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

by Ross E. Dunn

  There is no doubt, on the other hand, that in telling so much about himself, Ibn Battuta aimed to project a definite persona: the pious, erudite, Maliki gentleman, though one with a Sufi’s sensitivity and reverence. It seems equally clear that as he told Ibn Juzayy his story, he tended, as perhaps most of us would in his place, to exaggerate his competence as a man of learning and his social status among the kings and princes who entertained him, as well as the importance of the judicial positions he held. Perhaps we can discern in the thread of puffery that runs through the Rihla a discomforting self-awareness of the limits of his education and commitment to the rigorous academic life. There is no evidence that he ever spent much time in serious study once he left Tangier at the age of 21. To the learned jurisconsults and qadis of the great cities of Islam, who toiled years on end reading and memorizing the important texts of their legal school, Ibn Battuta’s deficiencies would have been plain to see. Ibn Juzayy introduces him with gusto as “the learned doctor of law.” But another scholar, a celebrated Andalusian judge named Abu l’Barakat al-Balafiqi, had also met the traveler in Granada and duly sized him up. His observation, reported in the brief article on Ibn Battuta in Ibn al- Khatib’s fourteenth-century compilation of notable biographies, was that the man may have traveled widely but he possessed only “a modest share of the sciences.”6 Or as another translator puts the passage, “He had not too much of what it takes.”7 He could never have landed a high judicial post in a city like Cairo or Damascus (except perhaps in the aftermath of the Black Death, when a large part of the civilian elite was dead). But he did thrive out on the peripheries of Islam where Muslim princes, badly needing experts in the shari’a and the prestige that came with enforcing it, were less particular about honoring and employing individuals with only “a modest share of the sciences.” In that sense, Ibn Battuta belongs to a large class of lettered but not accomplished men who, for want of serious career possibilities in the central cities, gravitated out to the expanding Islamic frontiers, where a Muslim name, a reasonable education, and a large ambition could see a man to a respectable job, even to riches and power.8

  If Ibn Battuta never became a master of his legal profession, he nonetheless possessed an extraordinary memory of the places he had visited and the things he had seen. It seems highly unlikely that when he got down to work with Ibn Juzayy he had extensive travel notes or journals at hand. He never mentions in the Rihla that he took notes, with the single exception of a remark that some tomb inscriptions he jotted down in Bukhara were one of the items he lost in the pirate attack off the coast of India.9 If he had other notes with him at that time (1345), they would also have been lost. In any case, a reading of the Rihla does not suggest that he had a foggier memory of people, places, and events for the period of his career antedating 1345 than for the time after. On the other hand, he appears to have written out a rough version of his life and observations, perhaps after he returned to Fez, since near the end of the Rihla Ibn Juzayy refers to the work as his own “abridgment” of the “writing” or “notations” (taqyid) of the traveler.10 From time to time in the narrative Ibn Battuta admits candidly that he simply cannot remember the name of a particular person or town. But he also misremembered numerous facts. He gets names and dates wrong occasionally, he reports certain contemporary or historical events inaccurately, he mixes up now and again the order of his itinerary. Yet too close attention to his errors can distract from the astonishing accuracy of the Rihla on the whole, as both a historical document and a record of experience.

  To conclude that Ibn Battuta did not rely on notes during his interviews with Ibn Juzayy is not to say that the two of them had no “research” aids at all. In Muslim historical and geographical writing of that age, authors commonly drew upon the works of earlier authorities to flesh out their essays, sometimes explicitly crediting such authorities and sometimes not. Islamic literary theory regarded what we would call plagiarism with a wide latitude of tolerance. It was not considered improper to quote from or paraphrase other writers without citing them, even where the ideas or information such writers contributed might be partially or wholly disguised.11 Ibn Juzayy may have had a substantial library of geographical and travel literature of his own. In any case, Fez had become such an important center of learning that the libraries of its leading intellectuals, as well as that of the Karawiyin mosque, which was founded about 1350, would have provided the two men with a wealth of source material if they needed it.12

