The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (47 page)

Following Khubilai’s death in 1294, the appointment of foreigners to official posts trailed off as the Yuan emperors lost touch with the stout ways of the steppe, took up the habits of traditional Chinese potentates, and gradually brought the Confucian scholar-gentry back into government. The Sinicization of the dynasty, which was especially pronounced after 1328, does not seem to have much affected Muslim trading enterprise in the cities, which continued to thrive until the collapse of the Mongol regime in 1368. Until that time, a Muslim might travel the main roads and canals of China, finding in the major towns little clusters of co-believers always eager to offer hospitality and to hear news from the west. After 1368, however, the alien Muslim settlements along the south Chinese coast shrank or disappeared, perhaps partly because local Chinese Muslim merchants took over this commercial sector.

The growth of Muslim commercial settlements in China in the Mongol Age was mirrored in similar developments along the coasts of Southeast Asia. The strategic link in the trade between India and China was the Strait of Malacca, connecting the Bay of Bengal with the South China Sea. Like the Malabar coast, the strait was a hinge in the monsoonal sailing system. Vessels crossing the Bay of Bengal eastbound on the summer monsoon could not normally reach China before the opposing northeast wind set in. Therefore they would winter in a port along the strait before continuing around the Malay Peninsula and across the South China Sea in April or May. Climatic reality encouraged India-based merchants to sell their goods in the strait towns, then return directly to Malabar on the winter wind. China shippers followed the same seasonal pattern of travel, only in reverse.

By the thirteenth century local Malay rulers of the strait, men who practiced Hinduism or a combination of Hindu–Buddhist devotions, were avidly encouraging Muslim traders to settle in their ports owing to the obvious fiscal advantages of tying themselves securely into the southern seas’ commercial network. Wherever such communities sprouted, their members felt impelled to order their collective lives in accord with the demands of the
shari’a
to the extent the authorities permitted. Thus a call went out for the scribes, judges, Qur’anic teachers, mosque officials, craftsmen, and, since business was good, more merchants. In time, the Muslim population, with its universalist claims and its cosmopolitan connections, became large, rich, and prestigious enough to win over members of the Malay elite and ultimately to impress, intimidate, or manipulate the princely court into official conversion. This event in turn set off a new round of immigration from abroad, as enterprising, footloose men responded to what Marshal Hodgson calls the “drawing power” of new Muslim communities.
¹⁸

This process was only just beginning in Southeast Asia when Ibn Battuta came through. A Malay prince, ruler of the port of Samudra on the northwestern coast of Sumatra, converted to Islam sometime in the late thirteenth century, and his is the earliest Islamicized state in the region historians have been able to discover.
¹⁹
Elsewhere in the Eastern Archipelago, that is, in the countries bordering the Java Sea and the “spice islands” further off to the east, Islam was still largely unknown in the first half of the fourteenth century. The subsequent three hundred years would be
the crucial period of quiet, persistent conversion, ultimately transforming Indonesia into an overwhelmingly Muslim country.

From the eleventh century, when the high age of Arab geographical writing had almost run its course, down to the end of the Islamic Middle Period, the
Rihla
stands alone as an eyewitness Muslim travel account of Eastern Asia. Yet the story of Ibn Battuta’s journey to China must be told briefly and in a spirit of uneasy skepticism. If we take his word for the itinerary he followed, insofar as we can make sense of it, this was the longest more or less uninterrupted trip of his career, spanning somewhere between 11,000 and 12,000 miles of travel by land and sea. Yet his narrative of the entire tour from the Maldives to Bengal, Sumatra, China as far north as Beijing, and back to Malabar occupies less than 6 percent of the
Rihla
text. And as both a descriptive account and a record of personal experience of what alleges to be a bold, arduous journey far beyond the frontiers of the Dar al-Islam, it is the least satisfying and most problematic section of the entire book.

