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

by Ross E. Dunn

  The townspeople assemble in it daily, immediately after the dawn prayer, to read a seventh part of the Qur’an . . . In this mosque also there are a great many “sojourners” who never leave it, occupying themselves unremittingly in prayer and recitation of the Qur’an and liturgies . . . The townsfolk supply their needs of food and clothing, although sojourners never beg for anything of the kind from them.

  Ibn Battuta was one among this throng of wandering seekers, and it was during his 24 days in Damascus waiting for the hajj caravan to depart that he undertook his first formal studies abroad. Next to Cairo, Damascus possessed the greatest concentration of eminent theologians and jurists in the Arabic-speaking world, many of them refugees from Baghdad and other Mesopotamian or Persian cities who had fled the Mongol tide. So the young scholar had before him a galaxy of luminaries from which he might choose his teachers.

  In the advanced curriculum the professor usually read and offered commentary on a classical book, then tested his students’ ability to recite it as well as understand its meaning. He awarded those who performed competently an ijaza, or certificate, which entitled them to teach the same text to others. In the Rihla Ibn Battuta claims to have taken instruction and received ijazas from no less than 14 different teachers. He mentions in particular his “hearing” one of the most venerated texts in Islam, the Book of Sound Tradition of the Prophet (the Sahih) by the great ninth-century scholar al-Bukhari. He also details the essential information written on his ijaza: the chain of pedagogical authority linking his own teacher through numerous generations of sages back to al-Bukhari himself. This particular course of study, he tells us, took place in the Great Mosque and was completed in 14 daily sessions.

  Nothwithstanding the young man’s appetite for knowledge, it strains the imagination to see how he could have carried to completion 14 different courses in the space of 24 days.31 He could not have devoted his every waking moment to his studies since he was by no means free of more mundane concerns. For one thing, his entire stay in Damascus took place during the month of Ramadan, when Muslims are required to fast during daylight hours, a strenuous obligation that upset the normal routines of daily life. He also admits in the Rihla that he was down with fever during a good part of his stay and living as a house guest of one of the Maliki professors, who put him under a physician’s care. On top of that, he found time during this fleeting three and a half weeks to get married again, this time to the daughter of a Moroccan residing in Damascus. Given these preoccupations, we can surmise that he exaggerated the extent of his studies, that he undertook them during subsequent visits to Damascus without making that fact clear in the narrative,32 or that some of the ijazas were awarded him, as was often done, in recognition of the piety and scholarly potential he demonstrated rather than as diplomas for books mastered.33 But there is still no reason to doubt that despite illness and nuptial cares, he spent long August hours in the cool of the ancient mosque, absorbing as much learning as he could and gathering credentials that would contribute several years later to his appointment as a qadi to the Sultan of India.

  Notes

  1. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, 2nd edn., trans. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1967), vol. 1, p. 366.

  2. Symon Semeonis, The Journey of Symon Semeonis from Ireland to the Holy Land, trans. and ed. Mario Esposito (Dublin, 1960), p. 67.

  3. “Al-Iskandariyya,” EI2, vol. 4, p. 134.

  4. Gibb (Gb, vol. 1, p. 33n) states that IB probably did not visit all the towns of the Nile Delta that he claims to have seen during his first trip through the area. Although he passed through the delta at least three more times over the course of his travels, the Rihla bunches descriptions of places and persons into the narrative of the first visit and presents almost no new details in connection with subsequent trips. This method of organizing the story was in fact a literary device used in a number of points in the Rihla. It makes for several knotty problems of itinerary and chronology at various stages of the narrative. In the case at hand, Gibb’s argument rests on the fact that IB mentions a date (29 Sha’ban, 31 July 1326) in association with his visit to the town of Ibyar (Abyar) that cannot possibly be correct, since by the end of July he was presumably on his way to Damascus. Hrbek (Hr, pp. 418–20) disagrees, pointing out that despite the discrepancy of the date pertaining to Ibyar, other evidence (dates connected with named personages in various delta towns) tends to confirm IB’s statement that he visited the places he says he did during his first journey. Gibb and Hrbek do agree that he could not have been in the delta on 31 July.

  5. Symon Semeonis, Journey, p. 67.

  6. P. H. Dopp, “Le Caire vu par les voyageurs occidentaux du Moyen ge,” Bulletin de la Société Royal de Géographie d’Égypte 23 (1950): 135.

