Ibn Battuta

5 Key excerpts on "Ibn Battuta"

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  One Thousand Roads to Mecca

  Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing about the Muslim Pilgrimage

  • Michael Wolfe, Michael Wolfe(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Grove Press

    (Publisher)

  Ibn Battuta’s experiences abroad confirm the existence of a single, intercommunicating culture extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the South China Sea; not a narrow corridor spanned by a handful of trade routes east and west over which privileged figures traveled on official business but a global arena, an Afro-Eurasian zone actively crisscrossed by large populations of itinerant professionals who settled where they chose, furthered a career, and felt at home. Ibn Battuta was not unique in this milieu—he was representative. The roads of his time were filled with provincial scholars, judges, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, and traders from every corner of the earth who shuttled almost routinely among North Africa, Egypt, Persia, India, and Indonesia. Not only Muslims but Christians and Jews, too, took advantage of this trading network. They moved along lines that appear to have provided real support to a large class of mobile professionals. Ibn Battuta moved with them, working and traveling, recording a way of life that in certain ways prefigures the social flux of modern, free market capitalism. Bangladeshis at work in Silicon Valley, Iranian families thriving in Japan, would not have surprised Ibn Battuta. In fourteenth-century Damascus, he assures us, any Moroccan running out of money would be sure to find the means to earn his way. When he himself fell sick there, then went broke, benefactors appeared out of the woodwork. Later, in India, he met lawyers from around the world working at the sultan’s court in Delhi, earning handsome salaries and socializing with the upper classes. Still later, in China, as a guest of prosperous Egyptians in the huge city of Hang-chou, with whom should he cross paths in its large Muslim quarter but a neighbor from his own street in Tangier.

  Ibn Battuta’s account is greatly enriched by this sense of belonging and by the social opportunities it allowed. A non-Muslim author would have been stopped short at most of the doors that Ibn Battuta passed through; many a Muslim merchant, too, must have lacked his access to first families and potential patrons. In addition to a magnetic manner, Ibn Battuta made astute use of his knowledge in the law and in Sufi doctrine. These assertions of specialized knowledge earned him deference and respect in the wider world of Islamic values. They smoothed his way over thousands of miles and, very often, paid it, too, with lucrative appointments at court and hospitality along the roads.

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  Travels in Asia and Africa

  1325-1354

  • Ibn Battuta, H. A. R. Gibb(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Selections from the Travels of Ibn Battúta INTRODUCTION § 1. IBN BATTÚTA AND HIS WORK To the world of today the men of medieval Christendom already seem remote and unfamiliar. Their names and deeds are recorded in our history-books, their monuments still adorn our cities, but our kinship with them is a thing unreal, which costs an effort of the imagination. How much more must this apply to the great Islamic civilization, that stood over against medieval Europe, menacing its existence and yet linked to it by a hundred ties that even war and fear could not sever. Its monuments too abide, for those who may have the fortune to visit them, but its men and manners are to most of us utterly unknown, or dimly conceived in the romantic image of the Arabian Nights. Even for the specialist it is difficult to reconstruct their lives and see them as they were. Histories and biographies there are in quantity, but the historians, for all their picturesque details, seldom show the ability to select the essential and to give their figures that touch of the intimate which makes them live again for the reader. It is in this faculty that Ibn Battúta excels. Of the multitudes that crowd upon the stage in the pageant of medieval Islam there is no figure more instinct with life than his. In his book he not only lays before us a faithful portrait of himself, with all his virtues and his failings, but evokes a whole age as it were from the dead. These travels have been ransacked by historians and geographers, but no estimate of his work is even faintly satisfactory which does not bear in mind that it is first and foremost a human diary, in which the tale of facts is subordinated to the interests and preoccupations of the diarist and his audience

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  Desert Songs of the Night

  1500 Years of Arabic Literature

  • Suheil Bushrui(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Saqi Books

    (Publisher)

  Part VI

  THE AGE OF DEPRESSION

  Ibn Battuta

  ACROSS NORTH AFRICA

  I left Tangier, my birthplace, on Thursday, 2nd Rajab, 725 [14th June, 1325], being at that time twenty-two [lunar] years of age, with the intention of making the Pilgrimage to the Holy House [at Mecca] and the Tomb of the Prophet [at Madína]. I set out alone, finding no companion to cheer the way with friendly intercourse, and no party of travellers with whom to associate myself. Swayed by an overmastering impulse within me, and a long-cherished desire to visit those glorious sanctuaries, I resolved to quit all my friends and tear myself away from my home. As my parents were still alive, it weighed grievously upon me to part from them, and both they and I were afflicted with sorrow.

