Ibn Battuta

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Introduction to Ibn Battuta in Black Africa

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SOURCE: Hamdun, Said and Noël King. Introduction to Ibn Battuta in Black Africa, pp. 1-9, 12. Princeton, N. J.: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1994.

[In the following excerpt from an essay first published in 1975, Hamdun and King offer an evaluation of Ibn Battuta's travel narrative.]

Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, who was born at Tangier in North Africa in 1304 and died not far from there some sixty-five years later, was the greatest of the pre-modern travellers and will go down in history as being notable among the travellers of all time. Benjamin of Tudela, a Jew from Spain who in the second half of the twelfth century travelled to Baghdad and back, hardly touched central or south Asia and did not penetrate Africa. Marco Polo (1254-1324), a Christian, reached China and returned to Venice by way of south-east Asia and India, but he did not get into Africa. Chinese travellers reached Europe but did not go inland in Arabia or to West Africa, or even pass through the hinterland of Arab Africa.

On his side, ibn Baṭṭūṭa set out from his home town in North Africa at the age of twenty-one, and travelled till he was nearly fifty. He went across the countries we would today call Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon and Syria, then southwards through Jordan into Arabia to Mecca. There he spent some years and from there visited Iraq and Iran as well as southern Arabia. He visited the coast of the Sudan, went back to south Arabia and from Aden went on southwards to Somalia and Tanzania. He then visited the Persian Gulf and returned to Mecca by an overland route. From there he journeyed through Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, the Crimea and the Balkans to Constantinople; thence through southern Russia and central Asia to Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. From Delhi he went to south India and the Maldives, Ceylon, Assam and Bengal (areas now in India and Bangladesh). He journeyed on through Malaysia and Indonesia to China. On returning home to Tangier he visited Spain, and finally walked across the Sahara to ancient Malli. It is the black African section of his travels which confirms his pre-eminence, and it is this part of his narrative which is the subject of this book.

Besides the places he visited and the incredible distances he travelled on foot or on the backs of horses and camels, ibn Baṭṭūṭa is notable for the picture he gives of the Islamic world of his day. This came nearest to being the first genuinely world civilization which ever existed before the Americas and Australia were added to ‘the known world’. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa as a person from a North African town could feel genuinely part of it. By descent he was Berber—and nobody knows how long ago the Berbers came to Africa—history mentions them hundreds of years before it tells of people speaking Bantu languages; they are about as African as anybody can be. By language and culture he was an Arab and a Muslim. This sharing in the world of Islam meant he could travel without money or resources and everywhere find he could understand and be understood, obtain hospitality as well as rich gifts from rulers or from Muslim merchants. It is true that in some respects Islamic civilization had passed its zenith: the Arab conquests of the first Islamic century since the migration of the Prophet to Medina in a.d. 622 had been followed up by the rise of the superb civilizations of the Mahrib (north-western Africa), Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Persia. The Empire of the Caliphs and other parts of the Islamic world had suffered much at the hands of the Mongols who took Baghdad in 1258, and, in ibn Baṭṭūṭa's own day, the Black Death was to decimate whole countrysides. But following the Mongol opening up of Central Asia, Islamic civilization was able to penetrate even more widely. The new peoples coming westwards from Central Asia of ‘Turkish’ background were converted, and glorious Muslim civilizations arose in Turkey and India.

In the meantime, Islam had journeyed far into Africa and South-East Asia and there were flourishing Muslim communities and outposts in West and East Africa as well as in Malaysia and Indonesia. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa sets before us a breathtaking panorama of a civilization which included or touched upon every part of the world other than the Americas and Australia. He gives us an unforgettable picture of Islamic culture, hospitality, scholarship and holiness.

