by Ross E. Dunn
What Ibn Battuta recalls about his feelings upon arriving in Tunis is not the elation of a pilgrim who has reached one of the great centers of religious learning along the hajj route, but the forlornness of a young man in a strange city:
The townsfolk came out to welcome the shaykh Abu ’Abdallah al-Zubaydi and to welcome Abu al-Tayyib, the son of the qadi Abu ’Abdallah al-Nafzawi. On all sides they came forward with greetings and questions to one another, but not a soul said a word of greeting to me, since there was none of them that I knew. I felt so sad at heart on account of my loneliness that I could not restrain the tears that started to my eyes, and wept bitterly.
In no time at all, however things were looking up:
One of the pilgrims, realizing the cause of my distress, came up to me with a greeting and friendly welcome, and continued to comfort me with friendly talk until I entered the city, where I lodged in the college of the Booksellers.
After dodging tribal marauders all along the road from Bijaya, Ibn Battuta managed to arrive in Tunis during a period of relative political calm. The harried Abu Bakr, who had found himself shut out of the citadel of Tunis by rebels three different times since 1321, returned from Constantine and recaptured the city perhaps only a few days ahead of Ibn Battuta’s arrival there.9 Indeed Abu Bakr probably resumed authority just in time for the ’Id al-Fitr, the feast celebrating the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting during daylight hours. Ibn Battuta was on hand to witness the sultan fulfill his customary duty of leading “a magnificent procession” of officials, courtiers, and soldiers from the citadel to a special outdoor praying ground (musalla) that accommodated the crowds gathered for the prayers marking the Breaking of the Fast.10
Ibn Battuta spent about two months in Tunis, arriving some days before 10 September 1325 and leaving in early November. It was common for educated travelers or pilgrims to take lodging temporarily in a college, even though they were not regularly attending lectures. The madrasa of the Booksellers where he stayed was one of three colleges in existence in Tunis at that time.11 His recollections of his first visit to the city are slight, but we might be sure that he spent most of his time in the company of the gentlemen-scholars of the city. He may indeed have had exposure to some of the eminent Maliki ’ulama of the century. Since the demise of the Almohads, the Maliki school was enjoying as much of a resurgence in Ifriqiya as it was in Morocco. The Hafsid rulers were appointing Maliki scholars to high positions of state and patronizing the madrasas, where Maliki juridical texts were the heart of the curriculum.
If the Tunis elite held out an estimable model of erudition, they were also masters of refined taste and that union of piety and restrained wordliness that Ibn Battuta would exemplify in adulthood. During the previous century Tunis had been a distant refuge for successive waves of Muslims emigrating from Andalusia in the wake of the reconquista. Of all the North African cities with populations of Iberian descent, Tunis had the liveliest and most productive. The Andalusians, coming from a civilized tradition that was more polished than that of North Africa, were leaders in the fields of architecture, craftsmanship, horticulture, music, belle-lettres, and the niceties of diplomatic and courtly protocol. An Andalusian strain seems evident in Ibn Battuta’s own mannerly character, and we can wonder what seasoning effect two months in Tunis among such people may have had.
That he was already showing promise as an intelligent Maliki scholar was evident in the circumstances of his departure from Tunis in November 1325. He had left home a lonely journeyer eager to join up with whoever might tolerate his company. He left Tunis as the appointed qadi of a caravan of pilgrims. This was his first official post as an aspiring jurist. Perhaps the honor went to him because no better qualified lawyer was present in the group or because, as he tells us in the narrative, most of the people in the company were Moroccan Berbers. In any case, a hajj caravan was a sort of community and required formal leadership: a chief (amir) who had all the powers of the captain of a ship, and a qadi, who adjudicated disputes and thereby kept peace and order among the travelers.
The main caravan route led southward along Tunisia’s rich littoral of olive and fruit groves and through a succession of busy maritime cities — Sousse, Sfax, Gabès. Some miles south of Gabès the road turned abruptly eastward with the coast, running between the island of Djerba on one side, the fringe of the Sahara on the other. The next major stop was Tripoli, the last urban outpost of the Hafsid domain.