  It is perfectly plain that Ibn Juzayy copied outright numerous long passages from the Rihla of Ibn Jubayr, the twelfth-century Andalusian traveler who wrote the most elegant of the medieval Muslim travel books. These passages pertain to Ibn Battuta’s descriptions of Damascus, Mecca, Medina, and some other places in the Middle East. It seems likely that where Ibn Battuta could not remember very well certain places he visited, or where Ibn Jubayr’s description was, from a literary point of view, as good as anything Ibn Juzayy could produce, then deference might be made to this learned predecessor.13 Modern scholars have suggested, and in some cases proven, that Ibn Juzayy paraphrased from other earlier geographical books as well.14

  In his introduction to the Rihla, Ibn Juzayy declares that his intention was to write down the story just as Ibn Battuta told it:

  I have rendered the sense of the narrative . . . in language which adequately expresses the purposes he had in mind and sets forth clearly the ends which he had in view. Frequently I have reported his words in his own phrasing, without omitting either root or branch.

  Yet Ibn Juzayy had been commissioned not simply to transcribe mechanically Ibn Battuta’s reminiscences but to undertake appropriate “pruning and polishing” of his associate’s verbatim reports so as to produce a coherent, graceful work of literature in the high tradition of the rihla genre. In the interests of literary symmetry and taste, therefore, the raw record of the traveler’s experience had to be reshaped to some extent. For one thing, the itinerary over the entire 29 years was exceedingly complicated. Ibn Battuta visited a number of cities or regions two or more times, and his routes crisscrossed, backtracked, and overlapped. Consequently, Ibn Juzayy found it desirable to group the descriptions of certain places within the context of Ibn Battuta’s first visit there — and to do it without much heed to the precise details of his movements. The result is a more smoothly flowing narrative but a vexatious snarl of problems for any modern scholar trying to figure out exactly where Ibn Battuta went and when.15

  Even more troublesome for the historian is Ibn Battuta’s recounting of visits to at least a few places that in fact he probably never saw. Ibn Juzayy meant the Rihla to be at the broadest level a survey of the Muslim world of the fourteenth century. Ibn Battuta had not gone absolutely everywhere in that world. Yet Ibn Juzayy probably thought that for the sake of literary integrity almost every place in Eurasia and Africa having an important Muslim population should be mentioned within the framework of the traveler’s first-person experience, even though in a few cases that experience might not be genuine. Ibn Battuta describes, albeit rather lamely and self-consciously, a trip up the Volga River to visit the Muslim community of Bulghar, a trip he almost certainly did not make.16 Modern commentators have also cast doubts on the authenticity of his journeys to China and Byzantium, as well as to parts of Khurasan, Yemen, Anatolia, and East Africa, though scholarly opinion is very much divided on these questions.17 Even if small parts of the Rihla are fabricated, we can never know for sure how to parcel out the blame. It is conceivable that Ibn Juzayy added certain passages without Ibn Battuta even knowing that he did. Nor can we discount the meddlings of later copyists.

  If the authenticity of the Rihla has generally stood up well under modern scrutiny, Ibn Battuta was by no means let off easily in his own time. By an extraordinary piece of historical coincidence, ’Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun, the Tunisian historian and philosopher who came to tower over the Muslim intellectual world in the later medieval age, arrived in Fez in 1354 to join the circle
of scholars around Sultan Abu ’Inan. Ibn Khaldun had been a young government officer in Tunis when Abu l’Hasan’s army occupied that city. He was impressed by the erudition of the Moroccan scholars in the sultan’s suite and, having lost both his parents in the Black Death, decided to leave home to pursue advanced studies in Fez. There is no evidence that he ever made Ibn Battuta’s acquaintance. But in The Muqaddimah, his great work of historical sociology completed in 1377, he makes a brief and utterly incidental remark about a certain “shaykh from Tangier” who turned up in Fez after traveling widely in the Muslim world. “He used to tell about experiences he had had on his travels,” Ibn Khaldun reports, “and about the remarkable things he had seen in the different realms. He spoke mostly about the ruler of India. He reported things about him that his listeners considered strange.” Ibn Khaldun then repeats some of Ibn Battuta’s stories about Muhammad Tughluq: his provisioning the famine-stricken people of Delhi out of his own income and his practice of having gold coins showered upon his subjects from the backs of elephants. Ibn Khaldun also notes that Ibn Battuta held a judgeship in the sultanate. But then he goes on to remark darkly that the Tangierian “told other similar stories, and people in the dynasty (in official positions) whispered to each other that he must be a liar.”18

