The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (27 page)

27
. Alan Villiers (
Sons of Sinbad
, pp. 21–243,
passim
) describes in dramatic detail his voyage from Aden to Mogadishu, Zanzibar, and the Gulf of Oman in 1939–40.

28
. Neville Chittick remarks that the “Maqdishi” language IB says he heard in the town was either Somali or an early form of a Swahili dialect, probably the latter. “The East African Coast, Madagascar and the Indian Ocean,”
Cambridge History of Africa
, 5 vols. (Cambridge, England, 1977), vol. 3, p. 189.

29
. In his research on the
dallals
(brokers) of South Arabia, R. B. Serjeant notes the striking similarity between their functions and practices in modern times and IB’s description of the brokers of Mogadishu. “Maritime Customary Law in the Indian Ocean” in
Sociétés et compagnies de commerce en Orient et dans l’Océan Indien, Actes du 8(ème) Colloque International d’Histoire Maritime
(Paris, 1970), pp. 203–204.

30
. B. G. Martin, “Arab Migration to East Africa in Medieval Times,”
International Journal of African Historical Studies
7 (1974): 368.

31
. I have quoted this passage from Said Hamdun and Noel King’s lively translation (H&K, pp. 16–17).

32
. Both Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 379n) and Hrbek (Hr, p. 442) suggest that he sailed from Mogadishu in late February or early March. By the end of March the northeast monsoon was dying out (Tibbetts,
Arab Navigation
, p. 378).

33
. Peter Garlake,
The Early Islamic Architecture of the East African Coast
(London, 1966), p. 117.

34
. On the regnal dates of the Mahdali dynasty see Elias Saad, “Kilwa Dynastic Historiography: A Critical Study,”
History in Africa
6 (1979): 177–207.

35
. More is known about life in Kilwa than any other coastal town in that age thanks largely to the excavations of Neville Chittick,
Kilwa: An Islamic Trading City on the East African Coast
, 2 vols. (Nairobi, 1974).

36
. IB’s description of the East African coast, though brief, is the only eye-witness account of the medieval period, so historians have squeezed the
Rihla
for every tidbit of information. See Neville Chittick, “Ibn Battuta and East Africa,”
Journal de la Société des Africanistes
38 (1968): 239–41.

37
. Tibbetts,
Arab Navigation
, pp. 373, 377–78. Alan Villiers
(Sorts of Sinbad
, p. 191) left the mouth of the Rufiji River south of Kilwa in late March for his return voyage to Oman.

38
. Hamdun and King (H&K, p. 68) have it from East African sailors that the trip would take about four weeks. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 382n), based on Villiers’ journey from Zanzibar to Muscat, says three to four weeks. Hrbek (Hr, p. 444) suggests six to eight weeks, which seems too long.

39
. IB reports that he visited the hermit on “the Hill of Lum’an, in the midst of the sea.” Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, 391n) thinks this place must be the island of Hallaniyah. Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who traced IB’s journey along the southern coast of Arabia, has doubts. Tim Mackintosh-Smith,
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah
(London, 2001), pp. 256–58.

40
. The veracity of IB’s stay in Nazwa is uncertain, so I have not drawn attention to his description of the Banu Nabhan king of Oman, who he claims to have met, nor to his remarks on the religious beliefs of the Omanis. The interior region of Oman was the bastion of the Islamic sect known as the Ibadis. Reversing the Shi’ia doctrine of the supremacy of the House of ’Ali, the Ibadis believed that any member of the community of believers could be chosen as the Imam as long as he displayed the proper moral qualities and a capacity to uphold the Qur’anic law. If he failed, the community was obliged to withdraw its support. The Banu Nabhan (1154–1406), however, were not Imams, and their ascendancy represented a hiatus in the Imamate, which was restored in the fifteenth century. Roberto Rubinacci, “The Ibadis,” in A. J. Arberry and C. P. Beckingham (eds.),
Religion in the Middle East
, 2 vols. (Cambridge, England, 1969). vol. 2, pp. 302–17; and Salij ibn Razik,
History of the Imams and Seyyids of Oman
, trans. G. P. Badger (London, 1871).