The province of Tripolitania, today part of Libya, marked geographically the eastern extremity of the island Maghrib. From here the coastline ran southeastward for more than 400 miles, cutting further and further into the climatic zone of the Sahara until desert and water came together, obliterating entirely the narrow coastal band of fertility. Further on the land juts suddenly northward again into latitudes of higher rainfall. Here was the well-populated region of Cyrenaica with its forests and pasturelands and fallen Roman towns. If Tripolitania was historically and culturally the end of the Maghrib, Cyrenaica was the beginning of the Middle East, the two halves of Libya divided one from the other by several hundred miles of sand and sea.
Across the breadth of the coastal Libyan countryside Arab herding tribes ruled supreme, and once again Ibn Battuta and his companions courted trouble. Between Gabès and Tripoli a company of archers, no doubt provided by the Hafsid sultan to protect the hajj caravan, kept rovers at bay. In Tripoli, however, Ibn Battuta decided to leave the main group, which lingered in the city because of rain and cold, and push on ahead with a small troop of Moroccans, presumably leaving his judgeship, at least temporarily, in the hands of a subordinate. Somewhere near the port town of Surt (Sirte) a band of cameleers tried to attack the little party. But according to the Rihla, “the Divine Will diverted them and prevented them from doing us harm that they had intended.” After reaching Cyrenaica in safety, the travelers waited for the rest of the caravan to catch up, then continued, presumably without further incident, toward the Nile.
Crossing Libya, Ibn Battuta had greater reason than ever to be wary of trouble since he no longer had only himself to consider. While the caravan was in Sfax, he entered into a contract of marriage with the daughter of a Tunisian official in the pilgrim company. When they reached Tripoli, the woman was presented to him. The arrangement ended in failure, however, for Ibn Battuta fell into a dispute with his prospective father-in-law while traveling through Cyrenaica and ended up returning the girl. Undaunted, he then wedded the daughter of another pilgrim, this time a scholar from Fez. Apparently with income from his judicial office he put on a marriage feast “at which I detained the caravan for a whole day, and entertained them all.” The Rihla tells us nothing whatsoever about the character of either of these women or Ibn Battuta’s relationship with them. Indeed he would marry several times in the course of his travels, yet neither his wives, nor the slave concubines who were frequently in his train during later periods of his travels, would receive anything other than the scantest mention here and there in the Rihla. Wives vanish as casually and as inexplicably from the narrative as they enter it. In the Islamic society of that age a man’s intimate family relations were regarded as no one’s business but his own, and married Muslim women, at least in the Arabic-speaking lands, lived out their lives largely in seclusion. Ibn Battuta’s domestic affairs were not a proper subject for a rihla, nor would they be for the biography or autobiography of any public man of that time. Consequently we learn much less than we would like about a significant dimension of Ibn Battuta’s traveling life.
Sometime in the late winter or spring of 1326 the caravan reached Alexandria at the western end of the Nile Delta.12 As treks across northern Africa went, Ibn Battuta managed it in less time than many travelers did, covering the more than 2,000 miles in the space of eight or nine months. If at this point he had been in a hurry to get to the Hijaz, he could have continued across the delta and the Sinai Peninsula, picking up the Egyptian caravan route to Mecca. But the next pilgrimage season was
still eight months away, affording him plenty of time to explore the Nile Valley and, and as any serious scholar-pilgrim did, pay his respects to Cairo, which in the first half of the fourteenth century was the reigning intellectual capital of the Arabic-speaking world and the largest city in the hemisphere anywhere west of China.
Notes
1. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, 2nd edn., trans. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1967), vol. 3, p. 307.
2. Robert Brunschvig, La Berbérie orientale sous les Hafsides des origines à la fin du XVe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1940, 1947), vol. 2, p. 97.
3. M. Canard, “Les relations entre les Merinides et les Mamelouks au XIVe siècle,” Annales de l’Institut d’Études Orientales 5 (1939): 43.
4. Ibn Khaldun, Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l’Afrique septentrionale, trans. Baron de Slane, 4 vols. (Paris, 1925–56), vol. 2, pp. 462–66, vol. 3, pp. 403–05.
5. Brunschvig (Berbèrie orientale, vol. 1, p. 148n) suggests this hypothesis.
6. A. Cherbonneau, “Notice et extraits du voyage d’El-Abdary à travers l’Afrique septentrionale, au VIIe siècle de l’Hegire,” Journal Asiatique, 5th ser., 4 (1854): 158. My translation from the French.
