The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (58 page)

If the authenticity of the
Rihla
has generally stood up well under modern scrutiny, Ibn Battuta was by no means let off easily in his own time. By an extraordinary piece of historical coincidence, ’Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun, the Tunisian historian and philosopher who came to tower over the Muslim intellectual world in the later medieval age, arrived in Fez in 1354 to join the circle of scholars around Sultan Abu ’Inan. Ibn Khaldun had been a young government officer in Tunis when Abu l’Hasan’s army occupied that city. He was impressed by the erudition of the Moroccan scholars in the sultan’s suite and, having lost both his parents in the Black Death, decided to leave home to pursue advanced studies in Fez. There is no evidence that he ever made Ibn Battuta’s acquaintance. But in
The Muqaddimah
, his great work of historical sociology completed in 1377, he makes a brief and utterly incidental remark about a certain “
shaykh
from Tangier” who turned up in Fez after traveling widely in the Muslim world. “He used to tell about experiences he had had on his travels,” Ibn Khaldun reports, “and about the remarkable things he had seen in the different realms. He spoke mostly about the ruler of India. He reported things about him that his listeners considered strange.” Ibn Khaldun then repeats some of Ibn Battuta’s stories about Muhammad Tughluq: his provisioning the famine-stricken people of Delhi out of his own income and his practice of having gold coins showered upon his subjects from the backs of elephants. Ibn Khaldun also notes that Ibn Battuta held a judgeship in the sultanate. But then he goes on to remark darkly that the Tangierian “told other similar stories, and people in the dynasty
(in official positions) whispered to each other that he must be a liar.”
¹⁸

Abu l’Barakat al-Balafiqi, the Andalusian scholar who had met Ibn Battuta in Granada and was later to express a low opinion of his scholarship, also resided in Fez about this time and knew Ibn Khaldun.
¹⁹
According to Ibn al-Khatib, author of the fourteenth-century biographical notice on Ibn Battuta, al-Balafiqi said that people considered the traveler “purely and simply a liar.”
²⁰
Why such skepticism among the intelligentsia of Fez? Perhaps it was a reflection of their casual contempt for Ibn Battuta’s pedestrian erudition. Or it might simply have been the incredulous parochialism of Far Western Muslims who had themselves never traveled very far from home.

Indeed Ibn Khaldun continues in
The Muqaddimah
:

One day I met the Sultan’s famous vizier, Faris ibn Wadrar. I talked to him about this matter and intimated to him that I did not believe that man’s stories, because people in the dynasty were in general inclined to consider him a liar. Whereupon the vizier Faris said to me: “Be careful not to reject such information about the condition of dynasties, because you have not seen such things yourself.”
²¹

Moreover Muhammad ibn Marzuk, a famous scholar of Tlemcen who was occupying a government post in Fez when the
Rihla
was being composed, also expressed an opinion on Ibn Battuta, which found its way into Ibn Hajar’s fifteenth-century biographical notice. According to Ibn Hajar, Ibn Marzuk cleared the traveler of al-Balafiqi’s charge of lying and even declared, “I know of no person who has journeyed through so many lands as [he did] on his travels, and he was withal generous and welldoing.”
²²

If Ibn Battuta stirred up courtly gossip for a few months with his exotic tales, he seems to have attracted no more attention in Fez after his work with Ibn Juzayy was completed. All that we know of his later life is that, according to Ibn Hajar’s brief sketch, he held “the office of
qadi
in some town or other.”
²³
He probably lived in the modestly comfortable style of a provincial official, and, since he was not yet 50 years old when he ended his travels, he very likely married again and sired more children, little half brothers and sisters of the offspring growing up all across the Eastern Hemisphere.

As for the
Rihla
, very little is known of its history from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. In contrast to Marco Polo’s book, which was widely circulated and acclaimed in Europe in the later Middle Ages, the
Rihla
appears to have had a very modest impact on the Muslim world until modern times. There is no evidence of its being widely quoted or used as a source in Muslim historical or geographical works written after 1355. To be sure, copies of either the entire work or abridgments of it circulated among educated households in Morocco and the other North African countries. The
Rihla
was also known in the Western Sudan in the seventeenth century and in Egypt in the eighteenth, at least in the form of abridgments. It may also have turned up in libraries in Muslim regions east of the Nile.
²⁴
Only in the mid nineteenth century, half a millennium after it was written, did the narrative begin to receive the international attention it so profoundly deserved. The credit for that achievement, ironically enough, fell to scholars of Christian Europe, the one populous region of Eurasia Ibn Battuta had never bothered to visit in his travels.

