Ibn Battuta: A Traveler Par Excellence
By Asif Javed, MD
Williamsport, PA
I have indeed -- praise be to God - attained my desire in this world, which was to travel through the earth, and I have attained in this respect what no other person has attained to my knowledge. - Ibn Battuta
Ibn Battuta dictated these lines to Ibn Juzayy after he had returned to his native Morocco having put behind him 73,000 miles in three continents, an area equivalent to 40 modern countries. He began his globe tottering at 24 and did not return until he was 47.
During this lengthy absence, both his parents died while he himself went through enormous hardships. But in doing so, he has left behind a remarkably detailed record of the places that he visited and the people he met. The reading of Rihla -- the book of his travels -- is a fascinating experience.
Rihla provides very few details of his personal life. All we know is that he was a Berber from a family of legal scholars in Tangier and had some training in jurisprudence. It appears that his original intention was to perform Hajj and he set out from Tangier with this purpose in mind in1325. It took him eight months to make it to Egypt, a distance of almost 2,000 miles. Egypt and Syria at the time were ruled by Mumluks who enjoyed great prestige among the Muslims for having inflicted a crushing defeat on Mongols of Persia that saved Egypt from the catastrophe that had befallen Abbasid Khilafet and many other countries.
The Cairo that Ibn Battuta visited had a population of 500,000 and thus was 15 times bigger than London at the time. We also hear about the enormous size of caravansary's in Cairo, some of which could accommodate up to 4,000 guests. Having spent some weeks in Cairo, he moved on to Hijjaz through Syria, on joining the official Mamluk Hajj caravan. About Meccans, he reports: “They are elegant and clean in their dress -- use perfume freely -- and the women are of rare and surpassing beauty, pious and chaste”.
His religious obligation over, Ibn Battuta had a change of plans. Instead of returning to Morocco, he decided to move on to Persia. Indeed, he was to be a relentless traveler for almost thirty years that took him to the very boundaries of the Islamic world and well beyond. Since he was no longer part of the Hajj caravans, he ended up making his own travel arrangements. He spent weeks in the camel litters in the Middle East and Africa; horse was used in the Indian subcontinent while ships of various kinds were used at sea.
Reading Rihla, one is amazed at the young Moroccan's ability to befriend and gain favors from private citizens as well as high officials. During his time on the road, he stayed in all kinds of places including Sufi hospices, private residences, colleges, madrassas and survived on charity and gifts. Traveling in those days was far from safe but he continued his single-minded quest to explore the world. In the process, he came close to losing his life a few times and lost all his possessions once when he found himself on the south coast of India.
There were also sicknesses including one that made him so weak that he was tied to the horse saddle to prevent from falling.
From Hijaz, he went to Persia through Iraq, both being part of the Ilkhanid Mongol empire founded by Halaku Khan. At the time of Ibn Battuta's visit, it was ruled by Abu Sa’id whose father had converted to Islam. Ibn Battuta liked Abu Sa’id: "He is pious, tolerant, generous and a committed Sunni and is the most beautiful of God's creatures". Shiraz got high praise too: “Its inhabitants are handsome in figure and clean in their dress. There is no city except Shiraz that approaches Damascus in the beauty of its bazaars, fruitgardens and rivers”. On the contrary, his description of Baghdad is quite depressing: "Her outward lineaments have departed and nothing remains of her but name. There is no beauty in her that arrests the eye, or summons the busy passer-by to forget his business and to gaze".
The next stop was Anatolia (Asian Turkey of today). There he had the good fortune to meet and be a guest of Orkhan, son of legendary Usman, the founder of the Ottoman Empire. His kingdom was still in infancy. Here is what Rihla says of Orkhan:"This sultan is the greatest of the kings of Turkmens and the richest in wealth, lands and military forces. Of fortresses, he possesses nearly a hundred - he fights with the infidels continually and keeps them under siege". Ibn Battuta may not have realized he was witnessing the historic rise of an empire that was to see a non-stop expansion - in all directions -- for almost 70 years and was to last more than five centuries.
From Anatolia, he went further north in to Crimea on a boat through the Black Sea. The next few months were spent in the Caucasus region and Central Asia. Ozbeg Khan, the Mongol ruler of Golden Horde, was a new convert to Islam. IBn Battuta noted with obvious surprise that Mongol and Turkish women enjoyed freedom, respect and near equality in that land. Ibn Battuta, then turned west and traveled with Ozbeg Khan’s wife, who was to visit her family in Constantinople. He thus traveled as part of the royal entourage, did meet the emperor Adrionus III of Byzantium and toured the historic city, almost 130 years before it fell to Sultan Mehmat, the conqueror. Upon returning, Ibn Battuta turned south and passed through the kingdom of Chagatay. He paints a very depressing picture of the historic city of Bokhara which had been plundered by Gengis Khan a few decades earlier. “Its mosques, colleges and bazaars are in ruin". The great center of learning was not to recover from the havoc caused by the Mongol hordes for a long time.
Ibn Battuta continued his southward journey towards India and crossed into Afghanistan through the Hindukush Mountain. This route went through the famous Punjsher Valley where Ahmad Shah Masud led a fierce resistance against the Soviets in the 1980's. His entourage went through the Khyber Pass and eventually was led to Multan that was the western-most military post of the sultanate of Mohammad Tughlaq.
