The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (19 page)

Ibn Battuta was too much the sober urban scholar to go in for that sort of religious frenzy, so a one-night sojourn at the lodge may have
been quite enough for him. In any case he returned to Wasit to find that his caravan had already departed. He set off on his own in pursuit, perhaps a foolish thing to do in the Great Swamp, since a group of Sufi brethren who had straggled behind the caravan on its way to Wasit had been attacked and robbed by a band of Shi’i marsh-dwellers. In a day or two, however, he safely caught up with his party, which was now moving southward along a route generally parallel to the Tigris. Some time in the latter part of January 1327 the caravan reached Basra.
¹⁵

It is easy enough to understand why Ibn Battuta made a point of seeing Basra. Any literate young man, even from the Far West, would have known what this city had been six centuries earlier: the veritable Athens of Islam where the classical civilization of the Arabs had first been conceived and cast. It had been the home of numerous early Muslim luminaries: theologians, philosophers, poets, scientists, and historians. It had also been the laboratory where the rules of classical Arabic grammar were worked out, the rules by which educated men conversed and wrote and distinguished themselves from common folk. Though Baghdad superseded it in the ninth century as the intellectual capital of the Arabs, Basra continued to prosper for several hundred years owing to its status as chief port of the Caliphate on the Persian Gulf.

The Mongols left the city alone when they conquered Lower Iraq, but their assault on Baghdad and other Mesopotamian towns, which produced a severe decline in agricultural and industrial productivity, afflicted the economy of Basra as well. By the time Ibn Battuta visited the town, it had shrunk to such an extent that its beautiful grand mosque stood alone two miles outside the inhabited area. For a scholar who knew his history there was an even sadder testimony to decline than the deterioration of the architecture. When he attended Friday worship in the mosque, he was appalled to hear the preacher committing dreadful errors of grammar in his sermon. “I was astonished at his conduct,” he recalls, “and spoke of it to the
qadi
Hujjat al-Din, who said to me ‘In this town there is not a man left who knows anything of the science of grammar.’ ”

Except for its thick forests of date-palms, the city had little to recommend it that was not past and gone. Ibn Battuta must have devoted most of his time there to visiting the mosque and the graves of several of the early immortals of Arab letters, as well as
some of the Companions of the Prophet. As usual the local Sunni worthies, a small and undistinguished group, favored him with money, clothes, and food. The Ilkhanid governor also received him and gave him presents. He probably stayed not more than a week or two.
¹⁶

From Basra he took passage on a
sambuq
, a small, lateen-rigged boat common in the Mesopotamian river trade, and sailed for ten miles along the Ubulla canal, passing “through an uninterrupted succession of fruit gardens and overshadowing palmgroves both to right and left, with traders sitting in the shade of the trees, selling bread, fish, dates, milk, and fruit.” The canal emptied into the Tigris estuary, called the Shatt al-’Arab, which linked the region of Basra with the gulf.
¹⁷
Here, he transferred to a second vessel and sailed overnight to Abadan, which in that century was a few miles from the coast, though today it is more than twenty miles owing to the gradual build-up of the alluvial delta.
¹⁸

While stopping at a small hospice in Abadan, he learned of a local Sufi anchorite, who lived year round in the marsh and sustained himself entirely on fish. He immediately went looking for this hermit and found him seated in the shell of a ruined mosque. The
shaykh
gave the young man the blessing he sought and even offered him a large fish for his supper. Ibn Battuta recalls in the
Rihla
that he was deeply moved by this meeting, to the point that “for a moment I entertained the idea of spending the rest of my life in the service of this
shaykh
.” Indeed, he seems to have had a recurring fascination for this sort of uncompromising asceticism, probably a tug of the heart that many gregarious, worldly men feel from time to time. At a number of junctures in his career he experienced little crises of the soul, when he thought of throwing up his life of adventure for the self-denying and rapturous existence of a true Sufi disciple. In the end, however, what he calls “the pertinacity of my spirit” won out, and he was back on the road and into the world of affairs.

In this case he was back on the road in no time. Under the urging of an acquaintance from Basra, he contrived to get to Baghdad, not by turning around and heading back up the Tigris, but by making for the mountains of Persian Luristan, which was decidedly in the wrong direction. His plan was to make a long looping tour east of Mesopotamia through the Persian region of Jibal, or what he calls Iraq al-Ajami. Indeed it is at this point in the narrative that he speaks of his “habit” of shunning any road he had already traveled by.

