Thirty Sixth Issue: Ibn Battuta

Ibn Battuta lived a few hundred years later than Ibn Sina, and he was more of a traveler and explorer than a scholar. He wrote a book of his journeys which is a valuable source for medieval history and the main way anyone knows anything about Ibn Battuta and his life.

 

 

He was born to a family of Islamic legal scholars in Morocco in 1304 on February 25^th (we share a birthday!). When he was 21 he decided to go to Hajj which should take at the time, about 16 months, but he didn’t come home for 24 years.

Ibn Battuta followed the coast through to Tunis, where he ended up staying for two months. He travelled alone, but joined caravans wherever he could find them, for safety. He married a woman in a small town called Sfax, but he kept moving. He did that a lot, married various women and kept travelling, leaving them behind. Ibn Battuta reached Alexandria in 1326. He met two pious men, one of whom told him that he would be going to India and China, and please say hello to some of his friends who lived there. After exploring Alexandria for a few weeks, he went on to Cairo where he spent a month. He still hadn’t gone to Mecca though, so he decided to head up to the port of Aydhab, but there was a rebellion going on so he had to turn around and go back to Cairo.

He decided instead to go to Damascus, even though it was a diversion from his route there were a lot of holy places on the way from there to Mecca, so the way was relatively safe for pilgrims. Ibn Battuta spent Ramadan in Damascus and then joined a caravan going south to Medina. He stayed there for four days and then finally got to Mecca, where he did his hajj. Instead of going back to Morocco, he decided to keep going, heading northeast. He joined a caravan that was taking pilgrims back to Iraq, heading up through Medina again. However, he separated from the caravan before they got there and went to Najaf, where he visited Ali (the fourth caliph)’s mausoleum. Then he went into Persia, visiting Basra and Isfahan. He went to Shiraz, which was a large, flourishing city at the time. Then he went back across the mountains to Baghdad, arriving in Iraq in 1327. In Baghdad he found the last Mongol ruler, Abu Sa’id, heading north, so he joined his royal caravan to Tabriz, which was the first city in the area that opened its gates to the Mongols. It thus escaped the fate of its neighbors that had been razed, and became a trading center.

 

 

After Tabriz, Ibn Battuta visited Mosul, and then a couple of towns in Turkey. He went back towards Baghdad, and met up with another caravan going to Mecca. He did hajj again, but he got sick and stayed there for several years, recovering. Then he went to Jeddah, and followed the coast on several boats, visiting Yemen and Sana’a. He then went to Somalia, and visited Mogadishu. When he got there in 1331, it was at its peak, with rich merchants selling high quality export fabric. He then went on to Mombasa, which was still small at the time, and went to Tanzania, which was the center of the gold trade. Mombasa was beautiful, and he described it well.

As the winds changed, Ibn Battuta got back on a boat and went to Oman and then Mecca, where he did his third hajj. He then went to India and decided to get a job with the Muslim Sultan of Delhi. It took a long time to get there, and he stopped by Anatolia (currently Turkey). They were very welcoming to travelers there. He spent Ramadan in the area and then wanted to go up to Siberia but wasn’t able to do so. He got sidetracked and went to Constantinople instead, which was the first non-Muslim place he went to on his travels. He got there around 1333, and visited the Hagia Sophia Church and told a priest about what he had seen in Jerusalem. He went back to Samarkand and Bukhara, visiting the courts of various kings as he travelled. He then went to Afghanistan, and crossed into India. It was very cold. He went to Delhi and made friends with the sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq.

A little side note about this Tughluq guy is that he was the richest man in the Muslim world. He patronized scholars and others to consolidate his rule and he named Ibn Battuta a judge, but he wasn’t really able to enforce Muslim Law – the country hadn’t really been permeated by Islam beyond the sultan’s court. Ibn Battuta kept travelling, going to Pakistan and the Rajput Kingdom, but he continued to work for Tughluq. Sometimes he was treated well and other times he was suspected of treason. He got out of the country finally when a Chinese delegation arrived and asked if they could rebuild a Himalayan Buddhist temple that Chinese pilgrims often travelled to. Ibn Battuta got permission to tag along.

 

 

At the beginning of the journey he was separated from his companions when they were attacked by a group of bandits, but he managed to catch up and they went to Gujarat, on to Calicut, but the ships that he was on sank or sailed off without him, so Ibn Battuta didn’t know what to do next. He didn’t want to go back to Delhi as a failure, so he stayed on the coast of the river near the Arabian Sea for a while, but then when the sultan was overthrown he had to leave India entirely. He still wanted to go to China, but he stayed for nine months as a judge on the Maldive islands. He married into the royal family but when his judgments rubbed the King the wrong way (he didn’t like how local ladies didn’t wear shirts and didn’t put any on after he complained about it) he left, heading to Sri Lanka.

Ibn Battuta left Sri Lanka and went to India again for a while after an incident where his ship was attacked by pirates. He went back to the Maldives and tried to catch a ship to China – he was still trying to get to that temple that the Chinese were rebuilding. However, he got distracted again at the port of Chittagong in Bangladesh when he heard that Shah Jalal was in Sylhet. He made a month-long journey to go meet him. In 1345 he managed to see him, and was impressed by his strength and wisdom. He then went up and explored Assam, but then he returned back down to Chittagong to continue with his original plan.