  7. Several scholars have suggested this general estimate of the population, though more recently André Raymond argues for a much lower fourteenth-century (pre-Black Death) population of about 250,000. “La population du Caire, de Maqrizi à la Description de l’Égypte,” Bulletin d’Études Orientales 28 (1975): 214.

  8. Stanley Lane-Poole, The Story of Cairo (London, 1902), p. 270.

  9. Gaston Wiet, Cairo: City of Art and Commerce (Norman, Okla., 1964), p. 68.

  10. An estimate in accord with Hrbek’s overall chronological reconstruction of IB’s first visit to Egypt. Hr, pp. 420–21.

  11. K. A. C. Creswell, The Muslim Architecture of Egypt, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1952, 1959), vol. 1, pp. 66, 78, vol. 2, p. 195.

  12. Lane-Poole, Story of Cairo p. 212.

  13. On the cosmopolitanism of the leading colleges of Cairo in the fifteenth century, see Carl F. Petry, The Civilian Elite of Cairo in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1981).

  14. ’Abdullah ’Ankawi, “The Pilgrimage to Mecca in Mamluk Times,” Arabian Studies 1 (1974): 147.

  15. In his travels on the Nile Ibn Battuta has very little to say about the ruins of ancient Egypt (called in Arabic barbas). His brief description of the Pyramids, located just across the river from Cairo, is vague and partially inaccurate, leading Gibb to the conclusion that he never bothered to visit them personally (Gb, vol. 1, p. 51n). It must be remembered that the purpose of the Rihla was to edify literate Muslims on the places, personalities, and marvels of the Islamic world of their day and not on the architecture of pagan temples.

  16. Hr, p. 421.

  17. Ibn Jubayr, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, trans. R. J. C. Broadhurst (London, 1952), p. 67.

  18. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, p. 65.

  19. The Mamluk government had a policy of sharing the commercial duties of the port with the local powers-that-be out of strategic necessity, but it frequently fell into altercations with them over the just distributions of the revenue. See Yusuf Fadl Hasan, The Arabs and the Sudan from the Seventh to the Early Sixteenth Centuries (Edinburgh, 1967), pp. 73–79.

  20. ’Ankawi, “Pilgrimage to Mecca,” p. 149.

  21. Symon Semeonis, Journey, p. 103.

  22. He may have traveled from Gaza to Asqalon, a ruined port several more miles up the coast, before turning inland to Hebron. Hr, p. 425.

  23. Guy Le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems (Beirut, 1965), pp. 316–17.

  24. Nicola A. Ziadeh, Urban Life in Syria under the Early Mamluks (Beirut, 1953), p. 97.

  25. “Khirka,” EI2, vol. 5, pp. 17–18; Gb, vol. 1, p. 80n.

  26. It is at this point in the narrative that the reader encounters the first major discrepancy between itinerary and chronology. According to the Rihla, IB traveled extensively in Greater Syria following his departure from Jerusalem, visiting more than twenty towns and cities before reaching Damascus. Since he could not possibly have made such a complicated trip within the 23 days he allots for the entire journey from Cairo to Damascus, both Gibb and Hrbek have concluded that the itinerary after Jerusalem is largely artificial. Hrbek offers various bits of internal evidence to show that visits to particular places in Syria must have taken place during subsequent trips. He further suggests (and Gib
b agrees) that IB took a direct route northward from Jerusalem to Damascus (Hr, pp. 421–25; Gb, vol. 1, p. 81n). I have accepted the probable route Hrbek suggests, though it is conjectural. And I have reconstructed IB’s Syrian itinerary on the premise that he did not travel extensively in the region in 1326.

  Gibb and other scholars have shown that the Rihla’s descriptions of several cities in Greater Syria reproduce passages from the text of Ibn Jubayr, who traveled in the 1180s. In an article published in 1987, Amikam Elad demonstrated that most of IB’s descriptions of places in Palestine are copied from al-Rihla al-Maghribiyya, the travel account of Muhammad al-’Abdari, another Andalusian journeyer of the late thirteenth century. “The Description of the Travels of Ibn Battuta in Palestine: Is It Original?” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1987, pp. 256–272. As Elad points out, it is fruitless to attempt to resolve the serious chronological problems with the Syria–Palestine itinerary if the authenticity of IB’s visits to particular cities is in question. Elad does not argue, on the other hand, that IB never traveled to that region.

