Ibn Battuta, the traveler of Islam

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Our traveller journeyed along North Africa, the Middle East and East and Central Africa. After this first set of journeys, he returned to the holy city of Islam, where he lived for three years, to later depart to the south of the Arabian Peninsula, the south and southeast of Asia, continuing to Egypt, Syria, the Turkish region of Anatolia, south Russia and finally Constantinople and the lands of the Golden Horde.

He also lived for ten years in India and the Maldives to undertake his journey farther east: Ceylon, Bengal, China… Around 1347 he was on his way back to Fez where he arrived in November 1349. His journeys to al-Andalus and Niger culminate his extraordinary peregrinations, and he became known as “the traveller of Islam.”

The image depicts al-Hariri helping Abu Zayid to recover his stolen camel. IIlustration of al-Hariri’s Maqamat, as it appears in a manuscript dated 1335 preserved at the Bodleiana Lybrary, Oxford.

There is a tiny oratory in Tangier which is hard to access, being little known by guides and much less by tourists. In the city of his birth, it is said that one of the great travellers of the Middle Ages, Ibn Battuta, traveller of Islam, rests among its white walls. And I am saying of the Islam because his itineraries covered the greatest part of what in the 14th century was understood as the Islam world, from the Maghreb to China.

For the Islamic world Ibn Bautta represents what in the West embodies Marco Polo (with whom Ibn Battuta concurs in many of his descriptions) or our Ruy González de Clavijo and his embassy at Timur’s court.

They were all intrepid travellers who ventured into that unknown Orient, more affordable for some than to others, since Ibn Battuta took advantage of his Muslim condition and his knowledge of the Arabic language to reach the edges of the Far East, without ceasing to cross Islamic lands,and hence subjected to the use of the Arabic language as “lingua franca”.

His work is complied in the Rihla (journey account), a term that was born in the 12th century to define everything a genre of travels descriptions by the travellers from al-Andalus and Morocco, with clear backgrounds as al-Idrisi native to Ceuta. Even though at some point has been doubt about the veracity of the totality of his account −for his travels started to be written virtually thirty years after having been iniciated− the comparison of the descriptions by other travellers of his time provided credibility to his work, which truly offers quite an accurate and adjusted vision of the Muslim word in the 14th century. In any case, the account was not drawn in its final version by Ibn Battuta, but by the Granadan Ibn Yuzayy, to whom it was dictated, a meaningful detail that explain the relationships that existed in those time between both shores of the Strait of Gibraltar. Ibn Yuzayy added on his own endless literary flourishes, making a geographic lineal development of the work which was not always respected by the traveller.

Ibn Batutta left his born town when he was 23 years old, and he did not retruned until he was about to be in his fifties, after a travel that took him around the most part of the then known world. His work experiences a hard historical moment in the Lower Middle Ages marked by a global crisis affecting both shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It is also a time for the Christian maritime expansion, although in the case of our author, he hardly visited Christian states. As a witness of his time, he experienced the destruction caused by the Black Death in 1348, from which he had news while his stay in Alepo (Syria). The outbreak of the plague followed him close behind when he was coming back from Morocco, to the extent of referring the death of Alphonso XI of Castile in 1350, afflicted by the epidemic during the siege of Gibraltar.

His wondering life starts in the year 1325, when he leaves Tangiers in direction to Mecca to undertake his first pilgrimage. He then travelled across northern Africa, passing by Egypt, Palestine and Syria to finally reach his destination. From Mecca, he headed towards his second journey to Irak, the north of current Iran and Kudirstan to return to the departing point. Once there, he departs again to travel along Aden, current Yemen, and the estern African coast. His next itinerary will take him to India going through Anatolia, part of Rusia and Afganistan. In India, which was then under Islam rule, he will remain for a period of ten years. From here he continued travelling to the Far East and China, to finally return to Mecca in 1349. But being not content with this journey, upon returns he visits a decadent al-Andalus and Abu Yusuf’s Granada to end up getting into Black Africa, travelling to the Empire of Mali.

While travelling in Central Asia, which was then dominated by the Mogol Empire, he leaves us vivid description. On his course through a desolated Bukhara, he makes a reflexion on the Tartar invasions with these words: “Nowadays, you cannot find anyone in Bukhara who knows something about science or in interested in knowning about it.” In the same way, he describes Gengis Khan as “ the damned Tankiz the Tartar, of a generous soul, vigorous body and great height”, coinciding in this image with the one offered by Marco Polo. He also describes with distresses the final destiny of Bagdad after the Mogol invasion, and he tells the way they “got into the capital of Islam, seat of the caliphate, by the force of arms, and how they beheaded the caliph.”

In his visit to the Maldive Islands he was surprised before the proximity of them, and he remarks that “as you leave any of them, you can see already the top of palm trees of the next one.” Finally, he finds in Damas the example of an Islamic city and uses it as a model of beauty and armony, finding pleasure in using poems as introductions to ooathe other prestigious cities of the time like Aleppo or Baghdad. In China, he is amazed before the size of its cities: from Hang Tcheou-fou- (Zheijang) he writes “It is the larger city that my eyes have ever seen on earth: its length equals three days of travel.”

 

Reproduction by Hippolyte Leon Bennett after an oil painting depicting Ibn Battuta in Egypt.

We have described Ibn Battuta as the traveller of the Islam, but not haphazardly. As a profund Muslim, he takes Mecca as the core of his travels in his succesive pilgrimages from where he departs. But his has also and active role and exercises occasinally as alfaquí (jurist) in the Far East and follower of the Maliki Ortodox school. He also outlines the organisation of the zawiyas (religious confreries) where he often is accommodated. He specially remarks their tasks as the study and dissemination of the Islamic sciences (including the examples of medersas or cases of Islmaic law practice). He specially mentions the Muslim confrery of the Futuwwa in Anatolia, a kind of solidary young associations of a mystic nature.

