuries after Ibn Battuta’s death, the Rihla circulated, mostly in copied manuscript abridgments of Ibn Juzayy’s original text, among people of learning in North Africa, West Africa, Egypt, and perhaps other Muslim lands where Arabic was read.
The book was unknown outside Islamic countries until the early nineteenth century, when two German scholars published separately translations of portions of the Rihla from manuscripts obtained in the Middle East. In 1829 Samuel Lee, a British orientalist, published an English translation based on abridgments of the narrative that John Burckhardt, the famous Swiss explorer, had acquired in Egypt.* Around the middle of the century five manuscripts of the Rihla were found in Algeria following the French occupation of that country. These documents were subsequently transferred to the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris.
Two of them represent the most complete versions of the narrative that have ever come to light. The others are partial transcriptions, one of which carries the autograph of Ibn Juzayy, Ibn Battuta’s editor. Working with these five documents, two French scholars, C. Défrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti, published between 1853 and 1858 a printed edition of the Arabic text, together with a translation in French and an apparatus of notes and variant textual readings.”
Since then, translations of the work, prepared in every case from Défrémery and Sanguinetti’s printed text, have been published in many languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Persian, and Japanese. In 1929 Sir Hamilton Gibb produced an abridged English translation and began work on a complete edition of the work under the auspices of the Hakluyt Society.° The last of the four volumes in this series appeared in 1994, and an index came out in 2001.’ However, English translations of various portions of the Rihla have appeared in the past century as books or as articles in anthologies and scholarly journals.
The numerous translations of the Rihla, together with the extensive corpus of encyclopedia articles, popular summaries, and critical commentaries on Ibn Battuta and his career that have accumulated since the eighteenth century, are a tribute to the extraordinary value of the narrative as a historical source on much of the inhabited Eastern Hemisphere in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. The book has been cited and quoted in hundreds of historical works, not only those relating to Islamic countries but to China and the Byzantine empire as well. For the history of certain regions, Sudanic West Africa, Asia Minor, or the Malabar coast of India, for example, the Rih/a stands as the only eye-witness report on political events, human geography, and social or economic conditions for a period of a century or more. Ibn Battuta had no professional background or experience as a writer of geography, history, or ethnography, but he was, as Gibb declares, “the supreme example of /e géographe malgre lui,” the “geographer in spite of himself.”®
The Western world has conventionally celebrated Marco Polo, who died the year before Ibn Battuta first left home, as the “Greatest Traveler in History.” Ibn Battuta has inevitably been compared with him and has usually taken second prize as “the Marco Polo of the Muslim world” or “the Marco Polo of the tropics.” Keeping in mind that neither man actually composed his own book (Marco’s record was dictated to the French romance writer Rusticello in a Genoese prison), there is no doubt that the Venetian’s work is the superior one in terms of the accurate, precise, practical information it contributes on medieval China and other Asian lands in the latter part of the thirteenth century, information of profound value to historians ever since. Yet Ibn Battuta traveled to, and reports on, a great many more places than Marco did, and his narrative offers details, sometimes in incidental bits, sometimes in long disquisitions, on almost every conceivable aspect of human life in that age, from the royal ceremonial of the Sultan of Delhi to the sexual customs of women in the Maldive Islands to the harvesting of coconuts in South Arabia. Moreover his story is far more personal and humanely engaging than Marco’s. Some Western writers, especially in an earlier time when the conviction of Europe’s superiority over Islamic civilization was a presumption of historical scholarship, have criticized Ibn Battuta for being excessively eager to tell about the lives and pious accomplishments of religious savants and Sufi mystics when he might have written more about practical politics and prices. The Rihla, however, was directed to Muslim men of learning of the fourteenth century for whom such reportage, so recondite to the modern Western reader, was pertinent and interesting.
As in Marco’s case, we know almost nothing about the life of Ibn Battuta apart from what the autobiographical dimension of his own book reveals. Aside from three minor references in Muslim scholarly works of the fourteenth or fifteenth century that attest independently to the Moroccan’s existence and to his achievements as a traveler, no document has ever come to light from his own age that mentions him.!° To understand his character, his aspirations, his social attitudes and prejudices, his personal relations with other people and, finally, the way he “fits” into fourteenth-century Muslim society and culture, we must rely almost exclusively on the Rihla itself. Fortunately, by expressing here and there in its pages his reactions to events, his annoyances, his animosities, and the details of his personal intrigues, he reveals something of his own character.
Western writers have sometimes characterized Ibn Battuta as a brave explorer like Marco Polo, risking his life to discover terra incognita and bring knowledge of it to public attention. In fact Ibn Battuta’s experience was drastically different from that of the Venetian. Marco traveled as an alien visitor into lands few Europeans had ever seen and whose people knew little, and cared to know little, about Europe. He was an oddity, a “stranger in a strange land,” who was given the opportunity to visit China only because of the very special political circumstances that prevailed for a short time in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries: the existence of the great Mongol states of Asia and their policy of permitting merchants of all origins and religions to travel and conduct business in their domains. Marco does indeed herald the age of European discovery, not because the peoples of Asia somehow needed discovering to set themselves on a course into the future, but because his book made an extraordinary and almost immediate intellectual impact on a young Western civilization that until that time had a cramped and faulty vision of what the wider world of the Eastern Hemisphere was all about.
