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

  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 marvelo
usly 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.

  We do not know that the real traveler, as opposed to the old-timer in the story, ended his life in such a forlorn state. But the tale suggests that his return home left him not at ease and satisfied, but malcontent, restless, and regretful, still yearning for the road. The story adds a poignant touch to the portrait of Ibn Battuta we get in the Rihla, not only the descriptions of his thrilling adventures but also his opinions and feelings—his likes, dislikes, pious prejudices, physical courage, sexual appetites, and cravings for friendship with powerful people. An epic movie about him is a good idea, and it could be done without inventing a single scene not taken directly from his own amazing narrative.

  November 2011

  Notes

  1. L. P. Harvey, Ibn Battuta (London: I.B.Tauris in association with the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, 2007); David Waines, The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta: Uncommon Tales of a Medieval Adventurer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

  2. Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battuta in the Near East, Asia and Africa, 1325–1354 (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004).

  3. Ibrahimov Nematulla Ibrahimovich, The Travels of Ibn Battuta to Central Asia (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2010).

  4. “Summer Journey 2011,” Time Specials, July 2011.

  5. Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (London: John Murray, 2001); The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah (London: John Murray, 2005); Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah (London: John Murray, 2010).

  Preface to the Revised Edition

  The year 2004 marks the seven hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abu ’Abdallah ibn Battuta, the Muslim lawyer who crisscrossed the Eastern Hemisphere in the second quarter of the fourteenth century and, with the help of a literary collaborator, wrote a lengthy account of what he saw and did. The world should take note of the septicentenary of this pious and educated Moroccan traveler. Not only did he give us a precious description of places, people, politics, and lifeways in nearly all the urbanized lands of Eurasia and Africa in the later medieval era, he also exposed the premodern roots of globalization. His tale reveals that by the fourteenth century the formation of dense networks of communication and exchange had linked in one way or another nearly everyone in the hemisphere with nearly everyone else. From Ibn Battuta’s Rihla, or Book of Travels, we discover the webs of interconnection that stretched from Spain to China and from Kazakhstan to Tanzania, and we can see that already in the Moroccan’s time an event occurring in one part of Eurasia or Africa might reverberate, in its effects, thousands of miles away.

  Sailing the Arabian Sea in a two-masted dhow or leading his horse over a snow-covered pass in the Hindu Kush, Ibn Battuta could not have dreamed of the speed and intensity of human interchange today. Even since 1987, when the first edition of this book appeared, humankind has made astonishing advances in electronic technology and communication. One small irony of this “information revolution” is that Ibn Battuta himself has journeyed deeper into the popular imagination. He is today a more familiar historical figure among both Muslims and non-Muslims than he was twenty-five years ago. This has happened, I think, partly because of the increasing intensity of political and cultural relations between Muslim and Western countries and partly because of the broadening of international curriculums in schools and universities, notably in the United States, to embrace Asian and African societies, including famous men and women of the Muslim past.

  In the United States, virtually all high school and college world history textbooks introduce Ibn Battuta, and in the past several years I have had numerous invitations to talk about his adventures with middle and high school teachers and students. In 1994, the Hakluyt Society published the fourth and final volume of the English translation of the Rihla, bringing to conclusion a project that began in 1929!1 Other publications of recent years include a travel writer’s account of journeys tracing Ibn Battuta’s path across the Eastern Hemisphere, an abridged edition of the Hakluyt Society translation, a new edition of an English translation of the Moroccan’s East and West African trips, and an attractively illustrated commentary in Danish.2

  Several popular magazines have featured Ibn Battuta, including National Geographic.3 A Spanish-Moroccan production team made a documentary film about him in the mid-1990s, and currently at least two film projects are in the works. In 1993, Moroccan scholars organized an international conference on their native son in Tangier, his birthplace. In 1999, the Islamic Museum of Kuwait produced an enchanting one-man act and multimedia show called “The Travels of Ibn Battuta.” Several publications for young people have appeared in English, including a teaching unit for high school students, an issue of the world history magazine Calliope, and a fantasy of the “Indiana Jones” variety titled Ibn Battuta in the Valley of Doom.4 In San Francisco a middle school teacher has developed a detailed Ibn Battuta website.5 Finally, I must mention that in 1976, the International Astronomical Union honored the traveler by naming a lunar crater after him. It is eleven kilometers wide and on the near side of the moon.

  I was pleased indeed when the University of California Press agreed to publish this new edition, a seven-hundredth-birthday present to Ibn Battuta. I have made limited changes. I have taken account of the scholarly literature in Western languages that has appeared since 1987, as well as the insights and corrections published in reviews of the first edition. With the exception of an essay by Amikam Elad, who demonstrates that much of Ibn Battuta’s description of Syria and Palestine is copied from the travel account of the thirteenth-century
traveler Muhammad al-’Abdari, I have seen no new research that significantly alters what we know about the Rihla or Ibn Battuta’s life.6 Some new work, however, has offered insights on the Rihla’s chronology, itinerary, and reliability. My references to new work are mainly in the chapter endnotes.

  The only change I have made to the bibliography is the addition of a new section, “Supplemental Sources for the 2004 Edition.” I have also retained the same sources of translations from the Rihla, which mainly means that I have not quoted from volume four of the Hakluyt Society edition. I have made certain spelling changes—for example, “Qur’an” instead of “Koran”—and I have replaced the Wade-Giles with the pinyin system for romanizing Chinese place names.

  I am indebted to reviewers who pointed out mistakes and interpretive flaws in the first edition, and I would like to thank Tim Macintosh-Smith for meticulously rereading the book and sending me valuable comments. I greatly appreciate the efforts of Mari Coates, my University of California Press editor, whose enthusiasm for the new edition helped me meet her timetable for revisions. Finally, I thank Laura Ryan for research assistance.

  Ross E. Dunn

  March 2004

  Notes

  1. See the bibliography for the complete citation. The Hakluyt Society has also published an index to the Rihla in a fifth volume. C. F. Beckingham intended to produce a sixth volume, an extended commentary on IB’s itinerary and chronology. Sadly, Prof. Beckingham passed away in 1998.

  2. Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (London, 2001); Tim Mackintosh-Smith, ed. The Travels of Ibn Battutah (London, 2003); Said Hamdun and Noel King, Ibn Battuta in Black Africa (Princeton, NJ, 1994); and Thyge C. Bro, Ibn Battuta: En arabisk rejsende fra det 14. århundrede (Oslo, 2001).