Ibn Battuta's arrival in India was quite unlike his previous travels and needs some explanation. Indeed, it is believed that he had heard about the prestige and glamour of the court of Mohammad Tughlaq way back in Egypt. He may have been aware of the attractive job opportunities there, particularly to scholars from the Middle East. Being a faqih, fluent in Arabic and with a resume that included extended stay in Hijjaz, Damascus and Cairo, he may have hoped to impress the sovereign and he was not to be disappointed. Soon after his arrival in Delhi, he managed to get an audience with Sultan Mohammad Tughlaq who was sufficiently impressed and appointed the young scholar as the qadi of Delhi. His annual salary was to be 12,000 silver dinars.
Ibn Battuta spent almost ten years in and around India and devotes a considerable part of his book to it. He describes the Sultan as "a tall, robust, white-skinned man, his legs tucked beneath him on a gold plated throne" and Delhi as "a vast and magnificent city, the largest in India, nay rather the largest of all the cities of Islam in the east". He also reports on a severe famine when "thousands upon thousands of people perished of want".
Ibn Battuta's fall from grace in the court of Delhi was quite sudden and unexpected. It was brought about by his Indian wife's father who rose in rebellion against Mohammad Tughlaq. Being related to the rebel, Ibn Battuta naturally came under suspicion. As a result, he lost his job, remained under house arrest for a while and even feared for his life. After some time, the Sultan relented and asked him to go to China as the head of his delegation. Ibn Battuta, being a compulsive traveler, jumped at this opportunity. As the head of the delegation, he was to carry with him some very precious presents for the emperor of China. As fate would have it, there was a terrible storm in the Arabian Sea and the ship that was bound for China sank off the coast of Calicut with all the presents on board. Ibn Battuta miraculously survived the disaster but decided not to return to Delhi being fully aware of Mohammad Tughlaq's wrath and unpredictable nature.
Having spent some time on the south coast of India, he sailed to the Maldives Islands where he secured another judicial post but soon left and ended up in Southern China having passed through Ceylon, Java and Sumatra. The sea voyage lasted many weeks. China under the Mongol rule impressed him: "China is the safest and the most agreeable country in the world for the traveler. You can travel all alone across the land for nine months without fear, even if you are carrying much wealth".
Being away from home for years and probably having grown homesick, he started the long trip back from China in December 1346 and made it to Morocco in November 1349, having seen the horrors of Black Death (plague) ravaging around him. He reports up to 2,000 deaths a day in Damascus. However, his traveling was not over yet. He was soon crossing the Strait of Gibraltar and spent some time in the Islamic Kingdom of Granada. These were difficult times for Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula. The Islamic power in Spain had been in decline for some time and the Christian reconquista had already begun. It was during his short stay in Granada that he met Ibn Juzayy who would collaborate with him for his memoirs later.
His last journey was to the South in his own backyard in West Africa but this may have been the most disappointing of all. He went through enormous hardships to cross the vast and treacherous Sahara Desert where there was only one source of water in a stretch of 500 miles. This journey was undertaken to see the gold rich, Muslim kingdom of Mali. During the course of his travels, Ibn Battuta had pretty much come to expect a preferential treatment and expensive gifts from the kings. But Mansa Suleiman, the king of Mali greatly disappointed him. His predecessor, Mansa Musa had become a legend in that part of the world, having spent a fortune in Cairo on his way to Hajj, just a few years earlier.
It is said that Musa’s entourage spent gold so freely in Cairo that its price depreciated. But this is how Ibn Battuta describes the king of Mali in Rihla: “Suleiman is a miserly king from whom no great donation is to be expected. Mansa Musa, by contrast had been generous and virtuous”.
Having returned to Fez in Morocco, Ibn Battuta was asked by Abu ‘Inan, the Marinid ruler in his homeland, to write his memoirs. Over the next two years, he dictated -- from memory alone -- while Ibn Juzayy took notes and did the editing. His work finished and presented to the king, he retired to a quiet life of a private citizen in a provincial town. Ibn Battuta died in 1368. Not much is known of his later years.
Ibn Battuta’s life was, by any standards, an exciting one. He traveled far and wide and interacted with extraordinary people and saw extraordinary events (He reports seeing the self-decapitation of a subject to impress a Hindu prince in the Far East). But during his extended time on the road, he did not forget his own private pleasures. Frequently, he traveled in great style and luxury, in the company of his slaves and servants (He reports buying a very beautiful slave girl from Silhet). At one stage, he became quite wealthy, having received the most expensive gifts from various kings. He married and divorced frequently and fathered quite a few children, some of whom may have survived. It is quite possible that his descendants are living among us. In one sense, he was lucky too, since most of his journeys took him through regions which were at peace but that changed soon after his departure. Some of the kingdoms and dynasties he had visited vanished altogether (Granada, Mongol Persia and Yuan China) while the rest experienced great turmoil.
What is Ibn Battuta’s legacy? Traditionally, he has been placed well below Marco Polo who died in Venice a year before Ibn Battuta started his epic journey to the East. The Rihla remained largely ignored and was almost forgotten until the last 150 years or so. In recent times, however, it is being given its well-deserved recognition. This is how his biographer, Ross Dunn, summarizes the famous traveler’s place in history
For the history of certain regions, Sudanic West Africa, Asia Minor, or the Malabar Coast of India, the Rihla stands out as the only eye-witness report on political events, human geography, and social and economic conditions for a period of a century or more. Ibn Battuta has inevitably been compared with Marco Polo and usually taken second prize. Yet, Ibn Battuta travels 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 and his story is far more personal and humanly engaging than Marco’s.
(The writer is a physician in Williamsport, PA and can be reached at asifjaved@comcast.net)
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