SOURCE: Netton, Ian Richard. “Arabia and the Pilgrim Paradigm of Ibn Battuta: A Braudelian Approach.” In Arabia and the Gulf: From Traditional Society to Modern States, pp. 29-42. Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1986.

[In the following essay, Netton argues that Ibn Battuta's account of his travels is not a random narrative, but is organized to show the patterns and characteristics of the Islamic world of his era.]

The Riḥla of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (ad 1304-1368/9 or 1377) has been tackled over the years by a multitude of scholars in a variety of different ways. Often, however, the various studies which have been published have concentrated—to use, loosely, a not inappropriate pair of Ismā‘īlī terms—on a zāhir exposition of the text and its problems rather than on an analysis of a bāṭin structure. I do not, of course, mean that the Riḥla might have a secondary meaning but that it has been analysed, for example, more often as a straight travelogue,¹ a problematic chronology,² a vehicle or mirror of Muslim institutions³ and a focus for stylistic comparison.⁴ The translation of three-quarters of it into English by H.A.R. Gibb for the Hakluyt Society series has placed it—at least for English non-Arabists—firmly within that type of travel genre or tradition in which the Hakluyt Society has always specialised. The essence or raison d'être of the genre was epitomised in the early resolution adopted in 1846 explaining that the Society was to be formed ‘for the purpose of printing, for distribution among its members, the most rare and valuable voyages, travels and geographical records, from an early period of exploratory enterprise to the circumnavigation of Dampier’.⁵ The emphasis, in other words, was to be on the voyage and on the data which might have resulted from original exploration. Finally, to provide a last illustration, the Riḥla has been examined recently by the present writer in terms of myth and magic,⁶ and it is upon the approach used then that I would like to base that employed in the present essay.

In my article ‘Myth, Miracle and Magic in the Riḥla of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’ I put forward the proposition that Ibn Baṭṭūṭa used the Riḥla as a kind of frame story in a manner akin to the usage in Kalīla wa Dimma and the Panchatantra.⁷ In other words, what was being stressed was the sheer artificiality of the art form employed by the author and/or his editor.⁸ If we examine his Riḥla in these terms, we may go on to ask whether the whole is a frame for just a collection of disparate and, perhaps, unconnected places visited, episodes, interests, and prejudices, or whether there is some kind of identifiable structure upon which the Riḥla is built and some paradigm or pattern of widespread applicability by which it is ordered. Such tools of analysis need not, of course, have been present in the mind of the writer as he wrote or, rather, dictated his text. Indeed, it would be extraordinary if Ibn Baṭṭūṭa had thought in any kind of ‘structuralist’ way at all. What he did do, however, was to give vent to overriding interests and prejudices in the course of his text which we ourselves can now use as part of the meant of our analysis. It is therefore the purpose of this essay to assess what are the ‘constants’ at work within the frame which has been described. I propose to use, firstly, the three-level method of historiography established by that doyen of the French Annales school of history, Fernand Braudel (1902-1985), as a key to unlocking at least some of the structure of the Riḥla (in particular, its Arabian section) and identifying eventually what I will term the basic ‘pilgrim paradigm’ of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa.

Braudel's method, in which history is viewed and studied on three levels of (i) enduring geographic and economic structures, (ii) social structures and ‘conjunctures’,⁹ and (iii) events, is best seen in operation in his magisterial three-volume Civilization Matérielle, Économie et Capitalisme (XV^e-XVIII^e Siècle).¹⁰ But it also appeared earlier in his famous La Méditerranée et le Monde Méditerranéen à l'Epoque de Philippe II.¹¹ And it is precisely because of the Mediterranean orientation of the latter that I have decided to concentrate on it rather than on the former. In the preface to the first edition of La Méditerranée Braudel stressed that his book had three parts: the first studied the history of man ‘dans ses rapports avec le milieu qui l'entoure; une histoire lente à couler, à se transformer, faite souvent de retours insistants, de cycles sans cesse’. The second part dealt with ‘histoire sociale, celle des groupes et des groupements’ and the way in which such forces as economic systems, civilisations and societies interacted in the field of warfare. For war, Braudel emphasised, was the product of more than purely individual responsibility. The last part of La Méditerranée was rather more traditional and dealt with the history of events or what had been termed by Paul Lacombe and François Simiand ‘l'histoire événementielle’. Braudel summarised his efforts by saying that ‘ainsi sommes-nous arrivés à une décomposition de l'histoire en plans étagés. Ou, si l'on veut, à la distinction, dans le temps de l'histoire, d'un temps géographique, d'un temps social, d'un temps individuel’.¹² And he entitled the three parts of his book respectively ‘La Part du Milieu’, ‘Destins Collectifs et Mouvements d'Ensemble’ and ‘Les Événements, La Politique et les Hommes’.