Ibn Battuta, by contrast, spent most of his traveling career within the cultural boundaries of what Muslims called the Dar al-Islam, or Abode of Islam. This expression embraced the lands where Muslims predominated in the population, or at least where Muslim kings or princes ruled over non-Muslim majorities and where in consequence the shari’a, or Sacred Law, of Islam was presumably the foundation of the social order. In that sense Islamic civilization extended from the Atlantic coast of West Africa to Southeast Asia. Moreover, important minority communities of Muslims inhabited cities and towns in regions such as China, Spain, and tropical West Africa that were beyond the frontiers of the Dar al-Islam. Therefore almost everywhere Ibn Battuta went he lived in the company of other Muslims, men and women who shared not merely his doctrinal beliefs and religious rituals, but his moral values, his social ideals, his everyday manners. Although he was introduced in the course of his travels to a great many Muslim peoples whose local languages, customs, and aesthetic values were unfamiliar in his own homeland at the far western edge of the hemisphere, he never strayed far from the social world of individuals who shared his tastes and sensibilities and among whom he could always find hospitality, security, and friendship.
Today, we characterize the cosmopolitan individual in several ways: the advocate of international cooperation or world government, the sophisticated city-dweller, the jet-setter. The Muslim cosmopolite of the fourteenth century was likewise urbane, well traveled, and free of the grosser varieties of parochial bigotry. But, above all, he possessed a consciousness, more or less acutely formed, of the entire Dar al-Islam as a social reality. He also believed, at least implicitly, in the Sacred Law as the proper and eminently workable foundation of a global community.
To understand the intellectual basis of Ibn Battuta’s cosmopolitanism, we must re-orient ourselves away from the conventional view of history as primarily the study of individual nations or discrete “cultures.” In their writings more than twenty years ago the world historians Marshall Hodgson and William McNeill introduced and developed the “global” concept of the Eurasian, or preferably Afro-Eurasian, Ecumene, that is, the belt of agrarian lands extending west to east from the Mediterranean basin to China.!! It was within this region that the major sedentary civilizations of the Eastern Hemisphere arose, where most cities sprang up, and where most important cultural and technological innovations were made.
Beginning in ancient times, according to McNeill, the Ecumene went through a series of “closures” which involved increasingly complex interrelations among the civilizations of the hemisphere. Thus there evolved a continuous region of intercommunication, or, as we will call it in this book, the intercommunicating zone, which joined the sedentary and urbanizing peoples of the Mediterranean rim, the Middle East, Greater India, and China into a single field of historical interaction and change. Important innovations occurring in one part of the zone tended to spread to the other parts of it through trade, military conquest, human migration, or gradual diffusion. Moreover, the intercommunicating zone “grew” over the course of time by incorporating peoples in peripheral areas — subSaharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Europe north of the Alps — into the web of interrelations. Thus, the history of Africa and Eurasia in premodern times becomes more than the stories of individual, geographically bounded nations, cultures, or empires. It is also the history of the “unconsciously interregional developments,” to quote Hodgson, which “converge in their effects to alter the general disposition of the Hemisphere.” *
One of the most important dimensions of this “hemispheric history” was the role of pastoral populations who inhabited the great arid belt which ran diagonally from southwest to northeast across the intercommunicating zone, that is the chain of steppes and deserts extending from the Sahara through the Middle East and Central Asia to the Gobi. Contact between the herding peoples of the arid zone and sedentary societies tended in normal times to be mostly beneficial to both, involving the exchange of goods and elements of culture. However, the pastoralists, owing to their mobility and ethos of martial strength, were always a potential threat to the far richer settled civilizations. At periodic intervals beginning in the eighteenth century B.C. or earlier, nomadic invaders poured into neighboring agrarian lands, pillaging cities, terminating dynasties, and generally upsetting prevailing cultural and social patterns over wide areas of Eurasia and Africa. The last great nomadic movement occurred in the thirteenth century, when the Mongols and their Turkish-speaking allies erupted out of Central Asia and conquered China, Russia, and most of the Middle East, creating the largest territorial empire the world has ever known.
Islam had come upon the world scene in the seventh century in connection with the explosion of Arabic-speaking, horse-mounted warriors out of the Arabian desert under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad and _ his successors. Western historical writing has given a great deal of attention to the early evolution of Islamic civilization, that is, the “classical” age of the Abbasid Caliphate (or High Caliphate) centered on Baghdad between the eighth and tenth centuries. For this period the astonishing contributions of Muslims to world history in art, science, medicine, philosophy, and international commerce have been recognized, especially in so far as they were a major formative influence on the rise of Christian European civilization in the early Middle Ages. But precisely because historians of the West have been interested in Islam mainly in terms of its effects on the development of European institutions, the subsequent periods of Islamic history up to modern times have been given less heed. Indeed, the conventional perspective in European and American textbook writing has been that Islamic civilization reached its “peak” during the Abbasid age and thereafter went into a gradual but inexorable “decline.” This notion that Islam somehow atrophied after the tenth or eleventh century has largely turned on the Western perception (considerably exaggerated) that Muslims rejected the intellectual heritage of Hellenistic rationalism about the same time that Europeans “rediscovered” it. Consequently, so the argument runs, the West, having adopted a “scientific” and “rational” view of the natural world, was able to “progress” in the direction of world dominance, while “traditional” civilizations such as Islam languished and fell further and further behind.
In fact, the period of hemispheric history from 1000 to 1500 A.D., what we will call the Islamic Middle Period, witnessed a steady and remarkable expansion of Islam, not simply as a religious faith but as a coherent, universalist model of civilized life. To be sure, the intense, concentrated, innovative brilliance of the Abbasid Caliphate was not to be repeated in the subsequent half millennium of Islamic history. Yet if many Muslims did turn intellectually conservative by the standard of modern scientific rationalism, the religion nonetheless pushed outward from its Middle Eastern core as an attractive, satisfying, cohesive system for explaining the cosmos and for ordering collective life among ever-larger numbers of people, both sedentary and pastoral, both urban and rural, all across the intercommunicating zone.
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 wmma) 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.!* 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, worldminded 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 standard.
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