As a bonus, from his own description, we learn a great deal about the man himself, in fact, there are few pre-modern people of whom we can obtain so vivid a picture. We get to know a very remarkable human being, who is somehow so real and like ourselves that soon we enter the more deeply into the narrative and see things through his eyes. He is insatiably curious and his interests are impressively wide. He is concerned not only with kings, politics, geography, routes and wealth; but also he takes an intense interest in local products, especially the food and the women. He has deep prejudices, for instance, against schismatics in Islam whose views differ from his own, and against unbelievers and rationalists. Yet reading these travels is a sure antidote to the eurocentricity of most American and European medieval historians, for here we have a writer who could view things Magribian, Egyptian, Syrian, Byzantine, Persian, Arabian, Indian, Chinese, Italian, Spanish and African with the same impartial acceptances, enjoyments and rejections.

Ibn Baṭṭūṭa has his pettinesses. He loves name-dropping: trying to impress us by reciting the names of the people whom he met or with whom he was connected in scholarly learning or holiness. Yet it was these connections which were his ‘traveller's cheques’ which produced funds from donors as he travelled. He loves a fine spectacle, and his pages are full of the pomp and circumstance of parades and processions. Yet his book was intended to entertain as well as instruct and, despite oneself, using ibn Baṭṭūṭa as proxy, one enjoys the triumph, the glory and the splendour of it all. This world-traveller is something of an old prude; he gets quite upset at seeing young women whose breasts had formed going round in the nude, but he is equally outraged in a men's public bath to find men bathing without loincloths.

He enjoys his dignity and comforts. He lets slip that he never travels without a slave-girl or two, and he is avaricious in his desire for rich donations from Muslim rulers and not averse to drawing their attention to their duty to give him gifts by means which fall little short of blackmail. He carefully puts down anyone who might claim to have travelled as much as he has. He does not fail to report his illnesses. He seems to have experienced most travellers' diseases from Lahore sore to Delhi belly. Only the fact that the New World had not been discovered saved him from Montezuma's revenge.

Yet ibn Baṭṭūṭa is a man of courage. He never reveals any fear of the ocean, though he did not take to sea travel till comparatively late in his career and faced some terrifying storms. He loves luxury and yet he received his calling to be a traveller almost as Saint Paul received his vocation to Apostleship. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa betrays that he would have enjoyed a regular home life and seeing his children grow up before his eyes. He was also generous to others and sensitive to their suffering, whether they were Hindu women committing sutee or slave-boys thirsty in the desert. For a man who is so interesting a character and who achieved so much, it is surprising how little about him his contemporaries have passed on to us.

Ibn Hajar of Ascalon who died in a.d. 1448 has a note about ibn Baṭṭūṭa in his Hidden Pearls.1 He gives his name in full as ‘Muḥammad ibn Abdallāh ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Muḥammad ibn Ibrāhīm ibn Yūsuf of the Luwāta tribe [a Berber group] and the city of Tangier’. He says that ibn Khaṭīb remarks (to translate colloquially): ‘He had not too much of what it takes.’ Gibb translates this as: ‘He had a modest share of the sciences.’2 Presumably the meaning is that he was not really a scholar. The biographer gives ibn Khaṭīb's summary of ibn Baṭṭūṭa's travels and goes on to say that ibn Marzūq reported that ‘Abdallāh ibn Juzayy was told to write up the traveller's narrative by the sultan; ibn Baṭṭūṭa was suspected of telling lies but ibn Marzūq considered him innocent.3 He also reports that he lived on till the seventieth year of the eighth Muslim century (a.d. 1368-1369), and died while serving as qāḍi in some town or another. He remarks on his pre-eminence as a traveller and adds that he was a very generous and gracious person.

The only other contemporary material we have is to be found in ibn Khaldūn's Muqaddimah.4 He says that when ibn Baṭṭūṭa, a shaikh from Tangier, returned to the Maghrib after twenty years of travel, he told many stories, especially about India. It was suspected that he was a liar, but ibn Khaldūn consulted one of the court officials who told him of a man who was put in prison with his son and the boy grew up therein. The lad asked his father about the animals whose flesh was served to them—mutton, beef, camel-meat. However well his father described them, for the boy sheep, cows and camels were only types of rat, for rats were the only animals he had seen.

