(Travellers | Cities | Routes | Trade
Goods | Themes)
by Paul Lunde (See Chinese translation)
Ibn Battuta, one of the great travellers of all time, was born in Tangier in 1304. At the age of 22 he set out to make the pilgrimage to Makkah. He did not return for 25 years. By the time of his death in 1368, he had travelled some 73,000 miles and visited the equivalent, in modern terms, of 44 countries. In the course of his travels he visited not only the Islamic heartlands – North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Arabia, Iran – but also peripheral areas into which Islam was spreading: India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the Indonesian archipelago, China, East and West Africa. He visited or passed through more than 800 villages, towns and cities, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
When Ibn Battuta first set out, his intention was simply to perform a religious duty and to make contact with scholars and holy men along the way. Very quickly, however, he decided that his true vocation was travel. As a scholar of Maliki law, he was assured a welcome in legal circles wherever he went, and his consuming interest in Sufi brotherhoods, well-organized and influential throughout the Islamic world at this time, provided another support system, enabling him to move freely and find hospitality wherever he travelled. He was not a merchant and did not have private means, but supported himself by serving rulers in various capacities. At one time he was chief qadi of Delhi; at another, of the Maldives. He was chosen by the Sultan of Delhi to lead an embassy to China. Much later, he undertook a mission to Mali on behalf of the Merinid ruler of Morocco. He made a point of meeting – one could almost say, collecting – princes and rulers wherever he went.
Ibn Battuta gives us an inside view of the political geography of the Islamic world during his lifetime. The density and authenticity of the detail communicates to the reader exactly what it was like to serve, say, the Sultan of Delhi, with all its terrors and rewards – or to find oneself unwillingly appointed qadi of a remote group of Indian Ocean atolls. No other late medieval Arabic work conveys so vividly what it must have been like to be received in fear and trembling by an awesome tyrant in Delhi in 1346, or to travel through Syria and Egypt during the plague year of 1348, with the Black Death hard on one’s heels.
Ibn Battuta’s travels cover the years 1325 to 1355. During this period he made nine journeys, by land and sea, throughout Afro-Eurasia, from Spain and Africa, the westernmost points of the Islamic world, to China, and from Central Asia to Sumatra and the East African coast. When he returned from his journey across the Sahara to the Kingdom of Mali, the Sultan of Morocco, Abu ‘Inan, commissioned him to write an account of his lifelong peregrinations. These had already been much discussed at the court in Fez, and Ibn Battuta’s younger contemporary Ibn Khaldun tells us that many courtiers considered his stories – particularly those of his stay in India – unbelievable. The Sultan and his powerful wazir, Ibn Wadrar, were of a different mind, and commissioned a scholar named Ibn Juzayy to help Ibn Battuta work his notes into publishable form.
The book was completed on 9 December 1357 and given the title The Gift of Observers, on the Marvels of Cities and the Wonders of Journeys (Tuhfat al-nuzzar fi ghara’ib al-amsar wa aja’ib al-asfar). It is commonly referred to simply as the Rihla – ‘The Travels’. It has reached us only in an abridged form, but is nevertheless the richest and most interesting of all medieval Arabic travel accounts.
