by Ross E. Dunn
The education Ibn Battuta received was one worthy of a member of a legal family. It is easy enough to imagine the young boy, eager and affable as he would be in adult life, marching off to Qur’anic school in the neighborhood mosque to have the teacher beat the Sacred Book into him until, by the age of twelve at least, he had it all committed to memory. The education of most boys would go no further than this Qur’anic training, plus perhaps a smattering of caligraphy, grammar, and arithmetic. But a lad of Ibn Battuta’s family status would be encouraged to move on to advanced study of the religious sciences: Qur’anic exegesis, the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith), grammar, rhetoric, theology, logic, and law. The foremost scholar-teachers of the city offered courses in mosques or their own homes. Students might normally attend the lectures of a number of different men, sitting in a semi-circle at the master’s feet as he read from learned texts and discoursed on their meaning.
The pupil’s task was not simply to grasp the substance of a text but to learn it by heart. The memorization of standard and classical texts comprising the corpus of Islamic knowledge was central to all advanced education. The most respected masters in any field of learning were the people who had not only committed to memory and thoroughly understood the greatest number of books, but who could recall and recite passages from them with ease in scholarly discourse and debate. According to Ibn Khaldun, the great philosopher and historian of the later fourteenth century, memory training was even more rigorously pursued in Moroccan education than in other parts of the Muslim world.10 The purpose of education in the Islamic Middle Period, it should be understood, was not to teach students to think critically about their human or natural environment or to push the frontiers of knowledge beyond the limits of their elders. Rather it was to transmit to the coming generation the spiritual truths, moral values, and social rules of the past which, after all, Muslims had found valid by the astonishing success of their faith and civilization. Education was in every sense conservative.
Although the narrow discipline of memorization occupied much of a student’s time, an Islamic education nonetheless addressed the whole man. In the course of his advanced studies a boy was expected to acquire the values and manners of a gentleman. This included his everyday conversation in Arabic. Despite the Berber-speaking heritage of North Africa, including Tangier and its environs, Arabic was the language of civilized speech in every Maghribi city. A man of learning, unlike the ordinary citizen, was expected to know the subtle complexities of formal Arabic grammar, syntax, and poetics and to decorate his conversation with Qur’anic quotations, classical allusions, and rhymed phrases.11 Ibn Battuta’s family was of Berber origin, but we may suppose that he grew up speaking Arabic in his own household as well as in the company of other educated men and boys. The Rihla gives no evidence that he could speak the Berber language of northern Morocco.
The narrative of his life experience reveals that in his youth he mastered the qualities of social polish expected of the urbane scholar and gentleman.
Politeness, discretion, propriety, decency, cleanliness, ways of cooking, table manners and rules of dress all formed part of that extremely refined code of savoir vivre which occupied so predominant a place in social relations and moral judgements. Whatever caused shame and could irritate or inconvenience someone was considered impolite. A courteous and refined man . . . evinced in his behavior a combination of attitudes, gestures and words which made his relations with others harmonious, amiable and so natural that they seemed spontaneous.12
This description pertains to learned Moroccans in the nineteenth century, but it could easily apply to Ibn Battuta and to the well-bred men of his time. If in the course of his world travels he would display some less fortunate traits — impatience, profligacy, impetuousness, pious self-righteousness, and an inclination to be unctuous in the presence of wealth or power — he was nonetheless an eminently civilized individual. As he grew into adulthood his speech, his manners, his conduct would identify him as an ’alim, a man of learning, and as a member of the social category of educated men called the ’ulama.
As his education advanced, he began to specialize in the law, as other members of his family had done. The study of law (in Arabic fiqh) was one of the fundamental religious sciences. In Islam the Sacred Law, or shari’a, was founded principally on the revealed Koran and the words and actions of the Prophet. Ideally it was the basis not merely of religious practice but of the social order in its broadest expression. Although Muslim kings and princes promulgated administrative and penal ordinances as occasion demanded (and increasingly so in the Middle Period of Islam), the shari’a addressed the full spectrum of social relations — marriage, inheritance, slavery, taxation, market relations, moral behavior, and so on. Unlike the situation in the Christian world, no formal distinction was made between canon and secular legal systems. Therefore, Ibn Battuta’s juridical training was entirely integrated with his theological and literary education.