  Abu l’Barakat al-Balafiqi, the Andalusian scholar who had met Ibn Battuta in Granada and was later to express a low opinion of his scholarship, also resided in Fez about this time and knew Ibn Khaldun.19 According to Ibn al-Khatib, author of the fourteenth-century biographical notice on Ibn Battuta, al-Balafiqi said that people considered the traveler “purely and simply a liar.”20 Why such skepticism among the intelligentsia of Fez? Perhaps it was a reflection of their casual contempt for Ibn Battuta’s pedestrian erudition. Or it might simply have been the incredulous parochialism of Far Western Muslims who had themselves never traveled very far from home.

  Indeed Ibn Khaldun continues in The Muqaddimah:

  One day I met the Sultan’s famous vizier, Faris ibn Wadrar. I talked to him about this matter and intimated to him that I did not believe that man’s stories, because people in the dynasty were in general inclined to consider him a liar. Whereupon the vizier Faris said to me: “Be careful not to reject such information about the condition of dynasties, because you have not seen such things yourself.”21

  Moreover Muhammad ibn Marzuk, a famous scholar of Tlemcen who was occupying a government post in Fez when the Rihla was being composed, also expressed an opinion on Ibn Battuta, which found its way into Ibn Hajar’s fifteenth-century biographical notice. According to Ibn Hajar, Ibn Marzuk cleared the traveler of al-Balafiqi’s charge of lying and even declared, “I know of no person who has journeyed through so many lands as [he did] on his travels, and he was withal generous and welldoing.”22

  If Ibn Battuta stirred up courtly gossip for a few months with his exotic tales, he seems to have attracted no more attention in Fez after his work with Ibn Juzayy was completed. All that we know of his later life is that, according to Ibn Hajar’s brief sketch, he held “the office of qadi in some town or other.”23 He probably lived in the modestly comfortable style of a provincial official, and, since he was not yet 50 years old when he ended his travels, he very likely married again and sired more children, little half brothers and sisters of the offspring growing up all across the Eastern Hemisphere.

  As for the Rihla, very little is known of its history from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. In contrast to Marco Polo’s book, which was widely circulated and acclaimed in Europe in the later Middle Ages, the Rihla appears to have had a very modest impact on the Muslim world until modern times. There is no evidence of its being widely quoted or used as a source in Muslim historical or geographical works written after 1355. To be sure, copies of either the entire work or abridgments of it circulated among educated households in Morocco and the other North African countries. The Rihla was also known in the Western Sudan in the seventeenth century and in Egypt in the eighteenth, at least in the form of abridgments. It may also have turned up in libraries in Muslim regions east of the Nile.24 Only in the mid nineteenth century, half a millennium after it was written, did the narrative begin to receive the international attention it so profoundly deserved. The credit for that achievement, ironically enough, fell to scholars of Christian Europe, the one populous region of Eurasia Ibn Battuta had never bothered to visit in his travels.

  If the great journeyer attained no literary glory in his own time, he nevertheless had good reason to review his long career with satisfaction. He had seen and borne witness to the best that the fourteenth century had to offer, three decades of relative prosperity and political calm in the Afro-Eurasian world. The second half of the century was to be drastically different. It was in Barbara Tuchman’s phrase the “calamitous” half of the century, a time of social disturbance and economic regression that seemed to afflict almost the entire hemisphere.25 The troubles of the age were almost certainly associated with the great pandemic, not only the Black Death itself but the multiple recurrences of pestilence that followed decade after decade on into the fifteenth century. The Black Death killed untold millions, but the repeated outbreaks of plague prevented agrarian populations in Europe and the Middle East, and perhaps in India and China as well, from recovering to pre-plague levels.

