The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (15 page)

He does not report that any unusual tragedies befell his own caravan, and we may suppose that the company kept to the normal schedule. He traveled, he tells us, in the company of a corps of Syrian Arab tribesmen, who may have been serving as guides. He also made the acquaintance of a number of educated travelers like
himself, among them a Maliki jurist from Damascus and a Sufi from Granada whom he would meet again several years later in India. He also struck up a friendship with a gentleman of Medina, who made him his guest during the caravan’s four-day visit to that city.

Medina, where the Prophet Muhammad preached, founded the first Muslim state, and died in 632, was the most bountiful of the little islands of fertility scattered along the slopes of the Hijaz mountains, a green spot of habitation existing in uneasy symbiosis with the bedouin of the desert. Before Islam, it was but one of several commercial stopovers on the camel route linking the Yemen with the Middle East. In 622 A.D. Muhammad and his tiny band of converts, retreating from a histile and uncomprehending Mecca, moved north to Medina, which in the ensuing 34 years enjoyed its brief moment of political glory as the capital of the rapidly expanding Arab empire. After the center of Muslim power shifted to Damascus, Medina lost its political and military importance and would have been relegated once again to the back ridges of history were it not that the grave of the Prophet became an object of veneration.

The Mosque of the Prophet, which sheltered the sacred tomb as well as those of his daughter Fatima and the Caliphs Abu Bakr and ’Umar, became “al-Haram,” a place of inviolability. In the Middle Period Medina was as much a city of pilgrims as Mecca was; even the native townsmen were largely of non-Arabian origin. A journey to the Mosque of the Prophet was not obligatory for Muslims as part of the
hajj
duties. Nonetheless, few pilgrims failed to visit Medina, even though they may have reached the Hijaz from the west or south and would not pass through the city except as a special diversion from Mecca.

On the evening of the same day that the caravan made camp outside the walls of the city, Ibn Battuta and his companions went to the mosque, “rejoicing at this most signal favor, . . . praising God Most High for our safe arrival at the sacred abodes of His Apostle.” The sanctuary was in the form of an open court, surrounded on all sides by colonnades. At the southeast corner amidst rows of marble pillars stood the pentagonal tomb of Muhammad, and here Ibn Battuta repaired to pray and give thanks. During the following four days, he tells us in the
Rihla
,

we spent each night in the holy mosque, where everyone [engaged in pious exercises]; some, having formed circles in the court and lit a quantity of candles, and with book-rests in their midst [on which
were placed volumes] of the Holy Qur’an were reciting from it; some were intoning hymns of praise to God; others were occupied in contemplation of the Immaculate Tomb (God increase it in sweetness); while on every side were singers chanting in eulogy of the Apostle of God.

During the days, he undoubtedly found time to visit other mosques and venerated sites in and around the city, including the cemetery (al-Baqi’) east of the walls that contained the graves of numerous kinsmen and Companions of the Prophet. He is also likely to have made a point of seeing the little domed tomb of Malik ibn ’Anas, the great eighth-century jurist and founder of the Maliki school of law.

In the modern age charter buses whisk pilgrims along the paved highway connecting Medina with Mecca, but Ibn Battuta and his fellows faced 200 more miles of fiery desolation before reaching the goal of their hopes. Yet this final stage of the journey was different: haggard wayfarers became celebrants, uplifted and renewed, and the whole dusty company was transformed into a joyous, white-robed procession. The change took place at Dhu l-Hulaifa, a tiny settlement just five miles along the southbound road out of Medina. This was one of the five stations (
mikats
) on the five principal trails leading to Mecca where pilgrims were required to enter into the state of consecration, called
ihram
. Here male pilgrims took off their traveling clothes, washed themselves, prayed, and finally donned the special garment, also called
ihram
, which they would continue to wear until after they entered the Holy City and, if it were the time of the Greater Pilgrimage, performed the rites of
hajj
. The garment consisted of two large, plain, unstitched sheets of white cloth, one of which was wrapped around the waist, reaching to the ankles, the other gathered around the upper part of the body and draped over the left shoulder. Nothing was worn over or beneath the
ihram
, and feet were left bare or shod only in sandals without heels. Women did not put on these garments, but dressed modestly and plainly, covering their heads but leaving their faces unveiled. Once the pilgrim assumed the
ihram
, symbolizing the equality of all men before God, he was required to behave in a manner consistent with the state of sanctity into which he had voluntarily entered. The Prophet warned: “The Pilgrimage is in months well-known; whoso undertakes the duty of Pilgrimage in them shall not go in to
his womenfolk nor indulge in ungodliness and disputing in the Pilgrimage. Whatsoever good you do, God knows it.”
⁵

