The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (8 page)

7
. Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, “La Question de Ceuta au XIIIe siècle,”
Hespéris
42 (1955): 67–127: Derek Latham, “The Strategic Position and Defence of Ceuta in the Later Muslim Period,”
Islamic Quarterly
15 (1971): 189–204; Anna Mascarello, “Quelques aspects des activités italiennes dans le Maghreb médiéval,”
Revue d’Histoire et de Civilisation du Maghreb
5 (1968): 74–75.

8
. Dufourcq,
L’Espagne catalane
, p. 159.

9
. A
madrasa
was founded in Tangier some time during the reign of Abu I’Hasan (1331–51). Henri Terrasse,
Histoire du Maroc
, 2 vols. (Casablanca, 1949–50), vol. 2. p. 53.

10
. Ibn Khaldun,
The Muqaddimah
, 2nd edn., trans. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1967), vol. 2, pp. 430–31.

11
. On the culture of men of traditional learning in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Morocco, see Dale F. Eickelman,
Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a Twentieth Century Notable
(Princeton, N.J., 1985).

12
. Kenneth Brown,
People of Salé: Tradition and Change in a Moroccan City, 1830–1930
(Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p. 103.

13
. Alfred Bel,
La Religion musulmane en Berbérie
(Paris, 1938), pp. 320–22, 327.

14
. On the dress of legal scholars in both Granada and Morocco see Rachel Arié,
L’Espagne musulmane au temps des Nasrides
(Paris, 1973), pp. 382–91.

15
. Bel,
La Religion musulmane
, pp. 352–53; Terrasse,
Histoire de Maroc
, vol. 1. p. 81.

16
. Mohamed Talbi speaks of Muslim emigration from Spain as a “fuite des cerveaux” in “Les contacts culturels entre l’Ifriqiya hafside (1230–1569) et le sultanat nasride d’Espagne (1232–1492)” in
Actas del II Coloquis hispano-tunecino de estudios historicos
(Madrid, 1973), pp. 63–90.

A scholar’s education is greatly improved by traveling in quest of knowledge and meeting the authoritative teachers (of his time).
¹

Ibn Khaldun

Tangier would have counted among its inhabitants many individuals who had traveled to the Middle East, most of them with the main purpose of carrying out the
hajj
, or pilgrimage to the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz region of Western Arabia. Islam obliged every Muslim who was not impoverished, enslaved, insane, or endangered by war or epidemic to go to Mecca at least once in his lifetime and to perform there the set of collective ceremonies prescribed by the
shari’a
. Each year hundreds and often thousands of North Africans fulfilled their duty, joining in a great ritual migration that brought together believers from the far corners of the Afro–Eurasian world. A traveler bound for the Middle East might have any number of mundane or purely personal goals in mind — trade, study, diplomacy, or simply adventure, but the
hajj
was almost always the expressed and over-riding motive. The high aim of reaching Mecca in time for the pilgrimage season in the month of Dhu l-Hijja gave shape to the traveler’s itinerary and lent a spirit of jubilation to what was a long, exhausting, and sometimes dangerous journey.

In the fourteenth century an aspiring pilgrim of Tangier had the choice of traveling by land or sea, or a combination of the two. European vessels which put in at Maghribi ports, as well as Muslim coasting ships, commonly took passengers on board and delivered them to some port further east along the Mediterranean shore.
²

Until the age of the steamship and the charter flight, however, most pilgrims chose the overland route across the Maghrib, Libya, and Egypt. This route was in fact part of a network of tracks linking the towns and cities of northern Africa with one another. A traveler from Morocco might follow a number of slightly varying itineraries, passing part of the way along the Mediterranean coast and part of the way across the high steppes which ran west to east between the coastal mountains and the Atlas ranges of the deep interior. Or, pilgrims starting out in southern Morocco could go by way of the oases and river valleys which were strung out at comfortable intervals along the northern fringe of the Sahara. Northern and southern routes alike converged in Ifriqiya. From there to Egypt pilgrims took the coast road, the lifeline between the Maghrib and the Middle East, which ran along the narrow ribbon of settled territory between the Mediterranean and the Libyan desert.