The itinerary is vague, possibly disordered, and sometimes baffling. Chronological information, except for what can be inferred here and there, is almost altogether lacking. Descriptions of places, events, and things observed are often muddled or patently inaccurate. The sort of precise personal witnessing that lends credibility to so much of the narrative, while not altogether lacking, is suspiciously spare. The fuzziness and obscurity of the story stands out uneasily against the rich, vivid, even introspective accounts of the years in India and the Maldives. Indeed, the deficiencies of this part of the book give the impression that Ibn Battuta remembered the details of his much earlier travels in Persia, Africa, or Anatolia better than he did the Far Eastern trip, which occurred less than a decade before the
Rihla
was composed. Moreover, an estimation of the probable starting date of the journey (that is, his second departure from the Maldives) and his own recollection of the month when he returned to Malabar suggest that he made the entire journey from the Maldives to Peking in the far north of China and all the way back to South India again in the space of about twenty months, including several leisurely rest stops. Since we can safely eliminate the possibility of his traveling by jet plane or speedboat, such a pace seems inconceivable, and if not that, then at least pointless. All of these
difficulties have led some scholars to doubt that Ibn Battuta really traveled to China or even anywhere east of Ceylon, contending that this part of the
Rihla
may be a fabrication and the descriptive information it contains based entirely on hearsay.
²⁰

No one, however, has made a completely convincing case that Ibn Battuta did
not
go to East Asia, at least as far as the ports of South China. The riddle of the journey probably defies solution since the
Rihla
, we must remind ourselves, is a work of literature, a survey of the Muslim world of the fourteenth century in narrative form, not a travel diary composed along the road. We have no way of knowing the precise relationship between Ibn Battuta’s real life experience and the account of it contained in the fragile manuscripts that have come down to us from his time. Moreover, the narrative of the China trip is by no means a collection of abstract reports or improbable tales. For all its sketchiness and ambiguity, it is still a story of countries and cities visited, events experienced, people talked to, and aspects of everyday life observed. And so, honoring Ibn Battuta with the benefit of the doubt, we follow him, albeit warily, to Bengal and beyond.

Instead of sailing directly from the Maldives to the Strait of Malacca on some pepper ship out of Malabar, Ibn Battuta decided first to visit Bengal. He probably had no trouble finding a vessel to take him there since the islanders carried on regular trade with that region, importing quantities of rice from the Ganges Delta, paid for in cowrie shells.
²¹

Like the Deccan, Bengal in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was a frontier of Turkish arms and Persian-style Islamic culture emanating from the Indo–Gangetic plain. But much unlike the central plateau, Bengal was a heavily populated, water-soaked garden of immense fertility. In the early thirteenth century the region was annexed to the Sultanate of Delhi. As Muslim governors and garrisons occupied the important delta towns, immigrants streamed in from the northwest, making Bengal the eastward overland terminus for the class of skilled and literate refugees and their descendants who had introduced Arabo–Persian civilization to India. By Ibn Battuta’s time, a number of Bengali cities had
madrasas
and important Sufi lodges, and the conversion of Hindu or Buddhist peasant folk that would prove so successful in subsequent centuries was already getting under way.

The sultans of Delhi, however, found it exasperatingly difficult
to hold the mastery of their eastern frontier. Unlike the northern plains, Bengal was extremely unaccommodating to the operations of cavalry. Jungles and mountains obstructed the routes in from the capital, and rivers were numerous and unfordable. Consequently, the local Turkish lords, who built up riverine navies to ensure their own purely regional power, repeatedly rebelled against Delhi. Muhammad Tughluq succeeded in placing governors over his delta provinces early in his reign, but when the pretense of his vast subcontinental empire became exposed, Bengal was one of the first provinces to bolt. In 1338, the eastern half of the region broke away when Muhammad’s governor died, prompting an obscure Turkish officer named Fakhr al-Din Mubarak Shah to seize the main chance and proclaim a kingdom of his own. Two years later West Bengal seceded under similar circumstances.

Ibn Battuta seems to have wanted to visit the delta in the summer of 1345 mainly to seek the blessing of Shah Jalal. He was a celebrated holy warrior who, in the year our traveler was born, participated in the Muslim takeover of Sylhet, a town and district in the northeastern corner of the delta.
²²
Under normal circumstances, Ibn Battuta would also have had himself presented at the princely court of Fakhr al-Din, whose capital was at Sonargaon, a city about half way along the route from the coast to Sylhet. In this case, however, Fakhr al-Din’s dissidence was too recent and his own identification with Muhammad Tughluq too well known to make such an introduction advisable. Consequently, he decided to steer clear of royal interviews and make a quick trip up to Sylhet as anonymously as possible.

He probably disembarked at the busy eastern port of Chittagong, a city overflowing with agricultural goods transported by river craft down through the maze of delta channels to the coast.
²³
He notes in the
Rihla
that foreigners liked to call Bengal “a hell crammed with good things.” The noxious, humid vapours exuded from the delta’s marshes and riverbanks made for an oppressive climate, but food was abundant and remarkably cheap. To prove his point, he even offers in the
Rihla
a list of prices for rice, meat, fowl, sugar, oil, cotton, and slaves. Not to pass up a bargain himself, he purchased an “extremely beautiful” slave girl in Chittagong. One of his comrades acquired a young boy for “a couple of gold dinars.”

He tells us nothing very lucid about the itinerary or time schedule of his trip from Chittagong to Sylhet, but he very likely
traveled by boat northward along the Meghna River valley, a lush, watery, rice-growing country leading to the Assam Plateau and the Tibetan Himalayas beyond.
²⁴
He seems to have had a party of companions, but they are more phantom-like than ever. Al-Tuzari was apparently with him when he visited Ma’bar, but he is never mentioned after that and indeed we learn parenthetically in an earlier part of the
Rihla
that the man died in India.
²⁵

Shah Jalal of Sylhet, whose tomb is still a local pilgrimage center, was renowned in medieval India for awesome miracles, prognostications, and the feat of dying at the age of 150.
²⁶
One day, the
Rihla
reports, the old
shaykh
, who had no previous knowledge of Ibn Battuta, told his disciples that a traveler from the Maghrib was about to arrive and that they should go out to meet him. This they did, intercepting the visitor two days’ distance from the
khanqah
. The story gives Ibn Battuta a convenient entrée to remind his readers of his own singular accomplishments as a globetrotter:

When I visited him he rose to receive me and embraced me. He enquired of me about my country and journeys, of which I gave him an account. He said to me, “You are a traveler of Arabia.” His disciples who were then present said, “O lord, he is also a traveler of the non-Arab countries.” “Traveler of the non-Arab countries!” rejoined the
shaykh
, “Treat him, then, with favor.” Therefore they took me to the hospice and entertained me for three days.

Returning southward along the Meghna River past “water wheels, gardens, and villages such as those along the banks of the Nile in Egypt,” he reached Sonargaon (not far from modern Dacca), the capital of Sultan Fakr al-Din. Without dallying long or identifying himself at the royal residence, he bought passage on a commercial junk departing down the river and went directly on to Sumatra.

The route of his voyage to the Strait of Malacca, which would probably have taken place in the fall or winter of 1345–46, is an annoying puzzle since this part of the
Rihla
is murky and possibly disarranged. The ship made one stop at a place he calls Barah Nagar, which may have been a small Indo–Chinese tribal state along the western coast of Burma.
²⁷
The ship’s company presented gifts to the local chief (who appeared dressed in a goatskin and riding an elephant), then did a bit of trading and sailed away. A second stop was made at a port called Qaqula (Kakula, or Qaqulla), a lair of pirates. It may have been located somewhere along the Tenasserim coast on the western side of the Malay Peninsula.
²⁸
Here Ibn Battuta visited the walled town, accepted the hospitality of the infidel Malay ruler for three days, and had the grisly treat of watching one of the prince’s subjects decapitate himself as a show of affection for his sovereign!

Map 10: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Southeast Asia and China, 1345–46