The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (2 page)

We do not know that the real traveler, as opposed to the old-timer in the story, ended his life in such a forlorn state. But the tale suggests that his return home left him not at ease and satisfied, but malcontent, restless, and regretful, still yearning for the road. The story adds a poignant touch to the portrait of Ibn Battuta we get in the
Rihla
, not only the descriptions of his thrilling adventures but also his opinions and feelings—his likes, dislikes, pious prejudices, physical courage, sexual appetites, and cravings for friendship with powerful people. An epic movie about him is a good idea, and it could be done without inventing a single scene not taken directly from his own amazing narrative.

November 2011

1
. L. P. Harvey,
Ibn Battuta
(London: I.B.Tauris in association with the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, 2007); David Waines,
The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta: Uncommon Tales of a Medieval Adventurer
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

2
. Ibn Battuta,
The Travels of Ibn Battuta in the Near East, Asia and Africa, 1325–1354
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004).

3
. Ibrahimov Nematulla Ibrahimovich,
The Travels of Ibn Battuta to Central Asia
(Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2010).

4
. “Summer Journey 2011,”
Time Specials
, July 2011.

5
. Tim Mackintosh-Smith,
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah
(London: John Murray, 2001);
The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah
(London: John Murray, 2005);
Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battutah
(London: John Murray, 2010).

The year 2004 marks the seven hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abu ’Abdallah ibn Battuta, the Muslim lawyer who crisscrossed the Eastern Hemisphere in the second quarter of the fourteenth century and, with the help of a literary collaborator, wrote a lengthy account of what he saw and did. The world should take note of the septicentenary of this pious and educated Moroccan traveler. Not only did he give us a precious description of places, people, politics, and lifeways in nearly all the urbanized lands of Eurasia and Africa in the later medieval era, he also exposed the premodern roots of globalization. His tale reveals that by the fourteenth century the formation of dense networks of communication and exchange had linked in one way or another nearly everyone in the hemisphere with nearly everyone else. From Ibn Battuta’s
Rihla
, or
Book of Travels
, we discover the webs of interconnection that stretched from Spain to China and from Kazakhstan to Tanzania, and we can see that already in the Moroccan’s time an event occurring in one part of Eurasia or Africa might reverberate, in its effects, thousands of miles away.

Sailing the Arabian Sea in a two-masted dhow or leading his horse over a snow-covered pass in the Hindu Kush, Ibn Battuta could not have dreamed of the speed and intensity of human interchange today. Even since 1987, when the first edition of this book appeared, humankind has made astonishing advances in electronic technology and communication. One small irony of this “information revolution” is that Ibn Battuta himself has journeyed deeper into the popular imagination. He is today a more familiar historical figure among both Muslims and non-Muslims than he was twenty-five years ago. This has happened, I think, partly because of the increasing intensity of political and cultural relations between Muslim and Western countries and partly because of the broadening of international curriculums in schools and universities, notably in the United States, to embrace Asian and African societies, including famous men and women of the Muslim past.

In the United States, virtually all high school and college world history textbooks introduce Ibn Battuta, and in the past several
years I have had numerous invitations to talk about his adventures with middle and high school teachers and students. In 1994, the Hakluyt Society published the fourth and final volume of the English translation of the
Rihla
, bringing to conclusion a project that began in 1929!
¹
Other publications of recent years include a travel writer’s account of journeys tracing Ibn Battuta’s path across the Eastern Hemisphere, an abridged edition of the Hakluyt Society translation, a new edition of an English translation of the Moroccan’s East and West African trips, and an attractively illustrated commentary in Danish.
²

Several popular magazines have featured Ibn Battuta, including
National Geographic
.
³
A Spanish-Moroccan production team made a documentary film about him in the mid-1990s, and currently at least two film projects are in the works. In 1993, Moroccan scholars organized an international conference on their native son in Tangier, his birthplace. In 1999, the Islamic Museum of Kuwait produced an enchanting one-man act and multimedia show called “The Travels of Ibn Battuta.” Several publications for young people have appeared in English, including a teaching unit for high school students, an issue of the world history magazine
Calliope
, and a fantasy of the “Indiana Jones” variety titled
Ibn Battuta in the Valley of Doom
.
⁴
In San Francisco a middle school teacher has developed a detailed Ibn Battuta website.
⁵
Finally, I must mention that in 1976, the International Astronomical Union honored the traveler by naming a lunar crater after him. It is eleven kilometers wide and on the near side of the moon.