It is instructive to try and apply the Braudelian categories to the Arabian section of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla. And although an over-rigid compartmentalisation of data is often unwise, none the less the Braudelian method can be valuable in highlighting aspects both of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's own mind and the land and age through which he travelled, which might otherwise have been overlooked. Firstly, however, it is necessary to outline briefly the salient features of that first Arabian travelogue. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa made several pilgrimages to Mecca¹³ but it is this first visit and first incursion into Arabia that will concern us here.

Ibn Baṭṭūṭa left Damascus with the pilgrim caravan on 1 September 1326. He passed by the great castle of Al-Karak with its legendary crusading associations and entered the desert after passing through Ma‘ān which the traveller described as the last of the Syrian towns. He then began to encounter places associated with the Prophet Muḥammad in one way or another: Tabūk to which the Prophet had led an expedition in 631; the well of al-Hijr from which the Prophet had refused to drink; and finally, and most notably, the City of Medina with its plethora of associations with the life of the founder of Islam. Relying much on the earlier work of Ibn Jubayr, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa describes in detail the Mosque of Medina where Muḥammad, as well as the two early Caliphs Abū Bakr and ‘Umar b. al-Khaṭṭāb, lies buried. He retails, again in some detail, the circumstances of the building of this mosque and the way in which it was gradually enlarged over the centuries.¹⁴

Ibn Baṭṭūṭa tells us that he stayed four days in Medina and spent each night in the mosque.¹⁵ After leaving the city, he donned the pilgrim garb and entered the state of iḥrām near the mosque of Dhū 'l-Hulayfa, about five miles away. The last major village through which he passed was Badr, site of the first notable battle between Muḥammad and the Meccans in 624. It is duly noted and eulogised by Ibn Baṭṭūṭa. Finally, with a full heart, the traveller reached Mecca.¹⁶

Mecca has been the object of his journeying and the importance of this city both for Islam generally, and for Ibn Baṭṭūṭa in particular, ensures that it is treated in page after page of almost fulsome detail. Not only does Ibn Baṭṭūṭa perform the familiar and age-old pilgrim rituals and traditions of ṭawāf, running between al-Safā and al-Marwa, and drinking from the well of Zamzam, but he positively revels in every aspect of the city, describing its gates, the Sacred Mosque with the Ka‘ba, the city cemetery and even the sanctuaries outside Mecca, and the Meccan mountains and caves significant for early Islamic history.¹⁷ Nor do the inhabitants of Mecca escape his curious attention: he praises the good qualities of the Meccan citizenry and, as is his wont, pays particular attention to the scholars and pious folk who inhabit the city and its environs, recounting several entertaining anecdotes about these people.¹⁸

Perhaps the kernel of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's narrative of this, his first visit to Mecca for the pilgrimage, is his description of the wuqūf on the plain of ‘Arafāt. … The event clearly made an extraordinary impression on the young traveller for he notes not only the date of this wuqūf as a Thursday in AH 726 (= 6 November 1326)¹⁹ but records in the same paragraph the names of the commanders of the Egyptian and Syrian caravans at that time and the names of some of the notables who made the pilgrimage that year. The ‘Standing’ at ‘Arafāt is followed by the traditional rush to Muzdalifa, move to Minā, stoning of the pillars and celebration of ‘Id al-Aḍḥā.²⁰

Ibn Baṭṭūṭa left Mecca with the Iraqi caravan on 17 November 1326 and travelled back to Medina, where he spent a further six days, before embarking on a quite different route from the inward one, which eventually brought the traveller to Kūfa in Southern Iraq. As he went he once again recorded the historical associations of the places through which he passed: Al-Ajfur, romantically connected with the lovers Jamīl and Buthayna; al-Qādisiyya (map: al-Qādisīya) scene of one of the greatest early Arab victories over the Sassanians in 636 or 637, and Najaf with its Shi‘ite heritage.²¹

The above paragraphs give the bare chronological bones of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's first visit to Arabia for the purpose of making the pilgrimage to Mecca. And the value of the great quantity of material which he provides in his text (despite some obvious plagiarism)²² has, of course, been much appreciated by scholars from a variety of disciplines, not least that of Islamic art and architecture. But what may have sometimes been neglected in the frequently indiscriminate mining of the Riḥla for information by scholars is a real appreciation and ordering of the several different layers of information provided by Ibn Baṭṭūṭa. Here the insights of Braudel can be of considerable value.