Equally significant it is also the great amount of remarks that Ibn Battuta makes about the economic and sociologic aspects of the cities he visits. His references to prices is paradigmatic, showing a great interest to get to know the procedure for the development of every kind of commercial practices in far away lands, which is proved in the way he describes the use and coinage of paper money in China, the cashier’s check in Persia, and the Treasure notes in Delhi (india). The descriptions he makes of so varied aspects such as rights on customs, mining, craft industry, the boost of commerce or the movement of ships in the main ports such as Alexandria, Tirp, Calicut (India) or Zaytun (Tshiuan Tche-fou) in China, are lenghty.

He pays special attention to agriculture, as he is amazed before the living green of the orchards in Basora (Irak), from which he says: “there is no place on earth with more palm trees” or the quality of the melons from Kwarizm (Iran), an statement in which Ruy González de Claviojo agrees too.

He also includes in his analysis opinions on diverse minority groups. In this way, being an urbanite as he is, he calls the Bedouines robbers and destructive, but he admires and expresses a deep liking for the fakirs and dervishes Sufi motivated. His attitude is generally tolerant, excepting towards Jews an Christians, with the exception of the triumphant Christians from al-Andalus, to whom he exhibits an agressive behaviour. The situation of women also occupies a place in his descriptions. He includes aspects such as the legal procedures for feminine protection, and the high social regard that Mongolian and Berber women enjoy, as well as the decisión making-power of the women from Maldives when marrying.

Detail of the Catalan Atlas by Abraham Cresques ca. (1375) depicting the Mongol state of the Golden Horde, which included territories of today’s Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

We have plenty of descriptions left by Battua showing a myriad of curious details that may seem naive in our times. For instance, when he tells us how the Mongolians took the foot of Adam to China, which had been in Adam’s Peak the mountain of Adam or Mount Sarandib (in Sri Lanka). According to his account, “the footprint of the sacred foot is in ablack rock, Chinese people came here long time ago and took a fragment of the toe and keept it in the city of Zaytun, where they go in pilgrimage fron the most remote villages”. He also give us details of an exotic zoology: in Hormuz he finds the bones of a whale whose head was “like a hill, with eyes like gates” and he named the hippopotamus from Niger “sea horses”. His fantasy of Medieval traveller fantasy causes him to think that the Nilo River, which he considers the “river par excellence”, crosses from Timbuktu and Gao in Mali to Nubia, to reach the Victoria Falls.

We know the most human side of Ibn Battuta through many anecdotes. We must take into account that for a man of his times, reality was often warped by legend and the obscurantism that accompanied the description of the unknown. In the frequent fictional episodes he quoted, he denounced aspects like tricks and witchcraft practiced by women. When it comes to judging people, he could not escape his own human passions, distorting their descriptions depending on the way he was treated by them.

As in every journey at the time, the part related to research and espionage was nothing despicable. Ibn Battuta travels were aimed at gathering information for the Marinid Sultan Abu al-Hassan, and the model of Marinid political organization happened to be continously loaded. In this way Morocco came in first place in his ranking of the seven most powerful kings in the world. His travels to al-Andalus and Mali can be understood within the political framework of the unification of the Maghreb that sultan Abu Inan, Abu al-Hassan’s successor, was seeking. In al-Andalus the journey was aimed at ensuring the maritime border of the Strait of Gibraltar, also referring the pressure exerted by the corsairs, which were supported by the Marinid sultans. The task of informing and spying for the sultan is developed greatly detailed regarding how power is organized in the places he visits (like the organization of the Mongol army, or how power is distributed in China).

View of Granada in 1572. Civitatis Orbis Terrarum. J. Hoefnagel. ©Wiki Commons

As we have already mentioned, one of his last travels was to al-Andalus, at that time practically reduced to the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada. These are the words he used in his account: “I arrived in the land of al-Andalus −may God protect it− where the pay is abundant for its inhabitants and where rewards are granted to residents or travellers …”. He actually crossed the Strait and disembarked in Gibraltar, for Algeciras had been already taken by the Christians by Alphonso XI who had just died from plague. After visiting Ronda and Marbella (“a beautiful and fertile small village”), where he witnessed an incident in the disemarking of a group of Christians in Fuengirola, Ibn Battuta contnues his way to Malaga, which he discovers as “one of the most beautiful capitals in al-Andalus, where the advantages of sea and mountains meet, and it is abundant with products and fruits.” He finds its very wide mosque provided with huge orange yards “with no paragon”, making a flattering comment on the quality of its local pottery. From there he headed to Granada: “Granada, the capital city of al-Andalus, the bride of its cities.” Its surroundings have no equal among the districts of the entire earth, crossed by the Genil River and many other river courses.” In those times, Granada was ruled by sultan Abu Yusuf, and during his visit to the city he met with notable men such as kaids and alfaquis, before retracing his steps to sail from Gibralter to Morocco.

Ibn Battuta’s figure has a significant presence in the imaginary of people, particualrly in the Maghreb. When somebody comments along those lands about the fondress of travelling, the feedback, accompanied by a kind smile, use to be: “Oh like Ibn Battuta!”, so as to underline that his figure represents that of the traveller by excellence in that part of the world.

As a conclusion, it is enough to mention how his chronicler Ibn Yuzay ends up prasing Ibn Battuta, whom he qualifies as the “traveller of the Muslim community”.

 

Sergio Cebrián Sanz.

Writer

 

 

 

Bibliography
Ibn Battuta. A través del islam. Traducción de Serafín Fanjul y Federico Arbós. Editora Nacional, Madrid, 1981.

 

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