After fulfilling the ceremonies of
ihram
, the caravan set forth once again, the pilgrims walking straighter now and shouting God’s praises into the great Arabian void. The route followed a southwesterly course across low ridges of the Hijaz hills and then down to the plain bordering the Red Sea. The company reached the coast at Rabigh, a station about 95 miles north of Jidda, where the routes from Syria and Egypt finally converged and where the Egyptian pilgrims took the
ihram
. From here the caravan turned into the desert again, marching now southwestward along the coastal plain. Probably seven days after leaving Rabigh
⁶
they arrived in the morning hours at the gates of Mecca, the Mother of Cities.

It was mid October 1326. Twenty-two years old and a year and four months the pilgrim-adventurer, Ibn Battuta rode triumphantly into Mecca’s narrow, brown valley and proceeded at once to the “illustrious Holy House,” reciting with his companions the prayer of submission to the Divine will.

What is Thy Command? I am here, O God!
What is Thy Command? I am here!
What is Thy Command? I am here!
Thou art without companion!
What is Thy Command? I am here!
⁷

Among the cosmopolitan cities of Ibn Battuta’s time, Mecca was in one sense pre-eminent. From the end of Ramadan and throughout the months of Shawwal and Dhu l-Qa’da, pilgrims from every Islamic land gathered in the city to pray in the Sacred Mosque, and, on the ninth day of the month Dhu l-Hijja, to stand in fellowship on the plain of ’Arafat before the Mount of Mercy. As Islam expanded into more distant parts of Asia and Africa during the Middle Period, the call to the
hajj
embraced an ever-larger and more diverse range of peoples. In the rites of the perambulations around the Ka’ba, the great stone cube that stood in the center of the mosque, Turks of Azerbaijan walked with Malinke of the Western Sudan, Berbers of the Atlas with Indians of Gujerat. The grand mosque, called the Haram, or Sanctuary, was the one place in the world where the adherents of the four
main legal schools, plus Shi’is, Zaydis, ’Ibadis, and other sectarians, prayed together in one place according to their slightly varying ritual forms. Though there was a fixed order of prayer in the mosque for the four schools, reports Ibn Battuta,

at the sunset prayer they pray all at the same time, each imam leading his own congregation. In consequence of this the people are invaded by some wandering of attention and confusion; the Malikite [worshipper] often bows in time with the bowing of the Shafi’ite, and the Hanafite prostrates himself at the prostration of the Hanbalite, and you see them listening attentively each one to the voice of the
muezzin
who is chanting to the congregation of his rite, so that he does not fall victim to his inattention.

Black Muslims and white Muslims, Sunnis and Shi’is all came to Mecca with the single declared purpose to fulfill a holy duty and to worship the One God. But they also came, incidentally, to trade. Pilgrims almost always brought goods with them to sell, sometimes whole caravan loads. The bedouin and oasis-dwellers of the Hijaz and the Yemen hauled in huge quantities of foodstuffs to feed the multitude. Ibn Jubayr wrote of his visit in 1183:

Although there is no commerce save in the pilgrim period, nevertheless, since people gather in it from east and west, there will be sold in one day . . . precious objects such as pearls, sapphires, and other stones, various kinds of perfume such as musk, camphor, amber and aloes, Indian drugs and other articles brought from India and Ethiopia, the products of the industries of Iraq and the Yemen, as well as the merchandise of Khurasan, the goods of the Maghrib, and other wares such as it is impossible to enumerate or correctly assess.
⁸

