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Authors: Ross E. Dunn

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The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century

BOOK: The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century
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The Adventures of Ibn Battuta

The Adventures of Ibn Battuta

A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century

UPDATED WITH A 2012 PREFACE

ROSS E. DUNN

Ibn Battuta Street in Tangier.
The sign is in French, Spanish, and Arabic.
Photo by the Author.

University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
© 1986, 2005, 2012 by Ross E. Dunn
First Paperback Printing 1989

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dunn, Ross E.

The adventures of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim traveler of the fourteenth century / Ross Dunn.—Rev. ed. with a new pref.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index (p.      ).

ISBN 978-0-520-27292-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Ibn Batuta, 1304-1377. 2. Travelers—Islamic Empire—Biography. 3. Travel, Medieval. I. Title.
G93.I24D86 2005
910′.917′67—dc22

2004005791

Printed in the United States of America

20    19    18    17    16    15    14    13    12
12    11    10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro 100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

For Jordan and Jocelyn
And to the Memory of C. F. Beckingham

I met in [Brusa] the pious
shaykh
’Abdallah al-Misri, the traveler, and a man of saintly life. He journeyed through the earth, but he never went into China nor the island of Ceylon, nor the Maghrib, nor al-Andalus, nor the Negrolands, so that I have outdone him by visiting these regions.

Ibn Battuta

Contents

List of Maps

Preface to the 2012 Edition

Preface to the Revised Edition

Preface to the First Edition

Acknowledgments

The Muslim Calendar

A Note on Money

List of Abbreviations Used in Notes

Introduction

1. Tangier

2. The Maghrib

3. The Mamluks

4. Mecca

5. Persia and Iraq

6. The Arabian Sea

7. Anatolia

8. The Steppe

9. Delhi

10. Malabar and the Maldives

11. China

12. Home

13. Mali

14. The
Rihla

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Maps

1. Cities of Eurasia and Africa in the Fourteenth Century

2. Region of the Strait of Gibraltar

3. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Northern Africa, 1325–26

4. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Egypt, Syria and Arabia, 1325–26

5. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Persia and Iraq, 1326–27

6. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Arabia and East Africa, 1328–30 (1330–32)

7. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Anatolia and the Black Sea Region, 1330–32 (1332–34)

8. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Central Asia and Afghanistan, 1332–33 (1334–35)

9. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in India, Ceylon and the Maldive Islands, 1333–45

10. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Southeast Asia and China, 1345–46

11. Ibn Battuta’s Return Itinerary from China to North Africa, 1346–49

12. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in North Africa, Spain and West Africa, 1349–54

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.
1
A portion of the
Rihla
translated from Arabic to English by Samuel Lee back in 1829 has appeared in a new edition.
2
A professor of Arabic in Uzbekistan has published an English edition of Ibn Battuta’s journeys through Central Asia along with learned
commentary.
3
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.
4
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.
5
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 al-Khatib 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 al-Khatib 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
Rihla
—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.

BOOK: The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century
13.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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