I was pleased indeed when the University of California Press agreed to publish this new edition, a seven-hundredth-birthday present to Ibn Battuta. I have made limited changes. I have taken account of the scholarly literature in Western languages that has appeared since 1987, as well as the insights and corrections published in reviews of the first edition. With the exception of an essay by Amikam Elad, who demonstrates that much of Ibn Battuta’s description of Syria and Palestine is copied from the travel account of the thirteenth-century traveler Muhammad al-’Abdari, I have seen no new research that significantly alters what we know about the
Rihla
or Ibn Battuta’s life.
⁶
Some new work, however, has offered insights on the
Rihla
’s chronology, itinerary, and reliability. My references to new work are mainly in the chapter endnotes.

The only change I have made to the bibliography is the addition of a new section, “Supplemental Sources for the 2004 Edition.” I
have also retained the same sources of translations from the
Rihla
, which mainly means that I have not quoted from volume four of the Hakluyt Society edition. I have made certain spelling changes—for example, “Qur’an” instead of “Koran”—and I have replaced the Wade-Giles with the pinyin system for romanizing Chinese place names.

I am indebted to reviewers who pointed out mistakes and interpretive flaws in the first edition, and I would like to thank Tim Macintosh-Smith for meticulously rereading the book and sending me valuable comments. I greatly appreciate the efforts of Mari Coates, my University of California Press editor, whose enthusiasm for the new edition helped me meet her timetable for revisions. Finally, I thank Laura Ryan for research assistance.

Ross E. Dunn
March 2004

1
. See the bibliography for the complete citation. The Hakluyt Society has also published an index to the
Rihla
in a fifth volume. C. F. Beckingham intended to produce a sixth volume, an extended commentary on IB’s itinerary and chronology. Sadly, Prof. Beckingham passed away in 1998.

2
. Tim Mackintosh-Smith,
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah
(London, 2001); Tim Mackintosh-Smith, ed.
The Travels of Ibn Battutah
(London, 2003); Said Hamdun and Noel King,
Ibn Battuta in Black Africa
(Princeton, NJ, 1994); and Thyge C. Bro,
Ibn Battuta: En arabisk rejsende fra det 14. århundrede
(Oslo, 2001).

3
. Thomas J. Abercrombie and James L. Stanfield, “Ibn Battuta: Prince of Travelers,”
National Geographic
180 (Dec. 1991): 4–49. Also, Douglas Bullis, “The Longest Hajj: The Journeys of Ibn Battuta,”
Saudi Aramco World
51 (July/Aug. 2000), 2–39.

4
. Joan Arno and Helen Grady,
Ibn Battuta: A View of the Fourteenth-Century World
(National Center for History in the Schools, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998); “Ibn Battuta: Muslim Scholar and Traveler,”
Calliope
9 (April 1999); Abd al-Rahman Azzam,
Ibn Battuta in the Valley of Doom
(London, 1996).

5
. Nick Bartel, “The Travels of Ibn Battuta: A Virtual Tour with the 14th Century Traveler,”
http://www.sfusd.k12.ca.us/schwww/sch618/Ibn_Battuta/Ibn_Battuta_Rihla.html
.

6
. Amikam Elad, “The Description of the Travels of Ibn Battuta in Palestine: Is It Original?,”
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
(1987), 256–272. Also, Dr. Abdel-hadi Tazi, the leading Moroccan authority on IB, has found documentary evidence suggesting that he died in the town of Anfa, not Tangier, where his putative tomb is located.