Though Mecca’s own hinterland was a stony desert, Ibn Jubayr found the market street “overflowing” with “figs, grapes, pomegranates, quinces, peaches, lemons, walnuts, palm-fruit, water-melons, cucumbers and all the vegetables.”
⁹

If Mecca at the season of the
hajj
was a microcosm of all the peoples and all the wares of a good part of Africa and Eurasia, its cosmopolitanism was in other respects shallow. It was a cosmopolitanism derived from a unique annual event and not from
the existence of mighty, urbane educational or philanthropic institutions as was the case with Cairo or Damascus. When the pilgrims rolled up their prayer mats and headed back to their homelands in the latter part of Dhu l-Hijja, the city reverted to the more prosaic activities of a dusty western Arabian town. Though foreign traders, scholars, and stranded poor folk were to be seen in the city all through the year, the population dwindled quickly when the feast days were over. Mecca had no substantial agricultural base of its own and was almost completely dependent on neighboring oases and countries for its sustenance. In those conditions Mecca could never have grown into a metropolis or supported majestic colleges,
khans
, and palaces of the sort that distinguished the mature urban centers of Islam. Though the city had its colleges, most of them were modest, and teaching was largely conducted in the Haram.
¹⁰

If privation and remoteness finally doomed Mecca to second-rate city-hood, those very conditions suited it perfectly as a place for spiritual retreat and ascetic exercise. Simply to live there for a short time was an act of self-denial — at least it was before the age of automobiles, public toilets, and air conditioners. The city lies, not like Medina, in the midst of an oasis, but at the bottom of an arid depression surrounded by a double range of treeless mountains. From the north, the south, and the southwest, three ravines lead the visitor down into “this breathless pit enclosed by walls of rock,”
¹¹
where summer temperatures soar to 126 degrees Fahrenheit. Before modern technology revolutionized the logistical aspects of the
hajj
, water and housing ran chronically short, epidemics broke out among the pilgrims, and flash floods raged suddenly down the central streets of the town, on several occasions flooding the Haram and severely damaging the Ka’ba. Yet like all deserts, the Meccan wilderness possessed a pure and terrifying beauty, an immensity of light and shadow that hinted at the workings of the Infinite. And though the land was unyieldingly grim, it inflicted its dangers and discomforts on all equally, reducing to triviality differences of race and class and driving the pilgrims together in the knowledge that only God is great.

Whatever a pilgrim may have suffered on the road to Mecca, his personal cares were quickly enough forgotten as he entered the court of the Haram and stood before the great granite block enveloped in its black veil. “The contemplation of . . . the venerable House,” wrote Ibn Jubayr, “is an awful sight which distracts the senses in amazement, and ravishes the heart and mind.”
¹²
Even the infidel Englishman Richard Burton, who visited the mosque in disguise in 1853, declared that “the view was strange, unique” and “that of all the worshippers who clung weeping to the curtain, or who pressed their beating hearts to the stone, none felt for the moment a deeper emotion than did [I].”
¹³

The Haram and the Ka’ba, Mecca

Library of Congress

Generations of rulers have made numerous alterations to the Haram and the Ka’ba, so that the structures look substantially different today from the way they did when Ibn Battuta saw them. In its modern form the Ka’ba is in the shape of a slightly irregular cube, set almost in the center of the court and rising to a height of 50 feet. The walls of blue-grey Meccan stone are draped year round with the
kiswa
, made of black brocade and embellished with an encircling band of Koranic inscription in gold. A single door, set about seven feet above the ground and concealed by its own richly decorated covering, gives entry to the windowless interior of the sanctuary. There are no relics inside, simply three wooden pillars supporting the roof, ornamental drapes along the walls, lamps of silver and gold hanging from the ceiling, and a copy of the Koran. At the eastern corner of the exterior of the Ka’ba is embedded the revered Black Stone, which measures about twelve inches across and is set in a rim of silver. The surface of the stone is worn smooth and no one can be certain of its composition. In Koranic tradition Abraham built the Ka’ba, a wooden structure as it originally stood, to commemorate the One God. Though in pre-Islamic times the sanctuary was a home of idols and its precinct a place of pagan rites, Muhammad restored it to its original purpose as a temple consecrated to the primordial monotheism of Abraham.