If we take first the geographical level in Braudel's methodology, we find that a vivid awareness of the harshness of the Arabian landscape permeates Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's narrative. This awareness is epitomised best in the constant search for, and references to, water.²³ Ibn Baṭṭūṭa is always delighted by the presence of water whether it be running as at Tabūk,²⁴ sweet from having been previously brackish as at the Well of Arīs,²⁵ or simply rain-water collected in tanks.²⁶ There are numerous references to water and Arabian watering places in his narrative: the principal problem associated with both seems to have been the usual one of continual supply²⁷ rather than the incidence of malaria.²⁸ And there are other references to the environment as well: secondary motifs in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Arabian section include the terrors of the desert where men can be lost²⁹ and the fearsome Samoom wind.³⁰ By contrast with all this, the cities of Medina and Mecca are positive oases of the good life—what Braudel calls ‘minuscules points d'appui’³¹—with their mosques and well-stocked markets.³² The exquisite importance of transport³³—well-provisioned transport!—becomes excessively clear in such a desert-dominated milieu, and was a prime consideration of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa in Arabia as well as of every other sensible traveller.³⁴ It is factors such as the above that must have led Braudel to summarise Islam as ‘la totalité de ce que le désert implique de réalités humaines, concordantes et discordantes …’,³⁵ though he would be wrong if he intended to imply that Islam was of the desert, i.e. a desert faith in origin and essence.

In his second layer of analysis, which in La Méditerranée is encapsulated under the general rubric ‘Destins Collectifs et Mouvements d'Ensemble’, Braudel examined the role of interlocking factors such as the economy, trade and transport on the one hand, and social structures such as Empires, societies and civilisations, on the other. He concluded with an analysis of the forms of war.

All these elements are present or implicit, of course, in one form or another in the Riḥla of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa. On his first Arabian journey the author noted, for example, the role of the pilgrim caravan as a vehicle of trade.³⁶ Gibb comments: ‘The pilgrim caravans were at all times occasions for trade, especially as they were often exempted from the ordinary transit and custom duties.’³⁷ Braudel cites the description of an anonymous Englishman who, a few centuries later in 1586, followed an extremely well-endowed caravan to Mecca from an assembly point outside Cairo. It allegedly had about 40,000 mules and camels and 50,000 people including many merchants. As the caravan travelled, it sold some of the rice, tin, grain, silk and coral destined to be exchanged in the markets of Mecca.³⁸ And, indeed, the caravans in which Ibn Baṭṭūṭa travelled in Arabia, although he gives us no figures, may well have been of a similar magnitude and luxurious nature. The Iraqi caravan in which he left Mecca was clearly a massive one: according to the traveller, the numbers of people were so large that they surged like the waves of the sea, and if anyone left the caravan to relieve himself, he was quite unable to find his place again. The caravan was also endowed, as we have observed, with many water-bearing camels as well as a massive supply of luxuries and food.³⁹ And Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, like later⁴⁰ and earlier travellers, was not unaware of the dangers of a possible attack on the caravan.⁴¹ In a sea-faring context, Braudel described piracy, ‘industrie ancienne et généralisée’, as a ‘forme supplétive de la grande guerre’.⁴² On land, raids on the Arabian caravan routes could serve similar or other purposes but were equally ancient and dangerous.⁴³ Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's caravans were not themselves attacked while he was in Arabia on his first pilgrimage, but his narrative betrays a distinct apprehension about the possibility.

The caravan trade described by the traveller reflected, in some small way, the larger economy of the states through which he travelled. Similarly, the larger empires and civilisations, with their mixtures of societies, which he encountered as he moved on his Riḥla, impinged upon him most clearly and obviously in the form of smaller social units or structures. Two important social groupings which he encountered in Arabia were those of the pilgrimage peer group and the ‘Ulamā’.

