The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (57 page)

16
. Textual, linguistic, and archaeological evidence have all been marshalled to find the fourteenth century capital of Mali. Recent discussions, which also review the earlier literature on the problem, are Wladyslaw Filipowiak,
Études archéologiques sur la capitale médiévale du Mali
, trans. Zofia Slawskaj (Szczecin, 1979); Hunwick, “Mid-Fourteenth Century Capital,” pp. 195–206; and Meillassoux, “L’itinéraire d’Ibn Battuta,’ pp. 389–95. Hunwick hypothesizes that IB did not visit Niani but a place north of the Niger, pointing out that the traveler never mentions crossing the river.

17
. Al-Umari, L&H, p. 263.

18
. Ibn Khaldun, L&H, p. 335.

19
. Al-Umari, L&H, pp. 262–63.

20
. H&K, p. 72n.

21
. Hunwick, “Mid-Fourteenth Century Capital,” p. 203.

22
. Elias N. Saad,
Social History of Timbuktu: the Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables, 1400–1900
(Cambridge, England, 1983), pp. 11, 27.

23
. Levtzion,
Ghana and Mali
, p. 201; Mauny,
Tableau géographique
, pp. 114–15; and Saad,
Social History of Timbuktu
, pp. 36–37.

24
. Mauny
et al., Textes et documents
, p.71.

25
. Mauny (
Tableau geógraphique
, pp. 139–40) identifies IB’s Takadda with Azelik. Most other commentators agree.

26
. Jean Devisse presumes that IB was on a mission for Abu ’Inan and speculates that the sultan wanted up-to-date intelligence out of fear that the gold trade was being increasingly diverted towards Egypt. “Routes de commerce et échanges en Afrique Occidentale en relation avec la Méditerranée,”
Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale
50 (1972): 373.

27
. Levtzion,
Ghana and Mali
, pp. 174–76.

28
. Mauny
et al
. (
Textes et documents
, p. 79) identify IB’s watering place with one or the other of these points. L&H (p. 418n) are doubtful but offer no alternative.

I have indeed — praise be to God — attained my desire in this world, which was to travel through the earth, and I have attained in this respect what no other person has attained to my knowledge.
¹

Ibn Battuta

We know only in a very general way what happened to Ibn Battuta after he returned to Fez in 1354. Sultan Abu ’Inan certainly listened to his report on Mali and no doubt wanted to hear about his traveling career, the political highlights in particular. After the interview Ibn Battuta might have expected to slip quietly out of public notice, perhaps to seek a judicial appointment elsewhere in Morocco. Yet the king was sufficiently impressed by this genial and sharp-witted
faqih
that he ordered him to stay in Fez for the time being and prepare a narrative of his experiences for the pleasure of the royal court.

Since Ibn Battuta was no belle-lettrist, Ibn Juzayy, the young secretary he had met briefly in Granada three years earlier, was commissioned by the sultan to shape the Tangierian’s story into a proper oeuvre conforming to the literary standards of a
rihla
: an account of travels centering upon a journey (or journeys) to Mecca. Ibn Juzayy had fallen out of favor with his former employer Yusuf I of Granada and left his service to accept a post in Fez not long before Ibn Battuta’s return there from Mali. He already had a reputation for his poetry, his prose writings in philology, history, and law, and his fine calligraphic style.
²
He seems to have come to his assignment with enthusiasm and may well have developed a warm friendship with the journeyer.

The two of them probably met together regularly for about two years from shortly after Ibn Battuta’s arrival in Fez until December 1355, when the redaction of the narrative was finished under the florid formal title, “A Gift to the Observers Concerning the Curiosities of the Cities and the Marvels Encountered in Travels.” The work sessions likely took place in different places: in
the older man’s house or the younger’s, in the gardens or halls of Fez Jdid, in the shady arcades of mosques. Ibn Juzayy admits that what he wrote was only an abridgment of all that his collaborator told him or had written out for him in notes. There is no direct evidence that Ibn Battuta ever read the completed manuscript or checked it for errors. Mistakes in the phonetic spelling of various foreign words suggest that he did not.
³
Ibn Juzayy may have continued to revise and refine the book after his interviews with the traveler were completed. In any case, the connection between the two men ended in 1356 or 1357 when Ibn Juzayy, not yet 37 years old, died of causes unknown.
⁴

In his brief introduction to the
Rihla
, Ibn Juzayy explains precisely what the sultan had ordered Ibn Battuta to do:

he should dictate an account of the cities which he had seen in his travel, and of the interesting events which had clung to his memory, and that he should speak of those whom he had met of the rulers of countries, of their distinguished men of learning, and of their pious saints. Accordingly, he dictated upon these subjects a narrative which gave entertainment to the mind and delight to the ears and eyes.

This is a concise statement of the general subject matter of Ibn Battuta’s interviews with Ibn Juzayy, although he ranged over almost every conceivable aspect of fourteenth-century life from cuisine, botany, and marriage practices to dynastic history and the price of chickens. As he spoke or fed Ibn Juzayy notes, he wove his descriptive observations haphazardly into the account of his own experience. Ibn Juzayy, moreover, interjected rhetorical odds and ends into the manuscript here and there, including a bit of verse. But generally he stayed true to the structure of Ibn Battuta’s verbal recounting. Consequently, the autobiography, the personal adventure, remains at the heart of the book, revealing the traveler’s gregarious, high-spirited, pushy, impetuous, pious, ingratiating personality through the account of the life he lived. The plan of the
Rihla
was very different from the organization of that other famous travel narrative of the medieval age, the
Book of Marco Polo
. The Venetian’s work is divided into two parts, the first a brief summary of his traveling career, the second, which makes up most of the account, a systematic, didactic presentation of information about China and other lands east of Europe. All in
all, the book remains, in vivid contrast to the
Rihla
, “a treatise of empirical geography,” revealing almost nothing about Marco’s personality.
⁵

There is no doubt, on the other hand, that in telling so much about himself, Ibn Battuta aimed to project a definite
persona
: the pious, erudite, Maliki gentleman, though one with a Sufi’s sensitivity and reverence. It seems equally clear that as he told Ibn Juzayy his story, he tended, as perhaps most of us would in his place, to exaggerate his competence as a man of learning and his social status among the kings and princes who entertained him, as well as the importance of the judicial positions he held. Perhaps we can discern in the thread of puffery that runs through the
Rihla
a discomforting self-awareness of the limits of his education and commitment to the rigorous academic life. There is no evidence that he ever spent much time in serious study once he left Tangier at the age of 21. To the learned jurisconsults and
qadis
of the great cities of Islam, who toiled years on end reading and memorizing the important texts of their legal school, Ibn Battuta’s deficiencies would have been plain to see. Ibn Juzayy introduces him with gusto as “the learned doctor of law.” But another scholar, a celebrated Andalusian judge named Abu l’Barakat al-Balafiqi, had also met the traveler in Granada and duly sized him up. His observation, reported in the brief article on Ibn Battuta in Ibn al- Khatib’s fourteenth-century compilation of notable biographies, was that the man may have traveled widely but he possessed only “a modest share of the sciences.”
⁶
Or as another translator puts the passage, “He had not too much of what it takes.”
⁷
He could never have landed a high judicial post in a city like Cairo or Damascus (except perhaps in the aftermath of the Black Death, when a large part of the civilian elite was dead). But he did thrive out on the peripheries of Islam where Muslim princes, badly needing experts in the
shari’a
and the prestige that came with enforcing it, were less particular about honoring and employing individuals with only “a modest share of the sciences.” In that sense, Ibn Battuta belongs to a large class of lettered but not accomplished men who, for want of serious career possibilities in the central cities, gravitated out to the expanding Islamic frontiers, where a Muslim name, a reasonable education, and a large ambition could see a man to a respectable job, even to riches and power.
⁸

If Ibn Battuta never became a master of his legal profession, he
nonetheless possessed an extraordinary memory of the places he had visited and the things he had seen. It seems highly unlikely that when he got down to work with Ibn Juzayy he had extensive travel notes or journals at hand. He never mentions in the
Rihla
that he took notes, with the single exception of a remark that some tomb inscriptions he jotted down in Bukhara were one of the items he lost in the pirate attack off the coast of India.
⁹
If he had other notes with him at that time (1345), they would also have been lost. In any case, a reading of the
Rihla
does not suggest that he had a foggier memory of people, places, and events for the period of his career antedating 1345 than for the time after. On the other hand, he appears to have written out a rough version of his life and observations, perhaps after he returned to Fez, since near the end of the
Rihla
Ibn Juzayy refers to the work as his own “abridgment” of the “writing” or “notations” (
taqyid
) of the traveler.
¹⁰
From time to time in the narrative Ibn Battuta admits candidly that he simply cannot remember the name of a particular person or town. But he also misremembered numerous facts. He gets names and dates wrong occasionally, he reports certain contemporary or historical events inaccurately, he mixes up now and again the order of his itinerary. Yet too close attention to his errors can distract from the astonishing accuracy of the
Rihla
on the whole, as both a historical document and a record of experience.

To conclude that Ibn Battuta did not rely on notes during his interviews with Ibn Juzayy is not to say that the two of them had no “research” aids at all. In Muslim historical and geographical writing of that age, authors commonly drew upon the works of earlier authorities to flesh out their essays, sometimes explicitly crediting such authorities and sometimes not. Islamic literary theory regarded what we would call plagiarism with a wide latitude of tolerance. It was not considered improper to quote from or paraphrase other writers without citing them, even where the ideas or information such writers contributed might be partially or wholly disguised.
¹¹
Ibn Juzayy may have had a substantial library of geographical and travel literature of his own. In any case, Fez had become such an important center of learning that the libraries of its leading intellectuals, as well as that of the Karawiyin mosque, which was founded about 1350, would have provided the two men with a wealth of source material if they needed it.
¹²

It is perfectly plain that Ibn Juzayy copied outright numerous long passages from the
Rihla
of Ibn Jubayr, the twelfth-century
Andalusian traveler who wrote the most elegant of the medieval Muslim travel books. These passages pertain to Ibn Battuta’s descriptions of Damascus, Mecca, Medina, and some other places in the Middle East. It seems likely that where Ibn Battuta could not remember very well certain places he visited, or where Ibn Jubayr’s description was, from a literary point of view, as good as anything Ibn Juzayy could produce, then deference might be made to this learned predecessor.
¹³
Modern scholars have suggested, and in some cases proven, that Ibn Juzayy paraphrased from other earlier geographical books as well.
¹⁴

In his introduction to the
Rihla
, Ibn Juzayy declares that his intention was to write down the story just as Ibn Battuta told it:

I have rendered the sense of the narrative . . . in language which adequately expresses the purposes he had in mind and sets forth clearly the ends which he had in view. Frequently I have reported his words in his own phrasing, without omitting either root or branch.

Yet Ibn Juzayy had been commissioned not simply to transcribe mechanically Ibn Battuta’s reminiscences but to undertake appropriate “pruning and polishing” of his associate’s verbatim reports so as to produce a coherent, graceful work of literature in the high tradition of the
rihla
genre. In the interests of literary symmetry and taste, therefore, the raw record of the traveler’s experience had to be reshaped to some extent. For one thing, the itinerary over the entire 29 years was exceedingly complicated. Ibn Battuta visited a number of cities or regions two or more times, and his routes crisscrossed, backtracked, and overlapped. Consequently, Ibn Juzayy found it desirable to group the descriptions of certain places within the context of Ibn Battuta’s first visit there — and to do it without much heed to the precise details of his movements. The result is a more smoothly flowing narrative but a vexatious snarl of problems for any modern scholar trying to figure out exactly where Ibn Battuta went and when.
¹⁵

Even more troublesome for the historian is Ibn Battuta’s recounting of visits to at least a few places that in fact he probably never saw. Ibn Juzayy meant the
Rihla
to be at the broadest level a survey of the Muslim world of the fourteenth century. Ibn Battuta had not gone absolutely everywhere in that world. Yet Ibn Juzayy probably thought that for the sake of literary integrity almost
every place in Eurasia and Africa having an important Muslim population should be mentioned within the framework of the traveler’s first-person experience, even though in a few cases that experience might not be genuine. Ibn Battuta describes, albeit rather lamely and self-consciously, a trip up the Volga River to visit the Muslim community of Bulghar, a trip he almost certainly did not make.
¹⁶
Modern commentators have also cast doubts on the authenticity of his journeys to China and Byzantium, as well as to parts of Khurasan, Yemen, Anatolia, and East Africa, though scholarly opinion is very much divided on these questions.
¹⁷
Even if small parts of the
Rihla
are fabricated, we can never know for sure how to parcel out the blame. It is conceivable that Ibn Juzayy added certain passages without Ibn Battuta even knowing that he did. Nor can we discount the meddlings of later copyists.