Ibn Battuta next went to Vietnam, then traveling to Aceh in Sumatra. He stayed here for a couple of weeks as the sultan’s guest and then he was sent on to China. He got to Malacca in Malaysia and stayed for three days, then again to Vietnam, and then finally he made it to Quanzhou in China. He arrived in 1345, when the Mongols were in control. He described the city in detail:

“One of the first things he noted was that Muslims referred to the city as "Zaitun" (meaning olive), but Ibn Battuta could not find any olives anywhere. He mentioned local artists and their mastery in making portraits of newly arrived foreigners; these were for security purposes. Ibn Battuta praised the craftsmen and their silk and porcelain; as well as fruits such as plums and watermelons and the advantages of paper money. He described the manufacturing process of large ships in the city of Quanzhou. He also mentioned Chinese cuisine and its usage of animals such as frogs, pigs and even dogs which were sold in the markets, and noted that the chickens in China were larger in comparison.”

Ibn Battuta hung out in China for a while, mostly in the Muslim part of the city. He went to Fuzhou, where he met some other Muslims who had come to China and become wealthy merchants. Then he went on to Hangzhou, and stayed as a guest with an Egyptian family. He really liked the Chinese wooden ships that were colored with silk awnings and sails, in the canals of the city. Ibn Battuta went to Beijing and hung out at the imperial court. He then went on a ship to Southeast Asia again. In 1346 he decided to head on back to Morocco. He passed through the Strait of Hormuz and arrived in Damascus a couple of years later. He learned that his father had passed away 15 years ago and was hard hit by that. The Black Death was also going through Syria, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia at the time. He finally returned home to Morocco in 1349 and learned that his mother had just passed away as well.

Ibn Battuta didn’t stay home long. He went to Al-Andalus, which is Spain now, and went to go help defend the port on the Iberian Peninsula with some other Muslims. By the time he got there, there was no longer a threat, so he just did a tour of Valencia and Granada for fun. He went back to Morocco, stopping in Marrakech which was almost empty due to the recent plague. He went to Tangier again, but he heard a story about now the West African Malian Mansa Musa had come through on his way to his own hajj and had “caused a sensation with a display of extravagant riches brought from his homeland”. He decided to cross the Sahara and go visit the Muslim kingdoms on the other side next.

Ibn Battuta in 1351 headed to the northern edge of the Sahara, still in Morocco, setting off with a caravan of camels to a place called Taghasa that was famous for its salt mines. All of the buildings were made from slabs of salt and though the place was a commercial center for the region, Ibn Battuta wasn’t a fan, saying there were too many flies and the water was brackish. He headed back out after ten days, and spent two months to travel 1600 kilometers across the desert. (That’s around a thousand miles).

Then Ibn Battuta travelled south along the river Niger until he reached the capital of the Mali Empire, where he met the King, Mansa Suleyman. Ibn Battuta wasn’t a fan of the way the local ladies dressed, saying that “female slaves, servants and even the daughters of the sultan went about exposing parts of their bodies not befitting a Muslim”. He went by camel to Timbuktu, which at the time was still a fairly small town. He saw a hippopotamus for the first time here. Then he went down to Gao which was an important commercial center. He headed home across the Sahara again when the Sultan of Morocco ordered him back, tagging along with a caravan of 600 female slaves, and got home in 1354. Below is a map of his four journeys.

 

 

Once he got home, Ibn Battuta dictated the story of his travels to Ibn Juzayy, a scholar. This is the only source that is used for his travels. It is called “A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling. However, it is often simply referred to as The Travels (الرحلة, Rihla)”. There is no way to know if Ibn Battuta kept notes or journals for the almost three decades he spent travelling, so there’s no way to know the accuracy of his account. In some places he copied from accounts of other travelers who had gone some places before him. Some scholars think that he never travelled to all of the places he said he went to, but it is still an important account of the world at the time.

Ibn Battuta used sex slaves and married and divorced ladies here, there and everywhere, having many children specifically in Malabar, Delhi, and Bukhara. He didn’t like the Greeks, calling them "enemies of Allah", drunkards and "swine eaters", but he also used a Greek girl as his sex slave.  He abandoned some of his wives and children on his travels. He also experienced a lot of culture shock when going to places that had recently converted to Islam and weren’t as conservative as what he was used to.

“Among the Turks and Mongols, he was astonished at the freedom and respect enjoyed by women and remarked that on seeing a Turkish couple in a bazaar one might assume that the man was the woman's servant when he was in fact her husband.”

After he finished the Rihla in 1355, not much is known about him; he worked as a judge in Morocco and died about 15 years later.

Ibn Battuta has always been well known in the Muslim world, but Europeans didn’t hear about him until the early 1800s when a German scholar picked up a copy of his book and translated it in 1818. I’m honestly shocked a movie hasn’t yet been made of his adventures. I suppose it would have to be an expensive, well-researched film, very big budget. Maybe that’s why. I plan on reading his book when I can, and if you know of any good documentaries please send them my way!