Bearing this salutary parable in mind, we too must ask to what extent we can trust this narrative. It is clear that now and then ibn Baṭṭūṭa succumbs to every traveller's or raconteur's temptation to embellish his narrative. Thus, when he had reached the Black Sea, he gives a rather suspicious narrative of a visit to Bulghar in which he covered about a thousand miles in less than two weeks. When travelling in far eastern seas on the way to China he tells of a visit to a state which is ruled by women; historians find great difficulty in locating it. On the way back from China he tells of a storm after which they saw a shape like a mountain and his companions said it was the ruq, an enormous bird which would destroy them if it saw them. Luckily the wind changed and they got away. Even so, he does not actually say he saw it. These are the most notable examples in the whole narrative, and even with them it is cruel to compare him with Gulliver, though the ruq may just remind us of Sindbad.

In the main, ibn Baṭṭūṭa himself is one of the most reliable sources that has come down to us from pre-modern times. To say this is not to guarantee everything in the Travels. A traveller of this kind could hardly carry elaborate notes or send home regular reports. Moreover, ibn Baṭṭūṭa underwent such adventures as shipwreck and an armed robbery which left him with only his trousers. The man obviously had a prodigious memory—but the best of memories can deceive, especially where the same place is visited more than once. The old gentleman's narrative was dictated to a scribe who would inevitably make a few mistakes. It was edited by ibn Juzayy, who in his description of his task states that the sultan told ibn Baṭṭūṭa to dictate a description of the places he had seen, of the happenings he remembered, and of the kings, scholars and holy men he had met. The resultant narrative was interesting in itself, gave joy to the reader and hearer as well as being instructive. Ibn Juzayy's task was to put it together in the form of a work which brought out the usefulness of the material, caused it to conform to elegant literary usage, and made it generally suitable for pleasure in reading and edification. Sometimes he had re-expressed ibn Baṭṭūṭa's meaning in his own words but often he had used the traveller's own narrative. He had not attempted to verify anything, for ibn Baṭṭūṭa himself vouches for what he has seen and clearly states what is hearsay. He (ibn Juzayy) had indicated the full pronunciation of strange names and sounds by indicating vowels where necessary.5

After ibn Juzayy and the first scribe had finished, the manuscript had to be copied. Luckily there are available at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris some excellent manuscripts. Indeed, part of one of them may have come from the hands of ibn Juzayy himself. …

Ibn Juzayy ends his work of editing with the remark: ‘It would not be concealed from anybody of sound mind that this shaikh [ibn Baṭṭūṭa] was the traveller of the age, and he who says this man is the [supreme] traveller of this community [Islam] would not be far from the truth’. This tribute remains true six centuries later, and indeed one could say even more in praise of this great man.

Notes

  1. Al-Durar al-Kāmina, Hyderabad, Andra Pradesh, III, 1929, pp. 480-481.

  2. Ibn Khaṭīb was an official of the court at Grenada who died in 1374. The quotation of H. A. R. Gibb is from his Hakluyt edition and translation of The Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa. Cambridge, 1958, vol I, p. ix. We shall herafter abbreviate references to this series as ‘Gibb: Hakluyt’ and give the page and volume number. The Introduction to the whole work is in volume I and the East African section in volume II. The West African section is in volume IV which has not yet been published. Our debt to Gibb is great and we follow his chronology of his Hakluyt series where available, otherwise that of his Selections (London, 1929). Sometimes we have accepted the chronological revisions of Ivan Hrbek, ‘The Chronology of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Travels’, Archiv Orientální, XXX, 1962, pp. 409-486.

  3. Ibn Marzūq came from Tlemsen in Algeria, held an important post for some years in Cairo and died in 1379. Ibn Juzayy was a scholar who came from Grenada and died in 1356 or 1358. He was clearly an editor and writer of some brilliance and we owe him much, especially for his forbearance with some of the apparently whimsical but inimitable details the traveller gives. The sultan of Morocco was Abū ‘Inān who reigned 1348-1358.

  4. An Introduction to History, translated by Franz Rosenthal, Princeton, vol. I, 1958, pp. 369-371.

  5. C. Defrémery et B. R. Sanguinetti, Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah, Paris, 1893, vol. I, pp. 9-12; Gibb: Hakluyt, vol. I, pp. 5-7.

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