  The result was chronically depressed productivity, a condition that grievously affected many kingdoms of the hemisphere just about the time Ibn Battuta ended his travels. With the exception of a few regions where real political vigor was in evidence (the rising Ottoman Empire, Ming China after 1368, Vijayanagar in southern India), almost every state he had visited either disappeared (the Yuan dynasty in China, the Ilkhanids in Persia), rapidly deteriorated (the Delhi Sultanate, Byzantium), or experienced dynastic strife, rebellion, or social upheaval (the Khanates of Kipchak and Chagatay, the Mamluk Sultanate, Mali, Granada). Latin Europe, which he had not visited, experienced equally sorry times, with its deep economic recession, Hundred Years War, Papal Schism, and succession of peasant uprisings.

  In his own homeland he lived out his last years amid the violent, anarchic disintegration of the Marinid state. Sultan Abu ’Inan invaded Ifriqiya and occupied Tunis in the fall of 1357, but he was forced to withdraw within two months. The following year he fell sick and was finally strangled by a rebellious vizier. No Marinid king succeeded in restoring order and unity to the country during the next century.

  Perhaps safe in his remote judgeship from the turmoil of those times, the aging globetrotter could look back over a quarter century whose strong kingdoms, thriving hemispheric trade, and cosmopolitan cities had given him so many opportunities for adventure and fortune. And despite the spreading darkness of the later century, his confidence in the continuing triumph of Islam was doubtless undiminished. He would not have been specially impressed to know that, as the fifteenth century approached, Muslim merchants, preachers, soldiers, and peripatetic scholars like himself still carried on the work of implanting Islam and its treasury of values and institutions in Southeast Asia, East and West Africa, India, and Southeastern Europe. Even as the bellicose Portuguese prepared their attack on Ceuta and the age of European power began, Islam as both a living faith and a model of civilized life continued to spread into new regions of the earth.

  Ibn Battuta died in 1368 or 1369 (700 A.H.).26 Where his grave lies, no one knows for sure. The tourist guides of Tangier are pleased to take foreign visitors to see a modest tomb that allegedly houses the mortal remains of the traveler. But the site has no inscription and its genuineness is open to question.27 A more vital memorial to him is the Ibn Battouta, the big ferry boat that shuttles people and their automobiles across the Strait of Gibraltar. From the kasba high above the city, you can see it steam out of the harbor, carrying young Moroccan scholars to their law schools in Paris and Bordeaux.

  Notes

  1. Gb, vol. 2, p. 282.

  2. “Ibn Djuzayy,” EI2, vol. 3, p. 756; D&S, vol. 1, p. xxi.

&
nbsp; 3. H. A. R. Gibb, Ibn Battuta: Travels in Asia and Africa (London, 1929), p. 12.

  4. “Ibn Djuzayy,” EI2. vol. 3, p. 756.

  5. Leonardo Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia: An Introduction to his Description of the World Called Il Milione (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960) p. 12.

  6. This is Gibb’s translation (Gb, vol. 1, p. ix) of the passage as it appears in Ibn Hajar al-Ascalani’s fifteenth-century biographical dictionary Al-Durar al-Kamina. The Arabic text and French translation of Ibn al-Khatib’s notice, upon which Ibn Hajar’s is partially based, is found in E. Levi-Provençal, “Le Voyage d’Ibn Battuta dans le royaume de Grenade (1350)” in Mélanges offerts à William Marçais (Paris, 1950), pp. 213, 223. Ibn al-Khatib quotes Abu l’Barakat as saying he met IB in Granada in the garden of Abu l’Kasim ibn Asim. IB confirms this meeting (D&S, vol. 4, p. 371). On Abu l-Barakat al-Balafiqi, see Soledad Gibert, “Abu-l-Barakat al-Balafiqi, Qadi, Historiador y Poeta,” Al-Andalus 28 (1963): p. 381–424.

  7. H&K, p. 5.

  8. On the migration of Muslim literate cadres to the fringe areas of Islam, see Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 539–42.