  On reaching the city of Tilimsán [Tlemsen], whose sultan at that time was Abú Táshifín, I found there two ambassadors of the Sultan of Tunis, who left the city on the same day that I arrived. One of the brethren having advised me to accompany them, I consulted the will of God in this matter, and after a stay of three days in the city to procure all that I needed, I rode after them with all speed. I overtook them at the town of Miliána, where we stayed ten days, as both ambassadors fell sick on account of the summer heats. When we set out again, one of them grew worse, and died after we had stopped for three nights by a stream four miles from Miliána. I left their party there and pursued my journey, with a company of merchants from Tunis. On reaching al-jazá’ir [Algiers] we halted outside the town for a few days, until the former party rejoined us, when we went on together through the Mitíja to the mountain of Oaks [Jurjúra] and so reached Bijáya [Bougie]. The commander of Bijáya at this time was the chamberlain Ibn Sayyid an-Nás. Now one of the Tunisian merchants of our party had died leaving three thousand dinars of gold, which he had entrusted to a certain man of Algiers to deliver to his heirs at Tunis. Ibn Sayyid an-Nás came to hear of this and forcibly seized the money. This was the first instance I witnessed of the tyranny of the agents of the Tunisian government. At Bijáya I fell ill of a fever, and one of my friends advised me to stay there till I recovered. But I refused, saying, “If God decrees my death, it shall be on the road with my face set toward Mecca.” “If that is your resolve,” he replied, “sell your ass and your heavy baggage, and I shall lend you what you require. In this way you will travel light, for we must make haste on our journey, for fear of meeting roving Arabs on the way.” I followed his advice and he did as he had promised—may God reward him! On reaching Qusantínah [Constantine] we camped outside the town, but a heavy rain forced us to leave our tents during the night and take refuge in some houses there. Next day the governor of the city came to meet us. Seeing my clothes all soiled by the rain he gave orders that they should be washed at his house, and in place of my old worn headcloth sent me a head-cloth of fine Syrian cloth, in one of the ends of which he had tied two gold dinars. This was the first alms I received on my journey. From Qusantínah we reached Bona where, after staying in the town for several days, we left the merchants of our party on account of the dangers of the road, while we pursued our journey with the utmost speed. I was again attacked by fever, so I tied myself in the saddle with a turban-cloth in case I should fall by reason of my weakness. So great was my fear that I could not dismount until we arrived at Tunis. The population of the city came out to meet the members of our party, and on all sides greetings and questions were exchanged, but not a soul greeted me as no one there was known to me. I was so affected by my loneliness that I could not restrain my tears and wept bitterly, until one of the pilgrims realized the cause of my distress and coming up to me greeted me kindly and continued to entertain me with friendly talk until I entered the city.

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  The Thousand and One Nights

  Space, Travel and Transformation

  • Richard van Leeuwen(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The transition from nomad culture to a sedentary culture thus had important consequences for the perception of space: it created a new perspective, a new spatial diversity, new spatial hierarchies and a horizon which enclosed a specific space and which locked out an exotic and strange world. It created forms of territorialization, for the community of believers, for social groups and for individuals. Travelling was no longer a condition of life, it was a way of partaking in one of the newly established geographies, learning, religion and trade. It was also a prerequisite for the formation of boundary systems within the Arabo-Islamic realm and the concept of the ‘traveller’ and the genre of the travel account. From the tenth century onwards, the Muslim empire was carved up into various regional states and dynasties, which reflected political differentiation and the articulation of regional geographical systems.

