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

by Ross E. Dunn

  Ibn Battuta seems to have wanted to visit the delta in the summer of 1345 mainly to seek the blessing of Shah Jalal. He was a celebrated holy warrior who, in the year our traveler was born, participated in the Muslim takeover of Sylhet, a town and district in the northeastern corner of the delta.22 Under normal circumstances, Ibn Battuta would also have had himself presented at the princely court of Fakhr al-Din, whose capital was at Sonargaon, a city about half way along the route from the coast to Sylhet. In this case, however, Fakhr al-Din’s dissidence was too recent and his own identification with Muhammad Tughluq too well known to make such an introduction advisable. Consequently, he decided to steer clear of royal interviews and make a quick trip up to Sylhet as anonymously as possible.

  He probably disembarked at the busy eastern port of Chittagong, a city overflowing with agricultural goods transported by river craft down through the maze of delta channels to the coast.23 He notes in the Rihla that foreigners liked to call Bengal “a hell crammed with good things.” The noxious, humid vapours exuded from the delta’s marshes and riverbanks made for an oppressive climate, but food was abundant and remarkably cheap. To prove his point, he even offers in the Rihla a list of prices for rice, meat, fowl, sugar, oil, cotton, and slaves. Not to pass up a bargain himself, he purchased an “extremely beautiful” slave girl in Chittagong. One of his comrades acquired a young boy for “a couple of gold dinars.”

  He tells us nothing very lucid about the itinerary or time schedule of his trip from Chittagong to Sylhet, but he very likely traveled by boat northward along the Meghna River valley, a lush, watery, rice-growing country leading to the Assam Plateau and the Tibetan Himalayas beyond.24 He seems to have had a party of companions, but they are more phantom-like than ever. Al-Tuzari was apparently with him when he visited Ma’bar, but he is never mentioned after that and indeed we learn parenthetically in an earlier part of the Rihla that the man died in India.25

  Shah Jalal of Sylhet, whose tomb is still a local pilgrimage center, was renowned in medieval India for awesome miracles, prognostications, and the feat of dying at the age of 150.26 One day, the Rihla reports, the old shaykh, who had no previous knowledge of Ibn Battuta, told his disciples that a traveler from the Maghrib was about to arrive and that they should go out to meet him. This they did, intercepting the visitor two days’ distance from the khanqah. The story gives Ibn Battuta a convenient entrée to remind his readers of his own singular accomplishments as a globetrotter:

  When I visited him he rose to receive me and embraced me. He enquired of me about my country and journeys, of which I gave him an account. He said to me, “You are a traveler of Arabia.” His disciples who were then present said, “O lord, he is also a traveler of the non-Arab countries.” “Traveler of the non-Arab countries!” rejoined the shaykh, “Treat him, then, with favor.” Therefore they took me to the hospice and entertained me for three days.

  Returning southward along the Meghna River past “water wheels, gardens, and villages such as those along the banks of the Nile in Egypt,” he reached Sonargaon (not far from modern Dacca), the capital of Sultan Fakr al-Din. Without dallying long or identifying himself at the royal residence, he bought passage on a commercial junk departing down the river and went directly on to Sumatra.

  The route of his voyage to the Strait of Malacca, which would probably have taken place in the fall or winter of 1345–46, is an annoying puzzle since this part of the Rihla is murky and possibly disarranged. The ship made one stop at a place he calls Barah Nagar, which may have been a small Indo–Chinese tribal state along the western coast of Burma.27 The ship’s company presented gifts to the local chief (who appeared dressed in a goatskin and riding an elephant), then did a bit of trading and sailed away. A second stop was made at a port called Qaqula (Kakula, or Qaqulla), a lair of pirates. It may have been located somewhere along the Tenasserim coast on the western side of the Malay Peninsula.28 Here Ibn Battuta visited the walled town, accepted the hospitality of the infidel Malay ruler for three days, and had the grisly treat of watching one of the prince’s subjects decapitate himself as a show of affection for his sovereign!