Map 3: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary from Tangier to the Nile Delta, 1325–36

Whether by land or sea, getting to Mecca was a risky affair. If seafarers had to brave storms, pirates, and hostile navies, overland travelers confronted bandits, nomad marauders, or the possibility of stumbling into a war between one North African state and another. Consequently, most pilgrims going overland kept, for the sake of security, to the company of others, often the small caravans that shuttled routinely between the towns and rural markets. Travelers who had little money to start with frequently traded a stock of wares of their own along the way — leather goods or precious stones for example — or offered their labor here and there, sometimes taking several months or even years to finally work or chaffer their way as far as Egypt.

Quite apart from these little bands of pilgrims in the company of merchants and wayfarers was the great
hajj
caravan, which ideally went every year from Morocco to Cairo, and from there to the Hijaz with the pilgrims from Egypt. Starting usually in Fez or Tlemcen, the procession picked up groups of pilgrims along the way like a rolling snowball, some of them walking, others riding horses, mules, donkeys, or camels. By the time the company reached Cairo, it might in some years number several thousand.

The flow of pilgrims across the nearly 3,000 miles of steppe, desert, and mountain separating Morocco from Mecca was one of the most conspicuous expressions of the extraordinary mobility and cosmopolitanism within the Dar al-Islam in the Middle Period. Although North Africa was known as the Island of the West (Jazirat al-Maghrib), a mountainous realm separated from the heartland of Islam by sea and desert, the intercommunciation across the barren gap of Libya, whether by
hajj
caravan or otherwise, was nonetheless continuous — barring times of unusual political instability on one side or the other. And while the commercial aspect of the link was important, its cultural dimension
was even more so. If few educated Egyptians, Syrians, or Persians found reason to travel west in the fourteenth century (and tended to think of the Maghrib as Islam’s back country, its Wild West), the learned classes of North Africa and Granada were always setting off on tours to the East in order to draw spiritual and intellectual sustenance from their scholarly counterparts in Cairo, Damascus, and the Holy Cities of the Hijaz.

For scholarly North Africans the
hajj
was almost always more than a journey to Mecca and home again. Rather it was a
rihla
, a grand study tour of the great mosques and
madrasas
of the heartland, an opportunity to acquire books and diplomas, deepen one’s knowledge of theology and law, and commune with refined and civilized men.

Literate Moroccans of the fourteenth century owed their greatest intellectual debt not to the Middle East but to the learned establishment of Muslim Iberia. Yet Andalusia’s time was fast running out, and beleaguered little Granada, despite a brave showing of artistic energy in its latter days, could no longer provide much cultural leadership. The Middle East, however, having somehow survived the dark catastrophes of the Mongol century, was experiencing a cultural florescence, notably in the Mamluk-ruled lands of Egypt and Syria. Gentlemen scholars of far western cities like Tangier could readily look there for civilized models, higher knowledge, and learned companionship. And though the road to Mecca was long and perilous, the internationalism of Islamic culture, continuously reaffirmed, held men of learning in a bond of unity and shrank the miles between them.

On 14 June 1325 (2 Rajab 725 A.H.) Ibn Battuta rode out of Tangier and headed southeastward through the highlands of the Eastern Rif to join the main caravan road that ran from Fez to Tlemcen. He was 21 years old and eager for more learning, and more adventure, than his native city could hope to give him. The parting was bittersweet:

My departure from Tangier, my birthplace, took place . . . with the object of making the Pilgrimage to the Holy House [at Mecca] and of visiting the tomb of the Prophet, God’s richest blessing and peace be on him [at Medina]. I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveler in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed by
an overmastering impulse within me and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries. So I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones, female and male, and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests. My parents being yet in the bonds of life, it weighed sorely upon me to part from them, and both they and I were afflicted with sorrow at this separation.