Staring at the wall of my windowless office one day in 1976, I suddenly got the idea to write this book. I was teaching world history to undergraduates and trying to give them an idea of Islam in the medieval age as a civilization whose cultural dominance extended far beyond the Middle East or the lands inhabited by Arabs. It occurred to me that the life of Abu ’Abdallah ibn Battuta, the famous Moroccan traveler of the fourteenth century, wonderfully illustrated the internationalist scope of Islamic civilization. He toured not only the central regions of Islam but also its far frontiers in India, Indonesia, Central Asia, East Africa, and the West African Sudan. The travel book he produced at the end of his career is both a tale of high adventure and an expansive portrait of the eminently cosmopolitan world of Muslim princes, merchants, scholars, and theologians within which he moved during 29 years on the road.

Since the mid nineteenth century, when translations of his Arabic narrative began to appear in Western languages, Ibn Battuta has been well known among specialists in Islamic and medieval history. But no scholar had attempted to retell his remarkable story to a general audience. For the non-specialist interested in medieval Islam and the attitudes and preoccupations of its intellectual class the narrative can be absorbing. But the modern reader is also likely to find it puzzlingly organized, archaic, and to some degree unintelligible. My idea, therefore, has been to bring Ibn Battuta’s adventure to general readers and to interpret it within the rich, trans-hemispheric cultural setting of medieval Islam. My hope is not only that the Moroccan journeyer will become as well known in the Western world as Marco Polo is but that readers will also gain a sharper and more panoramic view of the forces that made the history of Eurasia and Africa in the fourteenth century an interconnected whole. Ibn Battuta, we shall see, was a kind of citizen of the Eastern Hemisphere. The global interdependence of the late twentieth century would be less startling to him than we might suppose.

Almost everything we know about Ibn Battuta the man is to be
found in his own work, called the
Rihla
, which is readily available in printed Arabic editions, as well as translations in English and several other languages. I have not rummaged about ancient manuscript collections in Fez, Damascus, or Delhi to piece his life together since, in so far as anyone knows, no such manuscripts exist. Indeed, this book, part biography and part cultural history of the second quarter of the fourteenth century, is a work of synthesis. In tracing Ibn Battuta’s footsteps through the equivalent of some 44 modern countries, I have relied on a wide range of published literature.

I first became interested in Ibn Battuta when I spent the better part of a year translating portions of the narrative in a graduate school Arabic class. I have come to this project, however, with a modest training in that beautiful and intractable language. I have used printed Arabic editions of the
Rihla
to clarify various problems of nomenclature and textual meaning, but I have largely depended on the major English or French translations in relating and interpreting Ibn Battuta’s career.

The
Rihla
is not a daily diary or a collection of notes that Ibn Battuta jotted in the course of his travels. Rather it is a work of literature, part autobiography and part descriptive compendium, that was written at the end of his career. In composing the book, Ibn Battuta (and Ibn Juzayy, the literary scholar who collaborated with him) took far less care with details of itinerary, dates, and the sequence of events than the modern “scientific” mind would consider acceptable practice for a travel writer. Consequently, the historian attempting to reconstruct the chronology of Ibn Battuta’s journeys must confront numerous gaps, inconsistencies, and puzzles, some of them baffling. Fortunately, the textual problems of the
Rihla
have sustained the attention of historians, linguists, philologists, and geographers for more than a century. In trying to untangle Ibn Battuta’s movements from one end of the Eastern Hemisphere to the other, I have therefore relied heavily on the existing corpus of textual commentary. Given the scope and purpose of this book, I could not do otherwise, since any further progress in solving remaining problems of chronology, itinerary, authenticity, and place name identification would require laborious research in fourteenth-century documentary sources. I have, however, tried to address the major difficulties in using the
Rihla
as a biographical record of events. Most of this discussion has been confined to footnotes in order to avoid digressions into
technicalities that would break annoyingly into the story or tax the interest of some general readers.