The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (12 page)

The colleges were the vital centers of intellectual and civic life wherein the religious, social, and cultural norms governing Egyptian society were taught and exemplified. A
madrasa
was in fact a mosque, though one designed primarily for teaching rather than for congregational prayer. It was Saladin who brought the
madrasa
idea from Iraq to Cairo in the twelfth century with the specific intention of founding Sunni schools to combat and suppress the Shi’i doctrines of the preceding Fatimid dynasty. As the city grew and prospered new colleges sprang up one after another, enough of them by the fourteenth century to elicit Ibn Battuta’s comment that “as for the
madrasas
in Cairo, they are too many for anyone to count.” The colleges of the Mamluk age were designed on a cruciform plan with a relatively small open courtyard, in contrast to the vast spaces within the chief congregational, or Friday, mosques. Opening onto the court were four vaulted halls, or
liwans
, where classes were normally held.
This was the classic
madrasa
form of Ibn Battuta’s time, providing in fact the model for Marinid college building in Morocco.

The college curriculum offered in Cairo would have been perfectly familiar to Ibn Battuta, as it was largely identical to what was presented in North African schools, except that the Shafi’i system of law was dominant rather than the Maliki. As in Tunis, Fez, or Tangier, education turned on the revealed and linguistic sciences, especially law. Studies in medicine, astronomy, mathematics, and philosophy were also available, though the teaching was usually conducted privately rather than in the
madrasas
. Cairo in the Mamluk age did not nurture people of creative originality (with the notable exception of Ibn Khaldun, who was a Tunisian but moved permanently to Egypt in 1383), but it did produce theologians, jurisprudents, historians, encyclopedists, and biographers of spectacular erudition and nimbleness of mind. It was these luminaries that Ibn Battuta, and hundreds of scholars like him from throughout the Arabic-, Persian-, and Turkish-speaking Islamic world, came to the great city to see and hear.
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Ibn Battuta might well have remained in Cairo much longer than a month, since at the end of that time (mid May 1326) there still remained more than five months before the start of the
hajj
rituals in Mecca. The official Egyptian caravan, which traveled to the Hijaz across Sinai under the protection of the Mamluks, did not normally leave Cairo until the middle of the month of Shawwal, in that year mid September.
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But Ibn Battuta had an impetuousness about him (as he had already demonstrated in his journey across North Africa), and he was not inclined to wait for caravans or fellow travelers for very long. In fact he decided to proceed to Mecca on his own, not by the Sinai route at all, but by way of Upper Egypt to the Red Sea port of ’Aydhab and from there by ship to Jidda on the Hijaz coast.

Pilgrims traveled both the northern and southern routes out of Cairo in the first half of the fourteenth century. The Sinai road was the shorter of the two, and it was relatively more secure because the sultans sponsored annual caravans and dispatched army units to maintain and police the route. The southerly track to ’Aydhab and Jidda was longer and there was no officially organized caravan. But this was the route of the spices, in Ibn Battuta’s time one of the busiest and strategically most important lanes of international
trade in the Afro–Eurasian world. The commercial infrastructure of trails, river transport, cameleers,
khans
, and markets was extensively developed and elaborately organized, affording the wayfarer a normally safe journey from Cairo to ’Aydhab.

Moreover, a pilgrim could normally expect to travel all the way to that town, located near the modern Sudanese border, without passing beyond the reach of Mamluk law and order. The sultan posted garrisons in Qus, Idfu, Aswan, and other important towns on the river and, when the situation called for it, dispatched punitive expeditions against the Arab or Beja tribes of the desert and Red Sea Hills. These unruly herdsmen, in normal times collaborators in the transit trade as guides and camel drivers, were quick to despoil caravans or defy Mamluk authority whenever the opportunity was too tempting to resist — a fact of Egyptian politics not, as we shall see, to be lost on Ibn Battuta.