In Sunni Islam, that is, mainstream or, perhaps less appropriately, orthodox Islam, the legal systems embraced four major “schools” of law, called madhhabs. They were the Hanafi, the Shafi’i, the Maliki, and the Hanbali. The four schools differed in matters of juristic detail, not in fundamental legal principles. The school to which an individual adhered depended largely on where he happened to have been born, since the madhhabs evolved during the early centuries of Islam along territorial lines.
The Maliki school, named after its eighth-century founder Malik ibn ’Anas, has been historically dominant throughout North Africa. The Almohad rulers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries possessed a distinctive approach to jurisprudence which set them and the minority of scholars who served them apart from the four schools and involved vigorous suppression of the Maliki doctors. The rude Marinid war captains who replaced the Almohads had no thoughts on the subject of law at all. They were, however, quick to distance themselves from the ideology of their predecessors by championing the re-establishment of Malikism. In this way they gained status and legitimacy in the eyes of Morocco’s educated majority and enlisted their help in consolidating the new political order. Therefore, Ibn Battuta grew up and went to school during a time of renaissance in Maliki legal studies. And partly because Malikism had been temporarily out of favor and was now back in, legal education in fourteenth century Morocco tended to stress uncritical, doctrinaire acceptance of the interpretations of law contained in the major Maliki texts.13 The law classes he attended in Tangier would have involved mainly the presentation and memorizing of sections of the corpus of Maliki fiqh, the professors using summaries and abridgments of major legal texts of that school.
As his introductory legal studies proceeded, he was also assimilating the specific cultural style of a Muslim lawyer. The education, as well as the speech and manners, of the juridical class was largely the same everywhere in the Muslim world. Therefore, Ibn Battuta’s particular socialization was equipping him to move easily among men of learning anywhere in the Dar al-Islam. If he aspired to be a jurisprudent one day, then he was expected to exemplify the prized qualities of members of his profession — erudition, dignified comportment, moderation in speech and conduct, and absolute incorruptibility. He also adopted the distinctive dress of the legal scholar: a more or less voluminous turban; a taylasan, or shawl-like garment draped over the head and shoulders; and a long, wide-sleeved, immaculately clean gown of fine material. Most educated men wore beards. In one passage in the Rihla Ibn Battuta makes an incidental reference to his own.14 (That reference, it might be added, is the only clue he offers anywhere in the narrative as to his own physical appearance. Since the ancestors of a Tangierian might include dark-eyed, olive- skinned Arabs, blue-eyed, fair-haired Berbers, and even black West Africans, nothing can be assumed about the traveler’s physiognomy.)
Another important dimension of his education was his introduction to Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam. Throughout the Muslim world in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
, Sufism was addressing popular desires for an Islamic faith of warmth, emotion, and personal hope, needs that outward performance of Qur’anic duties could not alone supply. Indeed it was during the later Middle Period that Sunni orthodoxy embraced Sufism wholeheartedly and transformed it into a powerful force for the further expansion of Islam.
Two ideas were at the heart of the Sufi movement. One was that the individual Muslim is capable of achieving direct and personal communion with God. The other was that the path to God could be found through the intermediary of a saintly master or shaykh. Such an individual was thought to be a wali, a “friend of God,” who radiated the quality of divine grace (baraka) and could transmit it to others. With the help of his master, the Sufi initiate immersed himself in mystical teachings, rituals, and special prayers and strove to inculcate high spiritual qualities in everyday life. Sufism was also a social movement because it involved the formation of congregations of seekers who gathered round a particular master to hear his teachings and join with him in devotional exercises. All across the Islamic world in Ibn Battuta’s time these groups were just beginning to become institutionalized as religious orders, each one organized around common devotion to the spiritual teachings, or “path,” of the founder of the order and his successors. These brotherhoods and sisterhoods were also developing as civic organizations and mutual aid societies and, by the fifteenth century in some areas, as loci of considerable political power.
Sufism had a special appeal for rural folk, whose arduous lives demanded a concrete faith of hope and salvation and who were isolated to a greater or lesser extent from the literate, juridically minded Islam of the cities. Sufi lodges, called zawiyas, organized as centers for worship, mystical education, and charity, were springing up all across North Africa in Ibn Battuta’s time, especially among rural Berber populations to whom they offered a richer, more accessible religion and a new kind of communal experience.