Ibn Baṭṭūṭa moved or worked, from the inside, with the one as a ḥājj and the other as a ‘ālim.⁴⁴ His narrative provides abundant evidence of the intricate ‘group-ethos’ which developed within the caravan with its customs and class structure: for example, it was customary for the Syrian pilgrims on arriving at Tabūk to charge the camp with drawn swords and smite the palm trees with those swords in emulation of the deeds of the Prophet Muḥammad on his expedition to Tabūk in 631.⁴⁵ Similarly the pilgrims made a point of drinking a mixture of barley meal and water or butter called sawīq, which was mixed with sugar, at the Pass of al-Sawīq. Again the action commemorated a previous one by the Prophet who, finding his companions to be without food in that place, changed sand into sawīq in a miracle which echoed that of the New Testament Cana.⁴⁶ The class structure of the pilgrim caravan is reflected in the fact that the Amīrs had their own tanks of water set aside for them at, for example, the spring of Tabūk, unlike the ordinary pilgrims;⁴⁷ and it was the Amīrs who assumed the responsibility for filling the water tanks with sawīq and doling it out to the people from them.⁴⁸ Wealth and/or high rank and a privileged access to water and associated beverages in the caravan are thus seen to be inexorably linked. Such divisions, to a certain extent, ought to have vanished with the group assumption of iḥrām.⁴⁹ But it was only in the rituals of the Hajj itself, communally celebrated in Mecca and ‘Arafāt and its environs, that the pilgrims really merged with their peers and assumed a single corporate identity par excellence.

Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's interest in, and encounters with, his fellow-‘Ulamā’ is a constant leitmotiv throughout his Riḥla. It is thus no surprise to find the traveller noting by name during the account of his first pilgrimage such individuals as a Mālikī professor,⁵⁰ a Zaydī Qāḍī,⁵¹ and the imāms of the four principal madhāhib at Mecca.⁵² Though Ibn Baṭṭūṭa does not seem to have collected in Medina and Mecca the ijāzāt which he claims to have acquired in vast quantities in Damascus just before setting off on his first Arabian journey,⁵³ it is clear from his accounts of these cities that he enjoyed to the full the company of his academic peers.⁵⁴

Braudel has described events as ‘poussière’. For him ‘ils traversent l'histoire comme les lueurs brèves; à peine naissent-ils qu'ils retournent déjà à la nuit et souvent à l'oubli’. But every event, ‘si bref qu'il soit, porte témoignage …’⁵⁵ and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's own first pilgrimage to Mecca and incursion into Arabia is much more than a single Braudelian event, or even a chain of connected events or journeyings, at a particular time. Because of its nature it is a celebration across time and space of a whole series of ‘events’, or alleged ‘events’, which took place long before in both the pre-Islamic pilgrimages and those of Muḥammad, and which function as a set of symbols in the present. It is these ‘events’ rather than what Ibn Baṭṭūṭa himself does, and where he goes, which constitute in a major sense the substance of his pilgrimage.

This three-level analysis based on the insights of Fernand Braudel enables us to marshal and present the data in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla in a particularly ‘compartmentalised’ fashion. The question may now be fairly asked: can we identify, through the medium of such a method, certain constants which have a function, relevance, or applicability throughout much of the Riḥla, and which may be said to constitute in toto a ‘pilgrim paradigm’ for the traveller? In other words, having achieved its most Islamically perfect form in Arabia because of the pilgrimage and Mecca—(although Mecca may not be the sole focal point of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's journeyings as it was with Ibn Jubayr)⁵⁶—is there a pattern of intentions which appears to operate in other cities and regions visited in the Riḥla as well?

An analysis of the Riḥla shows that this is the case. There are a certain number of constants which may be said to transcend, though they may be permeated by, or even a cause of, the traveller's more individual preoccupations or characteristics such as an interest in watering holes or uxoriousness. They transcend simply because of their breadth and the far-reaching nature of their significance for the narrative scope of the entire Riḥla; and they may thus be said to constitute a substrate or, better, an underlying ‘pilgrim paradigm’ for this work. The principal elements of the paradigm are four-fold. Firstly, we may derive from Braudel's generalised primary level of geographic constants the enduring religious geography of an Islamic sacred area, which in Arabia means primarily Mecca and its environs, and in which are celebrated, in a strictly ordered series of rituals, religious ‘facts’ from the past. Thus there is a linkage between Braudel's first and third levels. Religious geography and the ‘facts’ such geography has witnessed and absorbed engender a primal and focal search or journeying to a shrine, which in the case of Mecca is the Hajj to the sacred Ka‘ba itself.