  If one takes the growing political fragmentation into account, it is perhaps surprising that in the famous accounts of Ibn Jubayr (twelfth century) and Ibn Battūta (fourteenth century) little mention is made of political borders on land. Both travellers mention boundaries, of course, but these tend to be only of a more or less natural character: sea-ports, fringes of the desert, mountain areas and ethnic regions. Ibn Jubayr mentions only three ‘real’ boundaries: the port of Alexandria, where the travellers have their luggage inspected and where custom duties are collected; a similar border between Aydhab and Jedda; and the strongly guarded border between the Christian area of Tripoli and the Muslim territory, where a fee is levied. Ibn Battūta mentions a tightly supervised border between Egypt and Syria, in the Sinai desert, and a border at the crossing of the Indus river on entering the realm of Muḥammad Tughluq in India. The mentioning of these borders suggests that other borders, too, would have been mentioned if they had in some way affected the journeys.

  The absence of political borders in the travel accounts of Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Battūta does not mean that political differentiation did not exist, or that it was of no significance. Both travellers mention their leaving one domain and entering another – from the Arabian peninsula to Iraq, for instance, or from Syria to Anatolia – but these boundaries are marked by natural spaces and not by welldefined borderlines. In Anatolia, Ibn Battūta carefully mentions all the sultanates he visits, not by reporting on borders which he crossed, but by describing how he was received at the royal courts in the capitals, where he received his ‘endorsement’ as a legal foreigner. This custom, of granting a ‘visa’ at the centre of power, is clearly explained when he joins the travelling court of the Khan of the Golden Horde in Kipchak. Indeed, even the extensive formalities on the border of Hind are only a preparation for his audience at the court of the sultan and for the ritual of being accepted in his favour. The Egyptian borders, finally, which apparently were carefully defined, at least in Alexandria and the Sinai, are described as fiscal borders only, where travellers are subjected to oppressive measures due to the greed of local rulers. Ibn Jubayr gives this fiscal aspect a certain political dimension by praising Sultan Ṣalā al-Dīn for abolishing certain levies and deploring that his authority is insufficient to end the malpractices still current in Aydhab.6

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  Muslim Travellers

  Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination

  • Dale F. Eickelman, James Piscatori, Dale F. Eickelman, James Piscatori(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Sunan, III, 317, tradition no. 3641.
• Risks ranged from the danger of being assaulted by bandits , to exposure to plague, desert, and sea.
• Al-Manuni gives twenty-two titles of texts concerning the period 1660–1790 : two of them are sifariyya texts, three cover travel within the country, and seventeen are hijaziyya texts.
• Very often most of the biographical evidence available about the traveller is contained in his rihla
  account. This was the case of Ibn Battuta and al-Tamgruti.
• This vice , however, seems to be common to travel accounts in other cultures. See Morsy (1983) .
• It is worth noticing that such a feeling is still at work today. In a recent interview, Faqih al-Basri, one of the most radical leaders of the opposition to the Moroccan monarchy during the last twenty-five years, answered a question in these words:
  • Question: “Le pays a dû vous manquer . . . ?”
  • Réponse: “Bien sûr le Maroc me manque . . . J’étais loin de mon village, de mes racines, mais j’évoluais dans une partie plus vaste que j’ai appris à découvrir et à aimer . . . le croyant est partout chez lui en terre d’Islam.”
  (See Jeune Afrique, 15 July 1987, no. 1384, p. 24)
• Al-‘Ayyashi’s rihla
  is only partially translated into French: Berbrugger 1846 and Motylinksi 1900 .

References

• al-‘Ayyashi, A.S. (AH 1316/AD 1898–9) Ma’ al-Mawa’id , Fez, I and II.
• Berbrugger, L.A. (1846) ‘Voyages dans le sud de l’Algérie’, in Exploration scientifique de l’Algérie , vol. ix.
• Berque. J. (1955) Les structures sociales du Haut Atlas , Presses Universitaires de France, Paris.
• Brunel, R. (1955) Le Monachisme errant dans l’Islam, Sidi Heddi et les Heddawa , Libraire Larousse, Paris.
• AbuDawud (n.d.) Sunan , III.
• De Castries, H. (1929) Relation d’une ambassade marocaine en Turquie, 1589–1591