In Morocco Sufi preachers were notably active and successful among the Berber-speaking populations of the Rif Mountains, the region south and east of Tangier.15 Yet mystical ideas were also penetrating the towns in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, perhaps rather early in Tangier because of its nearness to the Rif. Moreover, Tangier, for all its intellectual respectability, was not one of the great bastions of scriptural orthodoxy like Fez, where the leading Maliki doctors were still inclined to be suspicious of Sufism, or any other religious idea not documented in their law books or theological treatises.
Although we have no idea what Ibn Battuta’s early experience with Sufism may have been, his behavior during his travels is itself evidence that he grew up in a social climate rich in mystical beliefs and that these ideas were tightly interwoven with his formal, scriptural education. By the time he left Tangier, he was so deeply influenced by Sufi ideas, especially belief in personal baraka and the value of ascetic devotionalism, that his traveling career turned out to be, in a sense, a grand world tour of the lodges and tombs of famous Sufi mystics and saints. He was never, to be sure, a committed Sufi disciple. He remained throughout his life a “lay” Sufi, attending mystical gatherings, seeking the blessing and wisdom of spiritual luminaries, and retreating on occasion into brief periods of ascetic contemplation. But he never gave up the worldly life. He was, rather, a living example of that moral reconciliation between popular Sufism and public orthodoxy that was working itself out in the Islamic world of his time. Consequently, he embarked on his travels prepared to show as much equanimity in the company of holy hermits in mountain caves as in the presence of the august professors of urban colleges.
Aside from the local teachers and divines of his youth, he is likely to have had contact with men of letters who passed through Tangier at one time or another. The scholarly class of the Islamic world was an extraordinarily mobile group. In the Maghrib of the later Middle Period the learned, like modern conference-hopping academics, circulated incessantly from one city and country to another, studying with renowned professors, leading diplomatic missions, taking up posts in mosques and royal chanceries. Scholars routinely shuttled back and forth across the Strait of Gibraltar between the cities of Morocco and the Nasrid Sultanate. Indeed, Ibn Battuta had a cousin (the Rihla tells us) who served as a qadi in the Andalusian city of Ronda.
Apart from this normal circulation, there was over the long run of time a pattern of one-way migration of educated people from Andalusia to North Africa, a kind of Iberian brain drain which accelerated in response to each new surge of Christian power and concomitant loss of security and opportunity for Muslims on the northern side of the strait.16 Iberia’s loss, however, was North Africa’s gain, since Andalusian scholars and craftsmen, arriving in sporadic streams between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, did much to enliven the cultural life of Maghribi towns. If Tangier took in few immigrants compared with Fez or other premier cities, the legacy of the great Andalusian intellectual tradition must have rubbed off on the city’s educated class to a significant extent.
No young scholar, however well connected his family might be, could expect to pursue a religious or public vocation until he had undertaken advanced studies with at least a few eminent teachers. The local masters and “visiting scholars” of Tangier could give a boy a solid foundation in the major disciplines. But any lad with a large intellectual appetite and personal ambition to match was obliged to take to the road along with the rest of the scholarly community. Fez lay only a few days traveling time to the south, and its colleges, just being built under Marinid sponsorship, were attracting students from all Morocco’s provincial towns. But though Fez was fast gaining a reputation as the most important seat of learning west of Tunis, it lacked the shining prestige of the great cultural centers of the Middle East, notably Cairo and Damascus. In those cities were to be found the most illustrious teachers, the most varied curricula, the biggest colleges, the rarest libraries, and, for a young man with a career ahead of him, the most respected credentials.
Notes
1. Quoted in George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges (Edinburgh, 1981), p. 91.
2. The limited literary sources on Tangier in the Almohad age and later have been brought together in Edouard Michaux-Bellaire, Villes et tribus du Maroc: Tanger et sa zone, vol. 7 (Paris, 1921).
3. Derek Latham, “The Later ’Azafids,” Revue de l’Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée 15–16 (1973): 112–13.
4. Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq. L’Espagne catalane et le Maghrib aux XIIIe et XIVe siècles (Paris. 1966), p. 575. Dufourcq notes an upsurge of piracy emanating from Moroccan ports in the early fourteenth century.
5. Hilmar C. Krueger. “Genoese Trade with Northwest Africa in the Twelfth Century.” Speculum 8 (1933): 377–82. Krueger does not mention Tangier specifically, but there is no doubt that Europeans were sailing there about this time since they were also beginning to put in at Atlantic ports southwest of Tangier.
6. J.H. Parry. The Discovery of the Sea (New York, 1974), p. 75.
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, 183
0–1930 (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.
2 The Maghrib
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.