Secondly, bearing in mind Braudel's second level of social structures generally, and the grouping of the Islamic ‘Ulamā’ in particular, we may note Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's search for knowledge. The ‘Ulamā’ as a social and educational group personified and institutionalised knowledge; and travellers like Ibn Baṭṭūṭa implemented the medieval saw which instructed Muslims to seek knowledge even as far as China. This has two facets in the Riḥla: Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's desire to associate with, or meet, as many scholars as possible, a feature which is clear in his Arabian narrative, and his almost childlike eagerness to acquire as many of such scholars' ijāzāt as possible, a feature which is, however, lacking in this first Arabian account but prominent elsewhere.⁵⁷ Ibn Baṭṭūṭa may be said to have obeyed the saw to the letter in that he actually claims to have visited China and conversed with its academics.⁵⁸

Thirdly, related to and deriving from this second Braudelian level of social structures is our traveller's search for personal recognition and/or power and massive interest in those who hold power. The isolation and loneliness felt by the youthful and inexperienced traveller as he sets out⁵⁹ are soon replaced by the satisfaction of scholarly converse, recognition in the form of the grant of an ijāza or ṣūfī robe,⁶⁰ personal fulfilment in marriage,⁶¹ or the attainment of politico-religious power as in his appointments as Ambassador of Sulṭān Muḥammad ibn Tughluq of Delhi to China,⁶² or Qāḍī to the Maldive islands.⁶³ Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's predilection for recognition by the pious and the powerful appears on his Arabian journey not only in his dropping of the names of jurists and scholars whose converse he clearly enjoyed, but in the way, for example, that he persuades the Commander of the Iraqi caravan himself, Muḥammad al-Hawīh, to take him under his wing, even to the extent of having the said Commander pay out of his own pocket the cost of hiring half a double litter as far as Baghdad, for Ibn Baṭṭūṭa.⁶⁴ Elsewhere, his interest in the great and the powerful is never far below the surface.⁶⁵

Finally, as a species of Braudelian ‘fact’ occurring in the present, there is the search for what might be characterised as the satisfaction of the raḥḥāla impulse, that inquisitive ‘itch’ to travel for its own sake, shared to a greater or lesser degree by all real travellers, as opposed to mere tourists, whether they be the ancient, and anonymous, author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea⁶⁶ or the modern Tim Severin.⁶⁷ The urge is encapsulated in our medieval traveller's express wish never to travel the same route twice if it be possible.⁶⁹

Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's ‘pilgrim paradigm’ thus comprises a series of four searches: for the shrine and/or its circumambient religious geography; for knowledge; for recognition and/or power; and for the satisfaction of a basic wanderlust. To test whether such a paradigm really exists, it is useful to look at some of the other cities and regions to which he travels and see if it is applicable there as well. Its various features are not, of course, always totally present and they may, at times, be permeated or changed by the traveller's other interests and prejudices, his vivid imagination and, indeed, his capacity for invention. But let us briefly take five cities or regions which are mentioned elsewhere in the Riḥla and see whether the pattern which has been posited holds true.

In Najaf, one of the great Shi‘ite centres of culture and learning, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa takes a considerable interest in the alleged tomb of ‘Alī⁶⁹ and eagerly soaks up information from ‘trustworthy individuals’ as well as three cripples hailing from Byzantium, Iṣfahān and Khurāsān, about healing miracles occurring every year on a certain ‘night of life’ (laylat al-Maḥyā) at the mausoleum.⁷⁰ The power and rank of the Naqīb al-Ashrāf, who governs Najaf, exercise the usual fascination over the traveller's mind and Ibn Baṭṭūṭa devotes some space to anecdotal material about a former incumbent of the office, Abū Ghurra.⁷¹ On leaving the city, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's wanderlust clearly transcends his justified fear of the inhabitants and highwaymen of the area between Najaf and Baṣra.⁷²