IB’s description of Nazwa is brief and fuzzy, he makes inaccurate or doubtful remarks about Ibadi customs, and his itinerary from Nazwa to Hurmuz on the far side of the Persian Gulf is a complete blank. Neither Gibb nor Hrbek explicitly questions the truthfulness of IB’s journey through the interior of Oman. J. C. Wilkinson, a scholar of Omani history, expresses grave doubts and has pointed out to me some of the textual problems with this section of the
Rihla
(personal communication).

41
. Hrbek (Hr. pp. 445–48) develops a line of argument suggesting that IB did not visit Hurmuz, Persia, or any point on the eastern shore of the Gulf in 1329 (1331), but rather has inserted into the narrative a description of a journey that actually took place in 1347 when he traveled from India to Hurmuz and thence to Shiraz. Hrbek thinks that in 1331 he went directly from Nazwa to al-Qatif overland along the eastern coast of Arabia. The argument is based heavily on the fact that IB’s description of Hurmuz, his meeting with its sultan (Tahamtan Qutb al-Din), and the civil war in which that ruler had been engaged all relate to a situation pertaining in 1347. The other points Hrbek makes to sustain his theory are inferential and speculative. I cannot accept it, partly on the grounds that IB may well have blended his descriptions of
two
trips to Hurmuz, and partly on the fact that in his report of an interview with the King of Ceylon in 1344 he speaks of having discussed with that monarch the pearls he had already seen on the island of Qais off the eastern shore of the Gulf. MH, p. 218.

42
. Hr, p. 450; Gb, vol. 2, p. 406n.

43
. Ibid., p. 407n. Gibb thinks he visited Qais; Hrbek (Hr, p. 450) believes it was Siraf. In the fourteenth century Qais was a far more important commercial center than Siraf and a likelier place for IB to embark for Arabia.

44
. IB refers to Bahrain as a city, but Hrbek (Hr, p. 451) believes his description of such a place refers in fact to al-Qatif, the chief town of the coastal district known in earlier Muslim times as Bahrain. The term later referred solely to the island.

This country called Bilad al-Rum is one of the finest regions in the world; in it God has brought together the good things dispersed through other lands. Its inhabitants are the comeliest of men in form, the cleanest in dress, the most delicious in food, and the kindliest of God’s creatures.
¹

Ibn Battuta

Sometime near the end of 1330 (1332) Ibn Battuta boarded a Genoese merchant ship at the Syrian port of Latakia (Ladiqiya) and sailed westward into the Mediterranean, bound for the south coast of Anatolia. He was on his way to India and once again headed squarely in the wrong direction.

His intentions had been straightforward enough when he left Arabia some months earlier. He would go to Jidda, buy passage on a ship for Aden, and continue from there to India on the winter monsoon, just as hundreds of returning South Asian pilgrims were doing at the same time. First, though, he must secure the services of a
rafiq
, a guide-companion who knew India well, spoke Persian, and would have contacts of some value in official circles. Although the illustrious Sultan of Delhi was welcoming scholars from abroad and offering them prestigious and rewarding public posts, a young North African could not wander through rural India on his own and then, if he made it to Delhi at all, simply turn up unannounced at the royal palace. A
rafiq
was essential, and after several weeks in Jidda he failed to find one.
²

At this point he seems to have decided it would be better to approach India by a more circuitous route and hope to meet up with persons along the way who could lead him to Delhi and provide him with the necessary connections. And so boarding a
sambuq
he sailed directly to the Egyptian coast, made his way to ’Aydhab, and from there retraced his journey of a few years earlier across the desert and down the Nile to Cairo. He rested there a short time, then continued across Sinai, now for the second time, to Palestine. From this point his precise itinerary is uncertain, but he is likely to have traveled northward (including a quick inland detour to Jerusalem) through the Levantine coast towns — Ashqelon, Acre (Akko), Beirut, and finally Latakia.
³
Arriving there, he had in his company one al-Hajj ’Abdallah ibn Abu Bakr ibn Al-Farhan al-Tuzari. All we know of this gentleman, whom Ibn Battuta met in Cairo, is that he was an Egyptian legal scholar and that he determined to accompany the Moroccan on his travels. As it came to pass, the two men would remain fast friends and companions for many years.

Map 7: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Anatolia and the Black Sea Region, 1330–32 (1332–34)

Sailing from the coast of Syria to Anatolia in order to get to India made some sense, for it is precisely what Marco Polo had done more than sixty years earlier on his way to the Persian Gulf. From the south Anatolian ports of Ayas (Lajazzo), Alanya, and Antalya, trade routes ran northward over the Taurus Mountains to the central plateau where they joined the trans-Anatolian trunk road linking Konya, Sivas, and Erzurum (Arz al-Rum) with Tabriz and thence with Central Asia or the gulf. But since Ibn Battuta would spend about two years in Anatolia and the Black Sea region and finally approach India by way of the Hindu Kush and Afghanistan, a far more difficult and time-consuming passage than the gulf route, we can only conclude that he was playing the tourist again, his Indian career plans sidetracked in favor of more casual adventures.

There was nothing unusual about him and al-Tuzari taking passage out of Latakia on a European vessel. Italians, Catalans, and Provençais had long since eliminated Muslim shipping from the eastern Mediterranean except for coasting trade and the short run between the Levantine coast and Cyprus. Using Famagusta, the chief port of Cyprus, as the hub of their operations in the eastern sea, the Genoese called at both Levantine ports and those along the south Anatolian coast.
⁴

Ibn Battuta describes the vessel he boarded as a
qurqura
, which was probably lateen-rigged, two-masted, and fitted with two or even three decks. It may have been much larger than any ship he had seen in the Indian Ocean, since the Italian “round ships” of the time, with their great superstructures over the bow and stern, were known to hold as much as 600 tons dead weight of cargo and as many as 100 crewmen.
⁵
As usual, Ibn Battuta fails to tell us what sort of lading the ship was carrying, perhaps a load of Syrian cotton or sugar, but he does note that the captain treated his
Muslim passengers “honorably” and did not even charge them for the trip. Making a course northwestward around the tip of Cyprus, the ship approached Alanya, the western Taurus Mountains looming behind it, some time in the last weeks of 1330 (1332).
⁶

Except for his brief trip to Tabriz in Azerbaijan, Ibn Battuta was for the first time visiting a land whose Muslim inhabitants were mostly Turkish. Arab travelers to Anatolia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a modern scholar has noted, experienced jarring attacks of culture shock when they confronted the alien ways of the Turks, as if finding themselves in some remote part of equatorial Africa.
⁷
In the centuries of the Abbasid Caliphate the ridges of the eastern Taurus had effectively protected the Asian territory of Christian Byzantium from the Arab armies of Iraq and Syria. But the high green valleys of eastern Anatolia were a magnet to the hordes of Turkish herdsmen who poured into the Middle East in the eleventh century as part of the conquests of the Great Seljuks. The natural route of this vast sheep and horse migration was westward from Khurasan to Azerbaijan, then on to Anatolia. At Manzikert in 1071 Seljuk cavalry achieved the military triumph over the Byzantine army that had eluded the Abbasids for three centuries. Once the Greek defenses of the eastern mountains collapsed, one nomadic throng after another advanced through the passes and fanned out over the central plateau. Within a century Byzantium had given up all but the western quarter of Anatolia, and a new Muslim society was emerging which had had no more than peripheral contact with the world of the Arabs.

The transformation of Asia Minor from a land of Greek and Armenian Christians to the country we call Turkey was a long and extremely complex process not by any means completed until several centuries after Ibn Battuta made his visit. When the empire of the Great Seljuks broke up in the twelfth century, their dynastic heirs, the Seljuks of Rum (as Anatolia was traditionally known to Muslims, a term harking back to the rule of “Rome”) gradually consolidated their authority over the central and eastern regions. While the Seljukid commanders settled down in Konya and other ancient Greek and Armenian towns and took up the ways of the city, Turkish pastoral clans, conventionally called Turcomans (or Turkmens), continued to drift over the Anatolian plateau and into the highland valleys that rimmed it on all sides. In
the first half of the thirteenth century, however, the majority of the inhabitants of the region were still neither Muslim nor Turkish. Large Christian populations thrived in the towns and crop-bearing lands of the Seljukid domain. A steady process of conversion to Islam was occurring, sometimes as a result of unfriendly pressures, but it was slow. Moreover, along the perimeters of Anatolia, Christian polities continued to survive: the kingdom of Little Armenia in Cilicia bordering the southeastern coast, the Empire of Trebizond (a Greek state that had broken away from Constantinople) on the Black Sea, and of course the remaining Asian provinces of Byzantium. Moreover, the frontier between Byzantium and the sultanate became relatively stable, and the two governments treated one another much of the time in a spirit of neighborly diplomacy.