  Map 10: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Southeast Asia and China, 1345–46

  Continuing south along the Malay coast and into the mouth of the strait, the junk put in at the Sumatran port of Samudra, a transshipping town located on one of the rivers flowing down from the wild mountains of the northwestern interior.29 In a political sense Samudra was the last outpost of the Dar al-Islam. Though other towns down along the Sumatran coast had thriving commercial settlements, no sovereign Muslim states are known to have existed anywhere east of Samudra before the mid fourteenth century.

  Al-Malik al-Zahir Ahmad, the prince of the place and third in a line of Muslim rulers extending back some years before 1297,30 warmly entertained Ibn Battuta and his companions in his wooden-walled town, which was a few miles upriver from the port settlement. Except for the mosque, the Friday prayer ritual, the foreign Muslims attending at court, and the fact that the sultan enjoyed lively discussion on points of Islamic law with a small cadre of legal scholars, the palace of Samudra followed custom and ritual not much different from any of the Hindu–Buddhist states of Malaya or the Archipelago.31 Getting into the spirit of things, Ibn Battuta exchanged his under-breeches for a loincloth, and before appearing at court, donned a rich set of garments in the local fashion. His first official host was a ranking military officer, whom, it turned out, he already knew. The man had traveled to Delhi some years earlier on a diplomatic mission for Samudra. Later, the newcomer was presented to al-Malik al-Zahir, who invited him to sit on his left at royal meals and plied him with questions about his travels and the affairs of Delhi.

  Ibn Battuta recalls that he spent only two weeks in Samudra, but it may have been longer than that since he did not leave for China until about April 1346, that is, when the southwest monsoon started and ships bound for Quanzhou or Guangzhou normally left the strait.32 In any event, he departed in style. Al-Malik al-Zahir honored his learned guest by outfitting and provisioning a junk for him and even sending along one of his courtiers to provide good company at shipboard meals.

  The normal sailing time from Sumatra to the South China coast was about 40 days,33 but Ibn Battuta remembers that the trip took something short of four months. He accounts for the longer time by describing two stops at ports along the way, possibly on the coasts of eastern Malaya, Champa, or Tonkin. Unfortunately, the Rihla’s description of these places is so murky and, in the case of one of them, of such doubtful authenticity that their location remains a puzzle.34

  Ibn Battuta arrived on the coast of China during the last peaceful years of Mongol rule. Signs were growing of the violent popular uprisings against the Yuan that would begin in a few years, but in 1346 the country was still unified and prosperous. On the throne was Toghon Temur. He had come to power in 1333 after an unsettling period of murderous succession fights within the royal family. Turning his back on the Mongolian steppe, he ruled in the style of a traditional Confucian emperor and cultivated reasonably amiable relations with the Chinese elite.

  Ibn Battuta praises China as vast and bounteous, noting the quality of its silk and porcelain, the excellence of its plums and watermelons, the enormous size of its chickens, and the advantages of its paper money. He says that “China is the safest and most agreeable country in the world for the traveler. You can travel all alone across the land for nine months without fear, even if you are carrying much wealth.”35 On the other hand, he admits to experiencing the worst culture shock of his traveling career, unable to accept or understand much of what he witnessed, like a member of some American tour group, hopping through Asia from one Hilton and air-conditioned bus to another.

  China was beautiful, but it did not please me. On the contrary, I was greatly troubled thinking about the way paganism dominated this country. Whenever I went out of my lodging, I saw many blameworthy things. That disturbed me so much that I stayed indoors most of the
time and only went out when necessary. During my stay in China, whenever I saw any Muslims I always felt as though I were meeting my own family and close kinsmen.36

  Through the cultural lens of a Maliki schoolman, he saw the Chinese as heathens, worse indeed than the Christians in their ignorance of the One God and every single one of the prophets. More disturbing than that, the Confucian scholars were supremely confident that the Moroccan traveler’s own ideas of God and the universe were not worthy of serious discussion. If we accept the assumption that he did in fact visit China, we should be tolerant of his failure to learn much about Chinese culture or to report much of what he had learned in the Rihla. It was, after all, a book about the triumphant expansion of the Dar al-Islam, not about civilizations still befogged in idolatry.