In Isfahān Ibn Baṭṭūṭa chooses to stay in a convent much visited by people seeking baraka because it is associated with an ascetic disciple of al-Junayd. The traveller is warmly welcomed and honoured by the Convent Shaykh who ultimately invests him with the robe of the Suhrawardī Sūfī order, thereby satisfying in the one action Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's constant yearning for recognition, fascination with taṣawwuf, and love of arcane knowledge and lore. The latter is particularly apparent in the way he records in the Riḥla after describing the investiture, what he now considers to be his own ṣūfī silsila which he has clearly attempted to memorise from the Shaykh himself or his learned associates in the Convent.⁷³ After Iṣfahān a ten-day journey, with a view to visiting a certain Shaykh in Shīrāz, is contemplated with equanimity or, at least, without comment.⁷⁴

Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's one month and six days' sojourn⁷⁵ in Constantinople is marked by a similar collection of features: he is intrigued by the Christian places of prayer, whether they be the great church of Hagia Sophia or the city's monasteries.⁷⁶ He converses at length with the Qāḍī of Constantinople,⁷⁷ meets the ruler of the city⁷⁸ and also a monk named Jirjīs whom he believes to have been the former ruler.⁷⁹ Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's ‘raḥḥāla impulse’ is clearly indulged to the full in his roaming about the city every day.⁸⁰ And the same pattern manifests itself all over again in and around Delhi: he provides a vivid description of the great Mosque of Delhi⁸¹ and lauds the power possessed by the much-venerated tomb of the Shaykh Quṭb al-Dīn Bakhtiyār al-Ka‘kī of the Chistī order.⁸² Ibn Baṭṭūṭa has his ample share of contact with the scholarly and the pious in Delhi,⁸³ as well as welcome and unwelcome recognition and power. The unstable and bloodthirsty ruler of Delhi, Sulṭān Muḥammad ibn Tughluq, showers him with gifts⁸⁴ and ultimately invests him with the Qadiship of Delhi⁸⁵ and an ambassadorship to China.⁸⁶ In between holding the latter two offices, however, he suffers the indignity of being placed under guard by the Sulṭān, having incurred the latter's displeasure.⁸⁷ Finally, his wanderlust surfaces readily in his eagerness to go hunting with the Sulṭān⁸⁸ and his (thwarted) attempt to go out on an expedition organised to fight the Sulṭān's enemies as well.⁸⁹

It is, perhaps, in our fifth and final example, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's sojourn in Ceylon, that we come closest to finding articulated the original Meccan paradigm. On Adam's Peak is a shrine or better, place of religious visitation par excellence: this is the footprint of Adam⁹⁰ and the visit to it has its own peculiar customs and pilgrim rituals.⁹¹ The traveller absorbs (though he does not necessarily believe) the stories of the Yogis,⁹² and he finds his lust for proper recognition sated in full measure by the hospitable and kindly reception which he receives from the infidel ruler whom he calls Sulṭān Ayrī Shakarwatī (Arya Chakravarti).⁹³ The enthusiasm with which Ibn Baṭṭūṭa seeks permission from the latter to undertake the difficult journey to the ‘Foot of Adam’ is yet a further simple indication of the traveller's innate wanderlust combined with curiosity.⁹⁴

The five examples which we have provided above may not rigidly reflect, or adhere to, what has been termed ‘the pilgrim paradigm’ in every tiny detail. None the less, that paradigm is sufficiently present in each case: in other words, the illustrations chosen from a number of disparate cities and areas do show that there is an underlying, and therefore unifying, set of constants, in the narrative of each visit. The Arabian section of the Riḥla does, therefore, present a paradigm of features which are coherent, relevant and applicable to other areas of the text.

Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's work, of course, constitutes a particular development of the Riḥla form:⁹⁵ it is, so to speak, a canonisation of that form. If we turn back briefly to an earlier, and almost equally famous, Riḥla, that of Ibn Jubayr (ad 1145-1217),⁹⁶ with which it is logical to make a comparison, we find a much more fluid travelogue: this is the record of a pilgrim journey undertaken for a different purpose, much shorter in terms of both time and distance travelled and not so much a frame story as a simple narrative of a voyage undertaken and experienced.⁹⁷ We may conclude with a, perhaps not inappropriate, gardening analogy: if Ibn Jubayr's work resembles the somewhat disordered ‘swampy, treeless land about Versailles’ in the days before the advent of Louis XIV's master-gardener André Le Nôtre (ad 1613-1700), then Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's paradigmatic frame is akin—without too much exaggeration—to the ordered formalism of that gardener's great achievement at Versailles when he had finished.⁹⁸ The ‘pilgrim paradigm’ which we have proposed is both a ‘way of seeing’ or examining the age in which Ibn Baṭṭūṭa himself operated as well as a broader representation of some of the primary impulses of that which, for the sake of convenience, we describe loosely as ‘Islam’ itself.⁹⁹