  27. Ludolph von Suchem, Ludolph von Suchem’s Description of the Holy Land, and of the Way Thither, trans. Aubrey Stewart (London, 1895), p. 129.

  28. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, p. 271. Large blocks of IB’s description of Damascus were taken from the rihla of Ibn Jubayr, who was there in 1184. However IB updates the material and adds various observations of his own.

  29. Ziadeh, Urban Life in Syria, p. 97.

  30. Ira Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), pp. 22, 70, 72, 75.

  31. He may have stayed 34 days, depending on whether the hajj caravan left Damascus on the 1st or the 10th of Shawwal. See Chapter 4, note 3.

  32. Though IB makes no explicit mention of it, some evidence suggests that he spent time in Damascus in the late months of 1330. If so, his marriage and some of his studies might have occurred then. On this chronological problem see Chapter 6, note 2.

  33. See Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974), vol. 2, p. 444.

  4 Mecca

  The first House established for the people was that at [Mecca], a place holy, and a guidance to all beings. Therein are clear signs — the station of Abraham, and whosoever enters it is in security. It is the duty of all men towards God to come to the House a pilgrim, if he is able to make his way there.1

  The Qur’an, Sura III

  Ibn Battuta gives no indication of how many people like himself were gathering in Damascus in 1326 to join the hajj caravan to Mecca, but it was very likely several thousand. Frescobaldi, the Florentine nobleman who was in Damascus in 1384 at the start of the pilgrimage, estimated the company at 20,000.2 In fact the size of the caravan varied greatly from year to year depending on a whole range of factors affecting individual decisions whether to attempt the trip — political and economic conditions at home, weather, prospects for trouble along the route. For most pilgrims the journey was a spiritually gladdening adventure, but it was also an extremely arduous one, requiring a sound body and careful advance preparations. Every participant was obliged to secure provisions for the round trip, as well as a mount, though Mamluk authorities did set up charitable funds to provide food and animals for the poorest among the travelers. Unless a pilgrim carried most of his supplies along with him, the journey could turn out to be extremely expensive, especially since the citizens of Medina and Mecca, desert-bound as they were and heavily dependent on the hajj trade for their survival, cheerfully exacted the highest prices they could get for food, lodging, and various services. Ibn Battuta himself was in bad financial straits toward the end of his stay in Damascus and might not have been able to set out that year had it not been for the generosity of the Maliki jurist with whom he stayed while he was sick. This gentleman, he tells us in the Rihla, “hired camels for me and gave me traveling provisions, etc., and money in addition, saying to me, ‘It will come in useful for anything of importance that you may be in need of — may God reward him.”

  The gathering of the pilgrims at Damascus was a decidedly political event. Both the Cairo and Damascus caravans set forth under the flag of the Mamluk state. Their safety en route and their timely arrival in Mecca in advance of the dates of the appointed rituals reflected on the capacity of the regime to maintain law and order in the realm. Moreover, in the latter half of the thirteenth century the Mamluks had imposed their political suzerainty over the rulers of Mecca and Medina. The former were a dynasty of Arabian Hasanid sharifs, that is, descendants of Hasan, son of ’Ali and grandson of the Prophet. The latter were also sharifs but the progeny of Husayn, ’Ali’s other son. The annual arrival of the hajj caravans at Mecca was an occasion for the ruling Sharif, called the Amir, to reaffirm, through an exchange of gifts and tribute, his fealty to the sultan and his recognition of Mamluk protectorship of the Holy Places, a responsibility carrying great prestige in the Muslim world.

  In the political pecking order of hajj groups, the Cairo caravan was pre-eminent. Each year the sultan appointed an amir al-hajj from among his favorite officers to lead the caravan and to act as his representative in Mecca. At the head of the procession went the mahmal, a green, richly decorated palenquin, which symbolized the sultan’s formal authority, though no one rode inside it. The amir al-hajj was also placed in charge of the kiswa, the huge black cloth that was woven and inscribed each year in Cairo and carried to Mecca to be draped over the Ka’ba. Though the Syrian caravan also had its amir al-hajj appointed either by the sultan or his viceroy, he stood down from the Cairene leader during ceremonies at the Holy Places. He was expected either to remain neutral or to follow the lead of his Egyptian colleague in negotiations or disputes with the sharifs or with the caravans from Iraq or the Yemen.