As it worked out, his next important destination was to be the city of Isfahan in the Jibal province on the far side of the lofty Zagros
Mountains. Apparently in the company of his Basran friend, he went by ship from Abadan eastward along the delta coastline to the port of Machul, now Bandar-e-Ma’shur, in the Iranian part of Mesopotamia. There he hired a horse from some merchants and headed northward across the plain of Khuzistan, a province of marshes and sugar-cane fields. He followed a generally northward route through the agricultural towns of Ramhormoz (Ramiz) and Shushtar (Tustar), then turned westward to meet the Zagros, which rose suddenly as a barricade of rock along the eastern rim of the plain.

The mountain crags and pinnacles, which formed the natural frontier between Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, were inhabited by fierce herding peoples called the Lurs. The Mongols had subdued this country perfunctorily in Hulegu’s time, but owing to its wild isolation from the centers of administration, they left law and order in the hands of a client dynasty of tribal barons, called
atabegs
. Ibn Battuta regarded some of the Lurs customs that came to his attention as thoroughly brutish and heterodox, but the
atabeg
and the little groups of literate men of the villages and hospices treated him well and gave him the usual presents owing to wayfarers.
¹⁹
From Idhaj (or Malamir, and now Izeh), the mountain capital of the
atabegs
, he advanced northeastward through the frigid high passes of the Zagros (it was probably March) and thence to the orchard city of Isfahan, which lay at the western edge of the central plateau at an altitude of 4,690 feet. He was now in the heart of Persia.

He found lodging in what seems to have been a Sufi center of abundant proportions, possessing not only a mosque, a kitchen, and rooms for disciples and travelers, but also a fine marble-paved
hammam
, or bath. The local head of the
zawiya
, a Persian named Qutb al-Din Husain, was also a
shaykh
of the Suhrawardiyya, one of the largest mystical orders of the later Middle Period with widespread affiliations in the eastern Islamic lands, including India. One day the young visitor was looking out the window of his room in the lodge and noticed a white
khirqa
, or patched Sufi’s robe, spread out in the garden to dry. He recalls thinking to himself that he would like to have one of them, just as he had collected one from the Rifa’i
shaykh
in Jerusalem, as a symbol of honorific connection with the Suhrawardiyya. In the next moment Qutb al-Din abruptly entered his room and ordered a servant to bring the robe, which he threw over his guest’s shoulders. Astonished,
Ibn Battuta fell to kissing the
shaykh
’s feet, then, in his impetuous way, begged if he might not have his blessed skull cap as well. The request was granted forthwith. In the
Rihla
Ibn Battuta takes pains to list the chain of authority (
isnad
) linking him by virtue of this investiture with the twelfth-century founder of the brotherhood. But as in the Jerusalem episode, he assumed no obligation to pursue the Sufi way simply by accepting the
shaykh
’s casual blessing on a God-fearing traveler.

He spent two weeks with Qutb al-Din in Isfahan, enjoying the preserved watermelon and other fruits of the Isfahan plain laid out at the
zawiya
’s table. At this point in history the city was not the noble capital it had been under the Seljuk Turks and would be again three centuries later under the Shi’i Safavids. Because of a sad inclination among the inhabitants to engage in violent factional rows, coupled with the turmoil of the early Mongol years, the city was only beginning to recover some of its earlier vigor.
²⁰
Perhaps dissatisfied with what the town had to show him of Persian culture, Ibn Battuta decided to travel another 300 miles south to Shiraz, chief city of the province of Fars.

This journey, accomplished in ten days, took him along one of the historic trade routes of central Iran and through the central region of the ancient Persian empire. Since it was probably about mid April,
²¹
he followd the so-called summer road through the Zagros foothills rather than the winter road which ran nearer the high desert to the east.
²²
During the final days of the trip he climbed through a series of blooming mountain valleys and thence into the fertile, mile-high basin that sheltered Shiraz, the “Garden City.”