If the great journeyer attained no literary glory in his own time, he nevertheless had good reason to review his long career with satisfaction. He had seen and borne witness to the best that the fourteenth century had to offer, three decades of relative prosperity and political calm in the Afro-Eurasian world. The second half of the century was to be drastically different. It was in Barbara Tuchman’s phrase the “calamitous” half of the century, a time of social disturbance and economic regression that seemed to afflict almost the entire hemisphere.
²⁵
The troubles of the age were almost certainly associated with the great pandemic, not only the Black Death itself but the multiple recurrences of pestilence that followed decade after decade on into the fifteenth century. The Black Death killed untold millions, but the repeated outbreaks of plague prevented agrarian populations in Europe and the Middle East, and perhaps in India and China as well, from recovering to pre-plague levels.

The result was chronically depressed productivity, a condition that grievously affected many kingdoms of the hemisphere just about the time Ibn Battuta ended his travels. With the exception of a few regions where real political vigor was in evidence (the rising Ottoman Empire, Ming China after 1368, Vijayanagar in southern India), almost every state he had visited either disappeared
(the Yuan dynasty in China, the Ilkhanids in Persia), rapidly deteriorated (the Delhi Sultanate, Byzantium), or experienced dynastic strife, rebellion, or social upheaval (the Khanates of Kipchak and Chagatay, the Mamluk Sultanate, Mali, Granada). Latin Europe, which he had not visited, experienced equally sorry times, with its deep economic recession, Hundred Years War, Papal Schism, and succession of peasant uprisings.

In his own homeland he lived out his last years amid the violent, anarchic disintegration of the Marinid state. Sultan Abu ’Inan invaded Ifriqiya and occupied Tunis in the fall of 1357, but he was forced to withdraw within two months. The following year he fell sick and was finally strangled by a rebellious vizier. No Marinid king succeeded in restoring order and unity to the country during the next century.

Perhaps safe in his remote judgeship from the turmoil of those times, the aging globetrotter could look back over a quarter century whose strong kingdoms, thriving hemispheric trade, and cosmopolitan cities had given him so many opportunities for adventure and fortune. And despite the spreading darkness of the later century, his confidence in the continuing triumph of Islam was doubtless undiminished. He would not have been specially impressed to know that, as the fifteenth century approached, Muslim merchants, preachers, soldiers, and peripatetic scholars like himself still carried on the work of implanting Islam and its treasury of values and institutions in Southeast Asia, East and West Africa, India, and Southeastern Europe. Even as the bellicose Portuguese prepared their attack on Ceuta and the age of European power began, Islam as both a living faith and a model of civilized life continued to spread into new regions of the earth.

Ibn Battuta died in 1368 or 1369 (700 A.H.).
²⁶
Where his grave lies, no one knows for sure. The tourist guides of Tangier are pleased to take foreign visitors to see a modest tomb that allegedly houses the mortal remains of the traveler. But the site has no inscription and its genuineness is open to question.
²⁷
A more vital memorial to him is the
Ibn Battouta
, the big ferry boat that shuttles people and their automobiles across the Strait of Gibraltar. From the kasba high above the city, you can see it steam out of the harbor, carrying young Moroccan scholars to their law schools in Paris and Bordeaux.

1
. Gb, vol. 2, p. 282.

2
. “Ibn Djuzayy,” EI
₂
, vol. 3, p. 756; D&S, vol. 1, p. xxi.

3
. H. A. R. Gibb,
Ibn Battuta: Travels in Asia and Africa
(London, 1929), p. 12.

4
. “Ibn Djuzayy,” EI
₂
. vol. 3, p. 756.

5
. Leonardo Olschki,
Marco Polo’s Asia: An Introduction to his Description of the World Called Il Milione
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960) p. 12.

6
. This is Gibb’s translation (Gb, vol. 1, p. ix) of the passage as it appears in Ibn Hajar al-Ascalani’s fifteenth-century biographical dictionary
Al-Durar al-Kamina
. The Arabic text and French translation of Ibn al-Khatib’s notice, upon which Ibn Hajar’s is partially based, is found in E. Levi-Provençal, “Le Voyage d’Ibn Battuta dans le royaume de Grenade (1350)” in
Mélanges offerts à William Marçais
(Paris, 1950), pp. 213, 223. Ibn al-Khatib quotes Abu l’Barakat as saying he met IB in Granada in the garden of Abu l’Kasim ibn Asim. IB confirms this meeting (D&S, vol. 4, p. 371). On Abu l-Barakat al-Balafiqi, see Soledad Gibert, “Abu-l-Barakat al-Balafiqi, Qadi, Historiador y Poeta,”
Al-Andalus
28 (1963): p. 381–424.

7
. H&K, p. 5.

8
. On the migration of Muslim literate cadres to the fringe areas of Islam, see Marshall G. S. Hodgson,
The Venture of Islam
, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 539–42.

9
. D&S, vol. 3, p. 28.

10
. D&S, vol. 4, p. 449. Major commentators are divided on the question of IB’s notes. Gibb, Hrbek, and Défrémery and Sanguinetti believe he did not use travel notes when he worked with Ibn Juzayy. Gibb,
Travels in Asia and Africa
, p. 12; Hr, pp. 413–14; D&S, vol. 1, p. ix. Mahdi Husain thinks he did. MH, p. xviin.

11
. See John Wansbrough, “Africa and the Arab Geographers” in D. Dalby (ed.),
Language and History in Africa
(London, 1970), pp. 89–101.

12
. On the founding of the Karawiyin library, J. Berque, “Ville et université: aperçu sur l’histoire de l’école de Fès,”
Revue Historique de Droit Français et Étranger
(1949): 72. On the practice of learned men making their libraries available to other scholars, George Makdisi,
The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West
(Edinburgh, 1981), pp. 24–27.

13
. J. N. Mattock, “Ibn Battuta’s Use of Ibn Jubayr’s
Rihla
” in R. Peters (ed.),
Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the Union Européene des Arabisants et Islamisants
(Leiden, 1981), pp. 209–18; and “The Travel Writings of Ibn Jubair and Ibn Batuta,”
Glasgow Oriental Society Transactions
21 (1965–66): 35–46.

14
. On the
Rihla
’s possible debts to al-Bakri, Ibn Fadlan, al-’Umari, and other Muslim authors see Herman F. Janssens,
Ibn Batouta, “Le Voyageur de l’Islam”
(Brussels, 1948), pp. 108–09; Stephen Janicsek, “Ibn Battuta’s Journey to Bulghar: Is it a Fabrication?”
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
(October 1929): 794; Mattock, “Ibn Battuta’s Use of Ibn Jubayr’s
Rihla,”
pp. 210, 217; L&H, pp. 280–81.

15
. See particularly Chapter 3, note 26.

16
. See Chapter 8, note 12.

17
. See various footnotes pertaining to the chronology and itinerary of trips to these areas.

18
. Ibn Khaldun,
The Muqaddimah
, trans, and ed. Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1958), vol. 1, pp. 369–70.

19
. Ibn Khaldun,
The Muqaddimah
, vol. 1, p. xlii.

20
. Ibn al-Khatib, quoted in Levi-Provençal, “Le Voyage d’Ibn Battuta,” p. 213.

21
. Ibn Khaldun,
The Muqaddimah
, vol. 1, pp. 370–71.

22
. Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani,
Al-Durar al-Kamina fi A’yan al-Mi’a al-Thamina
, 4 vols. (Hyderabad, 1929–31), 3: 480–81. Gb, vol. 1, pp. ix–x. On Ibn Marzuk see “Ibn Marzuk,” EI
₂
, vol. 3, pp. 865–68.

23
. Gb, vol. 1, p. x.

24
. ’Abd al-Rahman ibn ’Abd Allah al-Sa’di,
Tarikh es-Soudan
, trans. O. Houdas (Paris, 1964), pp. 15–16; D&S, vol. 1, pp. xiii–xvi. H.T. Norris has pointed out a biographical entry on IB in a work written in 1799–1800 by a scholar from Walata in Mauritania. Review of Ross E. Dunn,
The Adventures of Ibn Battuta
, in
The Maghrib Review
12, nos. 3–4 (1987), pp. 116–17. Tim Mackintosh-Smith (personal communication) informs me that the Moroccan Scholar Abdelhadi al-Tazi makes a case for IB’s work being known in the Middle East from the end of the sixteenth century. Al- Tazi’s Arabic edition of the
Rihla
has been unavailable to me in the United States.
Rihlat Ibn Battuta
, 5 vols. (Rabat: Royal Moroccan Academy, 1997).

25
. Barbara W. Tuchman,
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
(New York, 1978).

26
. Ibn Hajar’s biography quoted in Gb, vol. 1, pp. ix–x.