He did not, it seems, set out from Tangier with any plan to join the
hajj
caravan, if there was one that year. It was not, in any event, a bad year for a young man to launch forth entirely on his own, for political conditions in the Western Maghrib were un-typically calm. Abu Sa’id (1310–31), the reigning Marinid Sultan of Morocco, was a pious and relatively unenterprising ruler and, unlike many of the kings of his line, not much interested in pursuing military adventures either in Iberia or North Africa. Around the end of the thirteenth century the pilgrimage caravans from Morocco had had to be suspended for several years owing to Marinid wars against their eastern neighbor, the ’Abd al-Wadid kingdom.
³
But less intrigued than his predecessors with visions of a neo-Almohad empire, Abu Sa’id permitted a de facto peace to prevail on his eastern frontier during most of his reign. Consequently, merchants and pilgrims could expect to pass between the two realms in relative security.

Riding eastward through Morocco’s mountainous interior and then onto the high plains that stretched into the Central Maghrib, Ibn Battuta reached Tlemcen, capital of the ’Abd al-Wadid state, in the space of a few weeks. Although Tlemcen was a busy commercial transit center and intellectually the liveliest city anywhere between Fez and Tunis, he did not linger there. For upon arriving he learned that two envoys from the Hafsid Sultanate of Ifriqiya had been in the city on a diplomatic mission and had just left to return home. The ’Abd al-Wadids, enjoying an unusual break in their wars with the Marinids, had turned their full attention to their eastern marches where they were engaged in a protracted struggle with the Hafsids, notably over control of Bijaya (Bougie), a key Mediterranean port 450 miles west of Tunis. At the time Ibn Battuta arrived in Tlemcen, Abu Tashfin, the ’Abd al-Wadid sultan, was conspiring with a number of Ifriqiyan rebels and pretenders to unseat his Hafsid neighbor and satisfy his own expansionist ambitions.
⁴
It may be that the two envoys had come to
Tlemcen to try to negotiate peace with Abu Tashfin and were now going home, albeit empty-handed.
⁵
In any case, someone advised Ibn Battuta to catch up with them and their entourage and proceed on to Tunis in the safety of their company.

The busiest commercial routes out of Tlemcen led northward to the ports of Oran and Honein. But Ibn Battuta took the lonelier pilgrimage trail running northeastward through a series of river valleys and arid plains flanked on one side or the other by the low, fragmented mountain chains that broke up the Mediterranean hinterland. This part of the Maghrib was sparsely populated in the fourteenth century. He might have ridden for several days at a time without encountering any towns, only Berber hamlets and bands of Arabic-speaking camel herders who ranged over the broad, green-brown valleys and depressions.

After what must have been two or three weeks on the road, he caught up with the Ifriqiyans at Miliana, a small commercial center in the Zaccar hills overlooking the plain of the Chelif River. Eager scholar that he was, he could hardly have made better choices of his first traveling companions. One of them was Abu ’Abdallah al-Zubaydi, a prominent theologian, the other Abu ’Abdallah al-Nafzawi, a
qadi
of Tunis. Unfortunately, tragedy struck as soon as Ibn Battuta arrived. Both envoys fell ill owing to the hot weather (it was mid summer) and were forced to remain in Miliana for ten days. On the eleventh the little caravan resumed its journey, but just four miles from the town the
qadi
grew worse and died. Al-Zubaydi, in the company of the dead man’s son, whose name was Abu al-Tayyib, returned to Miliana for mourning and burial, leaving Ibn Battuta to continue on ahead with a party of Ifriqiyan merchants.

Descending the steep slopes of the Zaccar, the travelers arrived at the port of Algiers, and Ibn Battuta and his first sight of the sea since leaving Tangier. Algiers was a place of minor importance in the fourteenth century, not the maritime capital it would come to be in another two hundred years. It had little to recommend it to a member of the educated class. Abu Muhammad al-’Abdari, an An-dalusian scholar who had traveled from Morocco to Arabia 36 years earlier and had subsequently returned home to write a
rihla
of his experiences, sized up the city’s literate establishment and quickly wrote the place off: