The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (44 page)

wear only a waist-wrapper which covers them from their waist to the lowest part, but the remainder of their body remains uncovered. Thus they walk about in the bazaars and elsewhere. When I was appointed
qadi
there, I strove to put an end to this practice and commanded the women to wear clothes; but I could not get it done. I would not let a woman enter my court to make a plaint unless her body were covered; beyond this, however, I was unable to do anything.

When the zealous magistrate was not hearing cases in the council chamber or ferreting out derelictions of Koranic duty, he was busy building up his network of political alliances with the chief families and making a high place for himself in the pecking order of power. Within a short time of his first marriage, he wed three more women, four being the most wives a man could have according to Islamic law. His second wife was the daughter of an important minister and great granddaughter of a previous sultan. His third was a widow of Queen Khadija’s brother and immediate predecessor. His fourth was a step-daughter of ’Abdallah ibn Muhammad al-Hadrami, a nobleman who had just been restored to a ministerial position after having spent a period of time in exile on one of the outer islands for some unnamed transgression against the state. “After I had become connected by marriage with the above-mentioned people,” Ibn Battuta tells us bluntly, “the vizier and the islanders feared me, for they felt themselves to be weak.”

Despite the unity of Maldivian government, the political claustrophobia of tiny Male coupled with the fragmented geography of the kingdom encouraged both factional intrigues and dissidence.
³¹
The
Rihla
makes it apparent that the grand vizier, the de facto ruler, did not have the whip hand over his nobility and could not fully control the actions of political cliques. Ibn Battuta’s recounting of the events that led to his precipitous departure from the islands is subjective and episodic and leaves the reader of the narrative straining to discern the deeper currents of the political drama. He leaves no doubt, however, that he had not been a figure in the royal court for very long before he began to make enemies. Vizier ’Abdallah, the minister who had returned from temporary exile, seems to have regarded him as an
arriviste
and a threat to his own position of power. The two men got on badly from the start, clashing over symbolic matters of precedence and
protocol that concealed a far more serious rivalry for influence in the kingdom. As Ibn Battuta explains it, and we will never know anyone else’s side of the story, ’Abdallah and certain of his kinsmen and allies plotted to turn the grand vizier against his new
qadi
, and they finally succeeded. A nasty row broke out between Ibn Battuta and Jamal al-Din over a legal judgment involving a sordid affair between a slave and a royal concubine. The grand vizier accused Ibn Battuta of insubordination and called him before the ministers and military officers assembled in the palace.

Usually I showed him the respect due to a ruler, but this time I did not. I said simply “
salamu alaikum
.” Then I said to the bystanders, “You are my witnesses that I herewith renounce my post as
qadi
as I am not in a position to fulfill its duties.” The grand vizier then said something addressing me, and I rose up moving to a seat opposite him, and I retorted in sharp tones . . . Thereupon the grand vizier entered his house saying, “They say I am a ruler. But look! I summoned this man with a view to making him feel my wrath; far from this, he wreaks his own ire on me.”

On the heels of this stormy confrontation, Ibn Battuta paid off his debts, packed up his luggage, divorced one of his wives (probably ’Abdallah’s step-daughter), and hired a boat to take him to Captain Ibrahim’s ship, which was at that moment in the southern region of the atolls. Yet far from washing his hands of the Maldive government and sailing off in an offended huff, he reveals, tantalizingly and obscurely, that he was playing for bigger stakes than merely the independence of his authority as
qadi
. Describing his departure from Male, he writes in the
Rihla
, as if adding a forgotten detail.

I made a compact with the vizier ’Umar, the army commander, and with the vizier Hasan, the admiral, that I should go to Ma’bar, the king of which was the husband of my wife’s [that is, Hurnasab’s] sister and return thence with troops so as to bring the Maldive islands under his sway, and that I should then exercise the power in his name.
³²
Also I arranged that the hoisting of the white flags on the ships should be the signal and that as soon as they saw them they should revolt on the shore.

Then he adds rather disingenuously, “Never had such an idea occurred to me until the said estrangement had broken out between
the vizier and myself.” He also hints that Jamal al-Din had at least a suspicion of this astonishing plot, but the vizier’s own political position had apparently weakened so much that he could not risk arresting his
qadi
. Whatever Jamal al-Din’s fears may have been, the threat of an invasion was not entirely far-fetched, for the Chola empire of South India had conquered the islands in early medieval times.
³³

As it turned out, Ibn Battuta left Male without further incident and sailed in several days’ time to Fua Mulak (Muluk) island, which lay near the southern end of the archipelago just across the equator.
³⁴
Here Captain Ibrahim’s ship awaited him. Ibn Battuta had sailed out of Male with three wives in his company, but he divorced them all in a short time. One of these women, the wife of his first Maldive marriage, fell seriously ill on the way to Fua Mulak, so he sent her back to Male. Another he restored to her father, who lived on Fua Mulak. He offers no explanation for his divorcing the third woman, though she was pregnant. He stayed on Fua Mulak for more than two months, and there he married, and presumably divorced, two more women. Quite apart from his political motives in taking a total of six wives during his sojourn in the islands, such transitory alliances reflected the custom of the country:

It is easy to marry in these islands because of the smallness of the dowries and the pleasures of society which the women offer . . . When the ships put in, the crew marry; when they intend to leave they divorce their wives. This is a kind of temporary marriage. The women of these islands never leave their country.
³⁵

Ibn Battuta made a brief trip back to Male in the company of Ibrahim in order to help the captain iron out a dispute he had with the inhabitants of Fua Mulak. He did not, however, leave the ship while it was anchored in Male harbor. Then, after touching briefly at Fua Mulak once again, they set sail northeastward for the coast of Ceylon. The time was late August 1344.
³⁶

1
.
The Book of Duarte Barbosa
, trans, and ed. Mansel Longworth Dames, 2 vols. (London, 1918–21), vol. 2, p. 74.

2
. The
Rihla
is the sole record of this event. No evidence of the embassy has come to light in Chinese sources so far as I know, though Peter Jackson notes that a Yuan mission is known to have visited Egypt in 1342–43. “The Mongols and India (1221–1351),” Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1977, p. 222. The envoys probably
arrived several months before IB left Delhi. On the dating of his departure see note 5.

3
. Henry Yule identifies this town as Sambhal east of Delhi.
Cathay and the Way Thither
, 4 vols. (London, 1913–16), vol. 4, p. 18. Also MH, p. 150.

4
. IB states that he left Delhi on 17 Safar 743 A.H., that is, 22 July 1342. Evidence suggests that he did not remember the year correctly or that an error was made in copying the
Rihla
. A departure date of 17 Safar 742 (2 August 1341) makes more sense within the context of subsequent statements in the
Rihla
about chronology and itinerary. The fundamental problem with IB’s chronology for the travels in India, the Maldive Islands, and Ceylon is that he claims to have left the Maldives (following the first and longer of two visits) in the middle part of Rabi’ II 745 (late August 1344), that is, a little more than two years after leaving Delhi. His own statements about traveling times and lengths of sojourns in particular places, however, indicate that about
three
years elapsed between his leaving Delhi and his first departure from the Maldives. For the period of travels between these two events, the
Rihla
is not very helpful, since IB offers not one absolute year date. The Maldive departure date of 745, however, is probably accurate. In the space of a few months following that date, he arrived in the Sultanate of Ma’bar in the far southeastern corner of the subcontinent. There he witnessed and was involved in events surrounding the death of Sultan Ghiyath al-Din and the accession of Nasir al-Din. Numismatic evidence shows that this regnal change took place in 745 A.H. (The last coin of Ghiyath al-Din is dated 744; the first coin of Nasir al-Din is dated 745.) S. A. Q. Husaini, “Sultanate of Ma’bar” in H. K. Sherwani and P. M. Joshi (eds.),
History of Medieval Deccan
, 2 vols. (Hyderabad, 1973–74), vol. 1, pp. 65, 74. If IB’s Maldive departure date is accurate, at least for the year, then we may hypothesize that the Delhi date should be pushed back a year to make room for three years of travel.

5
. As it is set forth in the
Rihla
, IB’s itinerary from Delhi to Daulatabad is erratic and illogical. Part of the explanation is probably that some of the stages have been placed in incorrect order. For example, he states that he visited Dhar before Ujjain, when it was almost certainly the reverse. Furthermore, he may have visited some of the places mentioned during earlier excursions out of Delhi which he does not report and whose descriptive information is woven into the account of the trip to Daulatabad. He indicates, for example, that he had visited Gwalior at some earlier time, though nothing is said about the circumstances of such a trip (D&S, vol. 4, p. 33). IB offers almost no help in deducing the chronology of his journey through the interior of India. Mahdi Husain calculates that he arrived in Daulatabad on 3 November. A general estimate of late autumn seems reasonable, but this author’s precise town-to-town chronology for the entire range of IB’s travels in India, the Maldives, and Ceylon is delusive, for it is based almost entirely on informed guessing and inferential evidence such as “normal” traveling times from one place to another. MH, pp. lxiv-lxvi.

6
. Gujaratis were well established in the East Indies in the fifteenth century and were probably arriving there in the fourteenth. M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz, “Trade and Islam in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago Prior to the Arrival of the Europeans” in D. S. Richards (ed.),
Islam and the Trade of Asia
(Oxford, 1970), pp. 144–45.

7
.
Duarte Barbosa
, vol. 1, pp. 134, 136, 138.

8
. Simon Digby, “The Maritime Trade of India” in Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (eds.),
The Cambridge Economic History of India
, 2 vols (Cambridge, England, 1982), vol. 1, p. 152.

9
. P. M. Joshi, “Historical Geography of Medieval Deccan” in Sherwani and Joshi,
Medieval Deccan
, vol. 1, pp. 18, 20.

10
. IB states that the suzerain of Jamal al-Din was a ruler named Haryab, but historians have disagreed as to whether this individual is Ballala III of the Hoysalas
or Harihara I of the Kingdom of Vijayanagar. See R. N. Saletore, “Haryab of Ibn Battuta and Harihara Nrpala,”
Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society
31 (1940–41): 384–406; also MH, p. 180n.

11
. The location and identity of these ports, some of which no longer exist, are investigated in
Duarte Barbosa
, vol. 1, pp. 185–236, vol. 3, pp. 1–92; Yule,
Cathay
, vol. 4, pp. 72–79; and MH, pp. 178–88.

12
. According to the fifteenth-century navigator Ibn Majid, the best time for sailing from the west coast of India to the Bay of Bengal was around 11 April, or from mid March through April. G. R. Tibbetts,
Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese
(London, 1971), p. 377.

13
. Yule,
Cathay
, vol. 2, p. 131.

14
. Junks normally left the Malabar coast for China after mid March (see note 12). However, it seems likely that IB’s vessels were planning to stop over at Quilon, a major port further down the coast, before departing for the Bay of Bengal. Moreover, the subsequent chronological clues IB gives suggest that his departure from Calicut was not scheduled for any later than about 1 March (see note 19).

15
. IB does not describe this vessel. Joseph Needham suggests the name may be related to
cocca, coque
, or cog, which was a medieval ship of the Mediterranean and North Atlantic.
Science and Civilization in China
, vol. 4, part 3,
Civil Engineering and Nautics
(Cambridge, 1971), p. 469n.

16
. My translation. D&S, vol. 4, pp. 103–4.

17
. IB says that his second departure from Calicut took place “at the end of the season for traveling on the sea,” meaning the weeks before the southwest monsoon came up in full force. Although the Malabar ports did not close down altogether until June, IB almost certainly left Calicut no later than about 1 April, since vessels bound for Arabia or the Persian Gulf had to reach their destinations before the monsoon reached full strength in those latitudes. Tibbetts,
Arab Navigation
, p. 375. Therefore, the sinking of IB’s junk off Calicut must have taken place no later than about 1 March to make room for his trip to Quilon and back, which probably consumed at least 25 days. (He says it took him ten days to travel from Calicut to Quilon.)

18
. Yule (
Cathay
, vol. 4, pp. 64–66) identifies Sandapur with Goa.
Duarte Barbosa
, vol. 1, pp. 170–72. IB presents the only account of Jamal al-Din’s conquest of the city and its subsequent recovery by the
raja
.