  A number of other officials accompanied the Cairo and Damascus caravans to keep order among the pilgrims and see to their special needs. Some of these principals were Mamluks, others were educated Arabs. They included a qadi, an imam, a muezzin, an intendant of intestate affairs (to take charge of and record the property of pilgrims who died along the route), a secretary to the amir al-hajj, medical officers, Arab guides, and a muhtasib, who policed business transactions and public morality.

  On 1 September 1326 (or it may have been the 10th)3 Ibn Battuta set out, now for the second time in four months, to fulfill that “desire long-cherished” in his heart. (As later events would show, he left behind, and presumably divorced, the woman he had married in Damascus a short time earlier.) The staging ground for the caravan was the village of al-Kiswa a few miles south of the city. Here the main body of pilgrims from the city waited a few days for stragglers to catch up, while the amir al-hajj completed the job of organizing the various groups of travelers in a fixed order of march.

  The distance from Damascus to Medina was about 820 miles, and the caravan normally covered it in 45 to 50 days. The itinerary varied somewhat from year to year, but it coincided generally with the route of the now abandoned Hijaz Railway, which the Ottoman Turks built as far as Medina before World War I. From Damascus the trail ran southward along the fringe of the Syrian Desert to the oasis of Ma’an, located on about the same latitude as Cairo. From there the route turned slightly southeastward, veering away from the Gulf of Aqaba and running through the interior highlands along the eastern flank of the Hijaz mountains. At Tabuk, the northern gateway to Arabia, the caravan stopped for a few days while the pilgrims rested and watered their camels before venturing into the fierce land of nude mountains and vast, black lava fields that lay between there and Medina.

  Ibn Battuta thought the northern Hijaz a “fearsome wilderness,” and indeed it was at any season of the year. The trek through it was a physical trial for the stoutest of pilgrims, and the odds against calamity in one devilish form or another were not encouraging. Some pilgrims invariably perished along the way every year from exposure, thirst, flash flood, epidemic, or even attack by local nomads, who seldom hesitated to disrupt the Sacred Journey for what it might bri
ng them in plunder. In 1361 100 Syrian pilgrims died of extreme winter cold; in 1430 3,000 Egyptians perished of heat and thirst.4 Ibn Battuta recounts in the Rihla that a certain year the pilgrims were overcome south of Tabuk by the violent desert wind known as the samum: “Their water suplies dried up, and the price of a drink of water rose to a thousand dinars, but both buyer and seller perished.”

  He does not report that any unusual tragedies befell his own caravan, and we may suppose that the company kept to the normal schedule. He traveled, he tells us, in the company of a corps of Syrian Arab tribesmen, who may have been serving as guides. He also made the acquaintance of a number of educated travelers like himself, among them a Maliki jurist from Damascus and a Sufi from Granada whom he would meet again several years later in India. He also struck up a friendship with a gentleman of Medina, who made him his guest during the caravan’s four-day visit to that city.

  Medina, where the Prophet Muhammad preached, founded the first Muslim state, and died in 632, was the most bountiful of the little islands of fertility scattered along the slopes of the Hijaz mountains, a green spot of habitation existing in uneasy symbiosis with the bedouin of the desert. Before Islam, it was but one of several commercial stopovers on the camel route linking the Yemen with the Middle East. In 622 A.D. Muhammad and his tiny band of converts, retreating from a histile and uncomprehending Mecca, moved north to Medina, which in the ensuing 34 years enjoyed its brief moment of political glory as the capital of the rapidly expanding Arab empire. After the center of Muslim power shifted to Damascus, Medina lost its political and military importance and would have been relegated once again to the back ridges of history were it not that the grave of the Prophet became an object of veneration.

  The Mosque of the Prophet, which sheltered the sacred tomb as well as those of his daughter Fatima and the Caliphs Abu Bakr and ’Umar, became “al-Haram,” a place of inviolability. In the Middle Period Medina was as much a city of pilgrims as Mecca was; even the native townsmen were largely of non-Arabian origin. A journey to the Mosque of the Prophet was not obligatory for Muslims as part of the hajj duties. Nonetheless, few pilgrims failed to visit Medina, even though they may have reached the Hijaz from the west or south and would not pass through the city except as a special diversion from Mecca.