  Even his account of his own itinerary through China is vague, brief, and uncharacteristically superficial. Although he claims to have traveled something close to 3,500 miles, mostly along China’s extensive river and canal system, he mentions visiting only six different cities and what he says about them is mostly either conventional or inaccurate.37 Only his encounters with acquaintances old or new seem to ring true. After landing at the great port city of Quanzhou on the coast of Fujian province, he had the good fortune, as he certainly hoped he would, to meet up with one of the Chinese envoys who had accompanied him from Delhi to Calicut and who had made it back to China ahead of him. This gentleman willingly introduced him to the Yuan chief of customs in Quanzhou, who assigned him a comfortable house. Ibn Battuta told this official that he had come to China as the ambassador of the sultan of India, and a letter to this effect was duly sent off to the emperor in Beijing. Since Muhammad Tughluq’s gifts to Toghon Temur were lying at the bottom of the sea off Calicut, one wonders just how Ibn Battuta, suddenly wandering in with none of the retinue or accoutrements of an official diplomat, established his credibility. In any case, the emperor was to decide whether the man should be told to proceed to the capital.

  In the meantime the visitor met the Muslim worthies of Ch’üan-chou and even ran into a man named Sharif al-Din al-Tabrizi, one of the merchants who had loaned him money when he was first setting himself up in Delhi. He also made a brief trip 300 miles down the coast to the port of Canton (Guangzhou), where he lodged for two weeks with one of the rich traders.

  Soon after he returned to Quanzhou, he received word that he was indeed to go on to Beijing as the guest of the emperor. He relates that he traveled by river boat, but he mentions only two place names between Quanzhou and Hangzhou (Khansa), cities almost 400 miles apart as the crow flies. It would have been logical for him to travel northward along the canal system, but we can only guess at the route he took. He made one stop at a city he calls Qanjanfu, which may have been the port of Fuzhou.38 Here he had the remarkable pleasure of meeting a fellow Moroccan. The man was a young scholar named al-Bushri who had come originally from Ceuta, a city only 40 miles from Tangier. He had left home to travel to the eastern lands in the company of an uncle. Ibn Battuta in fact had already made a slight acquaintance with him in Delhi.

  I had spoken of him to the sultan of India, who gave him three thousand dinars and invited him to stay at his court, but he refused, as he was set on going to China, where he prospered exceedingly and acquired enormous wealth. He told me that he had about fifty white slaves and as many slave-girls, and presented me with two of each, along with many other gifts.39

  Al-Bushri accompanied his compatriot for four days out of Qanjanfu, then sent him on his way north to Hangzhou.

  Former capital of the Southern Sung empire, Hangzhou may well have been the largest city in the world in the fourteenth century.40 Ibn Battuta declares that it was indeed the biggest place he had ever seen and that its foreign Muslim population was large and thriving. He speaks of residing in the Muslim quarter with a family of Egyptian origin, then later meeting the Yuan governor in the palace and enjoying banquets, canal rides, and performances of magic. Yet his description of Hang-chou is cursory, blurred, and defective, as though he had been told it was the greatest city on earth but could not convey in the Rihla any concrete or convincing images of what such a place was like.41

  He claims to have continued on from Hangzhou to Beijing (a distance of about 700 miles) by way of the Grand Canal, which the Mongol rulers had extended as far as Beijing earlier in the century. This section of the Rihla, however, is so strange and so deficient in historical accuracy that it seems highly unlikely he traveled anywhere north of Hangzhou, if that far, or that he ever completed his checkered diplomatic mission to Toghon Temur.42 Indeed, his own dating clues lead us to infer that his entire tour of China was jammed into the summer and early autumn of 1346. Unless a full year has mysteriously dropped out of the chronology, the journey to Beijing must be apocryphal. However deep into China he actually went, he recounts that he returned to Quanzhou by retracing his route through Hangzhou and Qanjanfu and that he arrived on the south coast to find a junk belonging to the Sultan of Samudra ready to embark for the Strait of Malacca.

  Setting sail from the port on the first rush of the fall monsoon of 1346, he was, if he did not quite know it at the time, on his way home again. Within a little over three years he would be walking the steep streets of Tangier and telling his wondrous tales among the learned men of Fez.

  Notes

  1. The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. and with an introduction by Ronald Latham (New York, 1958), p. 237.