The young pilgrim’s two-to three-week journey up the Nile valley to the town of Idfu was accomplished without much adventure. He traveled by land rather than on the river, and at several points along the way he lodged in the homes, colleges, or lodges of scholars and Sufis.
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While passing through the town of Minya, he became embroiled in a minor incident, interesting for what it reveals of his high sense of civilized propriety — as well as a less appealing inclination to sanctimonious meddling:

One day I entered the bath-house in this township, and found men in it wearing no covering. This appeared a shocking thing to me, and I went to the governor and informed him of it. He told me not to leave and ordered the lessees of (all) the bathhouses to be brought before him. Articles were formally drawn up (then and there) making them subject to penalties if any person should enter a bath without a waist-wrapper, and the governor behaved to them with the greatest severity, after which I took leave of him.

A grateful governor and an annoyed corps of bath operators behind him, he continued on to Idfu, one of the principal transshipment centers for the overland haul to the coast. Here he crossed to the east bank of the river, hired camels, and set out for ’Aydhab in the company of a party of bedouin Arabs. Their trek southeastward through the desert and then over the bare and
smouldering Red Sea Hills took 15 days, about the normal time for the trip.
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Although Ibn Battuta’s brief description of ’Aydhab — its mosque, its men of learning, some customs of the inhabitants — is factual and detached, a traveler coming out of the desert would be likely to react to the town with a discomfiting ambivalence. On the one hand it was a flourishing port, its warehouses crammed with pepper, cloves, ivory, pearls, textiles, Chinese procelain, and all manner of exotic goods from Asia and tropical Africa, as well as the linen, silk, coral, sugar, and precious metals of Egypt and the Mediterranean. On the other hand, the fiery climate, the barren surroundings, and the country crudeness of the local hill folk made ’Aydhab one of the most uninviting transit stops anywhere from the Mediterranean to China. Thousands passed through, but no one stayed a moment longer than required. Ibn Jubayr, the celebrated Andalusian pilgrim and
rihla
writer of the twelfth century, despised the place. After noting in his book that the town was rich and of great commercial importance, he fervently advised pilgrims to get to Mecca by some other way if they possibly could:

It is enough for you of a place where everything is imported, even water; and this (because of its bitterness) is less agreeable than thirst. We had lived between air that melts the body and water that turns the stomach from appetite for food. He did no injustice to this town who sang, “Brackish of water and flaming of air.”
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Ibn Jubayr also took pains to warn travelers against the avarice of the ship captains, who loaded their vessels with pilgrims “until they sit one on top of the other so that they are like chickens crammed in a coop.”
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Somehow enduring these indignities, not to mention delays and storms, Ibn Jubayr had managed to reach Jidda after a week under sail and so continued on to Mecca. Ibn Battuta, as it happened, was not so lucky. When earlier he had passed through the town of Hiw (Hu) on the Nile, he paid a visit to a saintly
sharif
(descendant of the Prophet), one Abu Muhammad ’Abdallah al-Hasani. Upon hearing of the young man’s intention to go to Mecca, the
sharif
warned him to return to Cairo, prophesying that he would not make his first pilgrimage except by the road through Syria. Ignoring the omen, Ibn Battuta had continued on his way southward. Reaching ’Aydhab, he discovered much to
his chagrin that the local ruling family, a clan of the Beja people who inhabited the hills behind the city, were in revolt against the Mamluk governor.
¹⁹
The rebels had sunk some ships in the harbor, driven out the Egyptian garrison, and in this climate of violence no one was hoisting sail for Jidda. If he were to be assured of reaching the Hijaz before the start of the
hajj
, Ibn Battuta had no real choice but to retrace his steps to Cairo and continue from there by one of the northern routes.

Fortunately, the trip back did not take long. The Nile was reaching summer flood stage, and so after crossing the desert again and rejoining the river at Qus, he boarded a ship and returned to the capital in eight short days, arriving there, he recalls, in mid July.

Perhaps during his voyage down the river, where he had the leisure to think out his plans, he came to the conclusion that if he did not linger in Cairo he could reach Syria in time to catch the
hajj
caravan which normally left Damascus on or about 10 Shawwal (10 September of that year), or about two weeks earlier than the departure of the pilgrims from Cairo.
²⁰
It may have been his rather happy-go-lucky impetuosity that was driving him, or perhaps he thought it prudent to heed the word of the
sharif
of Hiw that he was destined to reach Mecca by way of Syria. In any case he stayed in Cairo, astonishingly enough, only one night before setting out for Syria, the Asian half of the Mamluk empire.