Notes

1. E.g. by Herman F. Janssens, Ibn Batouta ‘le voyageur de l'Islam’ (1304-1369), (Office de Publicité, Brussels, 1948).

2. Ivan Hrbek, ‘The Chronology of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Travels’, Archiv Orientální, vol. 30 (1962), pp. 409-86.

3. G.-H. Bousquet, ‘Ibn Baṭṭūṭa et les Institutions Musulmanes’, Studia Islamica, vol. 24 (1966), pp. 81-106.

4. J.N. Mattock, ‘The Travel Writings of Ibn Jubair and Ibn Baṭūṭa’, Glasgow Oriental Society Transactions, vol. 21 (1965-66), pp. 35-46.

5. Dorothy Middleton, ‘The Hakluyt Society 1846-1923’ in Annual Report and Statement of Accounts for 1984 (Hakluyt Society, London, 1985), p. 14. The relevant Hakluyt volumes are H. A. R. Gibb, The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa ad 1325-1354,trans. from the Arabic text ed. by C. Defrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti, 3 vols. (Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, Cambridge, 1958-71).

6. Ian Richard Netton, ‘Myth, Miracle and Magic in the Riḥla of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’, Journal of Semitic Studies, vol. 29:1 (1984), pp. 131-40.

7. Ibid., p. 133.

8. For references to Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's editor, Ibn Juzayy, see my ‘Myth, Miracle and Magic’, p. 132, nn. 4, 6.

9. For a discussion of the word ‘conjuncture’, see his La Méditerranée (1966), vol. 2, pp. 213-20. (Full bibliographical details appear below in n. 12.)

10. (Librairie Armand Colin, Paris, 1979).

11. (Librairie Armand Colin, Paris, 1949; 2nd rev. ed. 1966); trans. of 2nd rev. ed. by Siân Reynolds, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. (Collins, London, 1972).

12. Méditerranée, vol. 1, pp. 16-17.

13. E.g. in 1326, 1332, 1349.

14. Riḥlat Ibn Baṭṭūṭa hereafter referred to as Riḥla (Dār Sādir, Beirut, 1964), pp. 110-20.

15. Ibid., p. 126.

16. Ibid., pp. 128-30.

17. Ibid., pp. 130-46.

18. Ibid., pp. 148-68.

19. Gibb, Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, vol. 1, p. 245, n. 225.

20. Riḥla, pp. 169-71.

21. Ibid., pp. 172-218.

22. See my ‘Myth, Miracle and Magic’, p. 132, n. 6.

23. Ibid., p. 132.

24. Riḥla, p. 111-12.

25. Ibid., p. 126.

26. Ibid., p. 173.

27. E.g. ibid., p. 174. See also the story recounted on p. 112 in which a caravan's water supplies dried up.

28. See Braudel, Méditerranée, vol. 1, pp. 56-9.

29. Riḥla, p. 111; see also the reference to the awful wilderness between Tabūk and al-‘Ulā, p. 112. For deserts and oases see Braudel, Méditerranée, vol. 1, pp. 156-65, 169-70.

30. Riḥla, pp. 112-13. See Braudel, Méditerranée, vol. 1, p. 223 for the impact of the sirocco and ibid., pp. 229, 231 for that of the mistral.

31. Méditerranée, vol. 1, p. 169.

32. Riḥla, pp. 132, 164.

33. Méditerranée, vol. 1, p. 158.

34. E.g. see the references to provisions and transports, including water-carrying camels for the foot pilgrims, in the Iraqi caravan, Riḥla, p. 172.