  2. Henry Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, 4 vols. (London, 1913–16), vol. 3, p. 232.

  3. S. Pathmanathan, The Kingdom of Jaffna (Colombo, 1978), p. 235; MH, p. 217n.

  4. William Geiger, Culture of Ceylon in Mediaeval Times (Wiesbaden, 1960), pp. 105–08.

  5. IB states that he visited a place he identifies as Kunakar, capital of the king called Kunwar. He does not say that he met this ruler and indeed reveals that, about the time he passed through, the lords of the realm rose against the man and installed his son on the throne in his place. Mahdi Husain (MH, p. 219n) identifies Kunakar with Kurunegala, but more recent studies suggest it was either the city of Ratnapura, which lay south of Adam’s Peak, or Gampola, the Sinhalese capital, which was more or less on the way from Puttalam to the mountain. C. W. Nicholas and S. Paranavitana, A Concise History of Ceylon (Colombo, 1961), p. 296; Pathmanathan, Kingdom of Jaffna, p. 240. IB’s Kunwar was probably not the Sinhalese king but a well-known chief minister who was exercising power in the ruler’s name. Nicholas and Paranavitana, History of Ceylon, p. 296; Pathmanathan, Kingdom of Jaffna, p. 238. The Sinhalese state had been a large and powerful one in earlier medieval times, but by the fourteenth century it had declined precipitously and would be invaded by Jaffna about 1359.

  6. IB offers no chronological information on his journey through Ceylon. By his own reckoning he left the Maldives in August. Mahdi Husain (MH, pp. lxviii–lxix) estimates a stay on the island of about two months, which seems reasonable.

  7. IB says the admiral reported that no voyage could be made to the islands for three months. This might be taken to mean that the summer monsoon was in full strength, making the expedition risky from a navigational point of view. But unless our chronological scheme is hopelessly off track, IB arrived in Ma’bar in the fall, that is, near the start of the northeast monsoon and the best time to sail for the Maldives.

  8. IB’s Pattan has not been identified, but Yule (Cathay, vol. 4, p. 35) suggests that it stood somewhere on the Palk Strait leading into the Bay of Bengal. H. A. R. Gibb suggests Kaveripattanam or Negapatam in the Kaveri River delta. Ibn Battuta: Travels in Asia and Africa (London, 1929), pp. 365–66n. Large vessels leaving this port for the Maldives would have had to circumnavigate Ceylon owing to the blocking reefs of Adam’s Bridge.

  9. IB gives no clue about the pathology of this epidemic, but he does not link it specifically to plague, which he witnessed later in Syria. The assertion of some historians that the Black Death passed through India on its way to the Middle East and Europe on the grounds
that IB witnessed it in Madurai is not justified. Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, N. J., 1977), p. 377.

  10. G. R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese (London, 1971), p. 377.

  11. Ships would very likely have been leaving the Ma’bar coast in December for voyages to Malabar and on to South Arabia. The West Coast of India Pilot, 11th edn. (London, 1975), p. 24; Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, p. 375. Such a departure time fits in well with my suggested reconstruction of the chronology.

  12. The Book of Ser Marco Polo, trans. and ed. Henry Yule, 2 vols., 3rd edn., rev. Henri Cordier (London, 1929), vol. 2, p. 389.

  13. Yule (Cathay, vol. 4, p. 35) identifies this place with Pigeon Island.

  14. At several other places in the Rihla IB refers to gifts and souvenirs he lost in this holdup, including a set of tomb inscriptions he had copied when he passed through Bukhara in Central Asia.

  15. IB states that his son was about two years old when he saw him in the Maldives. But if the boy was born shortly after his father left the islands the first time (in August 1344), he would have been less than a year old at the time of the second visit. See note 16. Perhaps a lapse of memory is the explanation here.

  16. Following the monsoon pattern, IB must have left Calicut no later than May. Calicut harbor would have been closed in June and July, and if he waited until the end of the summer to go to the Maldives, he would not have found ships at that season sailing from there to Bengal.

  17. Morris Rossabi, “The Muslims in the Early Yuan Dynasty” in John D. Langlois, Jr., China under Mongol Rule (Princeton, N.J., 1981), pp. 274–77; Howard D. Smith, “Zaitun’s Five Centuries of Sino-Foreign Trade,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, pts. 3 and 4 (1958): 165–77.

  18. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974), vol. 2, p. 541.