The main route from Cairo to Damascus was the royal road of the kingdom, since Damascus was a kind of second capital, responsible for the military governance of Greater Syria and for the defense of the eastern marches against the Mongols of Persia. The sultan himself frequently traveled to Damascus, usually in the company of an army. Moreover, Damascus was as great a city as Cairo in the production of luxury goods. The military lords of Egypt depended heavily on the caravans from Syria for their fine silks and brocades, their ceramics and glassware, their magnificent tents and horse-trappings, all of these articles traded mainly for Egyptian textiles and grain. Damascene artisans, such as masons, marble workers, and plasterers, frequently accompanied the caravans to Cairo to work in the construction of palaces, mausoleums, and mosques. For both commercial and political reasons, then, the Mamluks were assiduous in protecting and provisioning the Cairo–Damascus artery, hemming it with garrison posts and building bridges and caravansaries to facilitate the passage of people and goods.

If Ibn Battuta had gone to Mecca with the Egyptian
hajj
caravan, he
would have traveled due east across the peninsula to Aqaba, then southward into the Hijaz. Instead, he set a northeastward course through the farming towns of the eastern delta and from there along the sandy Mediterranean plain to Gaza, the desert portal to Palestine. We have no idea with whom he may have been traveling, though he refers vaguely in the
Rihla
to “those who were with me” on this stretch of his journey. All along this trail the government provided public caravansaries where, according to the
Rihla
, “travelers alight with their beasts, and outside each
khan
is a public wateringplace and a shop at which the traveler may buy what he requires for himself and his beast.” At Qatya, a station located several miles east of the modern day Suez Canal, the state maintained a customs house where officials examined passports and merchandise and collected a bonanza in duties from the mercantile caravans moving between Syria and Egypt. Symon Semeonis, who passed through Qatya in 1323, describes Mamluk police techniques:

The village . . . is entirely surrounded by the desert and is furnished with neither fortifications nor natural obstacles of any kind that might impede the passage of travelers. Every evening after sunset a straw-mat or carpet is drawn at the tail of a horse, sometimes near the village, sometimes far from it, now in one place, now in another, transversely to the route, for a distance of six or eight miles, more or less, according to the Admiral’s orders. This renders the sand so smooth that it is impossible for either man or beast to pass without leaving traces to expose their passage. Every morning before sunrise the plain is scoured in all directions by specially appointed horsemen, and whenever any traces of pedestrians or of horsemen are discovered, the guards hasten in pursuit and those who have passed are arrested as transgressors of the Sultan’s regulations and are severely punished.
²¹

At Gaza Ibn Battuta turned off the heavily traveled road leading to the Levantine ports and headed eastward into the high country of Judaea, having in mind to visit the sacred cities of Hebron (al-Khalil) and Jerusalem before continuing to Damascus.
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The trail along the hilly backbone of Palestine, from Hebron to the Galilee, was not an important commercial road, but it was a route of pilgrimage for all three monotheistic faiths. After the wars of the
Crusades ended in the 1290s, increasing numbers of Latin pilgrims traveled to the Holy Land in small groups, by way of either Egypt or the Levant. Although they were frequently harassed and invariably overcharged, usually by local Muslims of the meaner sort, the Mamluk authorities, particularly in the fourteenth century, generally saw to it that they were protected from bodily harm.

Hebron was special to Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike because it was the burial place of the fathers of monotheism: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as well as their wives and Jacob’s son Joseph. In Mamluk times only Muslims were permitted to enter the mosque, built originally as a Crusader church, that stood over the tomb cave containing cenotaphs of the three Patriarchs. In the
Rihla
Ibn Battuta describes the mosque, a massive stone structure “of striking beauty and imposing height,” as well as the cenotaphs standing inside, as a traveler of any faith might see them today. He also offers learned testimony to the truth of the tradition that the three graves do indeed lie beneath the mosque, a tradition verified by Frankish knights, who opened the cave in 1119 and discovered what were presumably the holy bones.
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