The luck of Shiraz in the Middle Period was that the Mongol monster had not been inclined to devour Fars province, the region being too hot for steppe herdsmen and too far away from the main Tatar centers in Azerbaijan. The city not only survived but opened its gates to refugees from the north, and so, as with Cairo, its intellectual life received a fillip from the arrival of well-educated fugitives. Ibn Battuta was attracted to Shiraz partly because of its reputation as the greatest center of Persian letters and partly because it was a city where, according to his contemporary Mustawfi, “most of the people strive after good works, and in piety and obedience to the Almighty have attained a high degree of godliness.”
²³
The city was sometimes called the Tower of Saints (Burj-i-Awliya) because of the profusion of holy tombs. It was also
one of the loveliest towns in Persia, and still is. Ibn Battuta remembers that “its inhabitants are handsome in figure and clean in their dress. In the whole there is no city except Shiraz which approached Damascus in the beauty of its bazaars, fruit-gardens and rivers.”

The young jurist wanted above all to meet the chief
qadi
of the city, Majd al-Din, a famous Persian scholar especially admired among Sunnis for having brilliantly defied the Shi’i Ilkhan Oljeitu. When this ruler converted to Shi’ism, according to the version of the story recounted in the
Rihla
, he ordered that the
khutba
, the praise formulas recited at the beginning of the Friday mosque sermon, be changed throughout the land to exalt the name of ’Ali. When the people of Shiraz refused to cooperate, he commanded that Majd al-Din be executed by being thrown to a pack of ferocious dogs trained to eat humans. But when the dogs were let loose, Ibn Battuta relates, “they fawned on him and wagged their tails before him without attacking him in any way.” The Ilkhan was so astounded at the deliverance of this Muslim Daniel that he played out the Darius role perfectly, prostrating himself at the
qadi
’s feet, showering him with honors, and renouncing his errant doctrine for the Sunni faith. Ibn Battuta’s ending to the story is a bit artful, since we know from other sources that the most Oljeitu did was to call off persecutions of Sunnis while remaining a loyal Twelver until his death in 1316. Majd al-Din meanwhile held his post throughout the reign of Abu Sa’id and for twenty years after the collapse of the Mongol state.
²⁴

Soon after arriving in Shiraz in the company of three unnamed traveling companions, Ibn Battuta went to salute Majd al-Din, who questioned him about his homeland and his travels. The
shaykh
also offered him a small room in his college. Ibn Battuta does not say how long he stayed in the city, but the general chronological framework of the Persian tour would suggest that he remained something less than two weeks, visiting the mosques and the tombs of numerous Shirazi lights, including Abu ’Abdallah ibn Khafif, one of the forefathers of Persian Sufism, and the renowned poet Sa’di, who was buried in a lovely garden outside the city.
²⁵

Since there were no more specially interesting towns to visit between Shiraz and the seaports of the gulf, Ibn Battuta resolved to turn west and head once again in the general direction of Baghdad. His route took him through two high passes of the southern Zagros and the little town of Kazarun, then northwestward
into the Khuzistan plain. Somewhere north of the port of Machul he crossed his outbound trail of some three months earlier. Advancing once again into the Mesopotamian marshlands, he forded the Tigris at an unidentified point perhaps about midway between Wasit and Basra. He finally arrived at Kufa on the Euphrates five or six weeks after leaving Shiraz.
²⁶
He was now back on the main pilgrimage road. From Kufa, he continued upriver past the ruins of ancient Babylon and the Shi’i towns of al-Hilla and Karbala. About the first week of June 1327 he reached the Tigris and the city of the Caliphs.
²⁷

He gives the definite impression in the
Rihla
that he was traveling to Iraq primarily to see Baghdad. But he was under no illusions about the sad state of the city in his own time. He went there to honor its past and perhaps to walk among the ruins along the west bank of the river, imagining the ghosts of the divines and jurisprudents who had lived there five centuries earlier, founding the moral and intellectual code of civilization by which his own generation still lived. In the
Rihla
he introduces his description of the city with a set of perfunctory praise formulas (“of illustrious rank and supreme pre-eminence”) but then goes on to reiterate the mournful admission of his twelfth-century predecessor Ibn Jubayr that “her outward lineaments have departed and nothing remains of her but the name . . . There is no beauty in her that arrests the eye, or summons the busy passer-by to forget his business and to gaze.”