35. Braudel, Méditerranée, vol. 1, p. 171.

36. Riḥla, pp. 113, 175.

37. Gibb, Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, vol. 1, p. 159, n. 10.

38. Braudel, Méditerranée, vol. 1, pp. 165-6.

39. Riḥla, pp. 172-3; see n. 35 above.

40. Braudel, Méditerranée, vol. 1, p. 165.

41. Riḥla, p. 174.

42. Braudel, Méditerranée, vol. 2, pp. 190-1.

43. Compare the Cossack attacks on caravans along the Volga, Méditerranée, vol. 1, p. 178.

44. See my ‘Myth, Miracle and Magic’, pp. 138-9 for an assessment of the kind of ‘ālim that Ibn Baṭṭūṭa was.

45. Riḥla, p. 112.

46. Ibid., p. 129. See John 2: 1-11.

47. Riḥla, p. 112.

48. Ibid., p. 129.

49. Ibid., p. 128.

50. Ibid., p. 110.

51. Ibid., p. 127.

52. Ibid., pp. 150, 151.

53. See my ‘Myth, Miracle and Magic’, p. 138, esp. n. 40.

54. See, for example, his sharing of the content of a dream with the Imām of the Malikites at Mecca, Abū ‘Abdullāh Muḥammad, Riḥla, pp. 150-1.

55. Méditerranée, vol. 2, p. 223.

56. See my ‘Myth, Miracle and Magic’, pp. 132-3.

57. For ijāzāt acquired in Damascus, see Riḥla, pp. 108-10.

58. E.g. Riḥla, pp. 633, 637-8.

59. E.g. see ibid., p. 17.

60. E.g. ibid., p. 201.

61. E.g. ibid., pp. 19-20.

62. Ibid., p. 530.

63. Ibid., p. 588.

64. Ibid., p. 172.

65. E.g. see his account of the two Amīrs of Mecca, ibid., p. 148.

66. See the trans. by Wilfred H. Schoff (Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, New Delhi, 1974, [repr. from the Longmans, Green & Co., New York, 1912 edition]), and the more recent trans. by G. W. B. Huntingford (The Hakluyt Society, London, 1980).

67. See his The Brendan Voyage (Hutchinson, London, 1978) and The Sindbad Voyage (Hutchinson, London, 1982). See also his most recent volume The Jason Voyage: The Quest for the Golden Fleece (Hutchinson, London, 1985).

68. Riḥla, p. 191.

69. Ibid., pp. 176, 182.

70. Ibid., pp. 176-8.

71. Ibid., pp. 179-82.

72. Ibid., pp. 182-3.

73. Ibid., pp. 200-2. See Ibn Juzayy's somewhat snide commentary on this silsila, p. 202.

74. Ibid., p. 202.

75. Ibid., p. 356.

76. Ibid., pp. 351-4.

77. Ibid., p. 355.

78. Ibid., pp. 349-50.

79. Ibid., pp. 349, 354-5.

80. Ibid., p. 350.

81. Ibid., pp. 416-17.

82. Ibid., p. 419.

83. Ibid., pp. 419-20.

84. E.g. ibid., pp. 453, 507.

85. Ibid., p. 512.

86. Ibid., p. 530.

87. Ibid., p. 528.

88. Ibid., p. 517.

89. Ibid., p. 522.

90. Or the footprint of Shiva or Buddha depending on one's religious affiliation! See H. A. R. Gibb, Ibn Battúta: Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354, The Broadway Travellers (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1929), p. 365, n. 5.

91. Riḥla, pp. 598-600.

92. Ibid., pp. 597, 600.

93. Ibid., p. 594.

94. Ibid.

95. See my ‘Myth, Miracle and Magic’, p. 133.

96. Riḥla (Dār Sādir, Beirut, 1964).

97. See my article ‘Ibn Jubayr: Penitent Pilgrim and Observant Traveller’, UR [University Review], No. 2 (1985), pp. 14-17.

98. See Lucy Norton, The Sun King and his Loves (The Folio Society, London, 1982), pp. 39-41.

99. See Masterman, ‘The Nature of a Paradigm’, pp. 76-77.

I am indebted to the writings of my colleague Professor Aziz Al-Azmeh for suggesting to me a ‘paradigmatic’ approach to the Riḥla of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa. See M. Masterman, ‘The Nature of a Paradigm’ in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Proceedings of the International Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science, London, 1965, vol. 4 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1970), pp. 59-90. (I owe this reference to Professor Al-Azmeh.) See especially p. 62, n. 5 and p. 63, n. 11.