7. The events of this period are described in Ibn Khaldun, Histoire des Berberes, vol. 2, pp. 457–66; and Brunschvig, Berbèrie orientale, vol. 1, pp. 144–50.
8. Brunschvig, Berbèrie orientale, vol. 1, pp. 356–57.
9. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 146n.
10. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 301–02; Gb, vol. 1, p. 13n.
11. Robert Brunschvig, “Quelques remarques historiques sur les medersas de Tunisie,” Revue Tunisienne 6 (1931): 261–85. The college of the Booksellers was known in Arabic as the Ma’ridiyya.
12. In the Rihla IB remembers arriving in Alexandria on 5 April 1326 (1 Jumada I 726). Hrbek (Hr, pp. 417–18) argues that the date was more likely mid February (Rabi’ I 726) on the grounds that the trip from Tripoli to Alexandria should not have taken the three months Ibn Battuta allots to it, considering that no major delays are noted. Hrbek suggests that the journey probably took 40 to 45 days and that acceptance of an earlier arrival date in Alexandria helps to solve chronological problems that arise later on.
3 The Mamluks
As for the dynasties of our time, the greatest of them is that of the Turks in Egypt.1
Ibn Khaldun
Of the dozens of international ports Ibn Battuta visited in the course of his travels, Alexandria impressed him as among the five most magnificent. There was not one harbor but two, the eastern reserved for Christian ships, the western for Muslim. They were divided by Pharos Island and the colossal lighthouse which loomed over the port and could be seen several miles out to sea. Alexandria handled a great variety of Egyptian products, including the woven silk, cotton, and linen from its own thriving textile shops. But more important, it was the most westerly situated of the arc of Middle Eastern cities which funneled trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.
From the beginning of the Islamic age the flow of goods across the Middle East had followed a number of different routes, the relative importance of each depending on the prevailing configurations of political power and social stability. Ibn Battuta had the good fortune to make his first and lengthiest visit to Egypt at a time of high prosperity on the spice route running from the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and hence down the Nile to the ports of the delta.
Contributing to Egypt’s affluence was the firm rule of the Bahri Mamluks, the Turkish-speaking warrior caste who had governed that country and Syria as a united kingdom since 1260. Over the second half of the thirteenth century the Mamluks had been obliged to go to war several times to prevent the Mongol armies of Persia from overruning Syria and advancing to the Nile. It is to the credit of Mamluk cavalry that they stopped the Tatars and saved Egypt from catastrophe by the skin of its teeth. Thus the cities of the Nile were spared the fate of Baghdad, which the Mongols laid waste in 1258 and reduced to the status of a provincial market town.
Map 4: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Egypt, Syria, and Arabia, 1326
Although the Mongol threat to Syria did not end until about 1315, Egypt entered the fourteenth century with a firm government, a generally stable social order, and bright opportunities to exploit the commercial potential of its geographical position. Under the meticulous supervision of Mamluk soldiers and customs officers, the products of Asia were unloaded at the port of ’Aydhab half way up the Red Sea, moved overland by camel train to the Nile, then carried down the river on lateen-rigged vessels to Alexandria and the warehouses of Italian, French, and Catalan traders. Symon Semeonis, an Irish cleric who visited Alexandria in 1323 on his way to the Holy land, experienced the Mamluk customs bureaucracy at work:
On our arrival in the port, the [European] vessel, as is the custom, was immediately boarded by a number of Saracen [Muslim] harbor officials, who hauled down the sail, and wrote down the names of everybody on board. Having examined all the merchandise and goods in the ship, and having made a careful list of everything, they returned to the city taking the passengers with them . . . They quartered us within the first and second gates, and went off to report what they had done to the Admiral of the city, without whose presence and permission no foreigner is allowed either to enter or leave the city, and no goods can be imported.2
Ibn Battuta spent several weeks in the busy port, seeing the sights (including the Pharos lighthouse and the third-century marble column known as Pompey’s Pillar) and fraternizing with the men of letters in the mosques and colleges. In Egypt the Maliki school of law was not nearly so widedly used as the Shafi’i code, but Malikism was dominant in Alexandria owing to the large representation of North Africans and Andalusian refugees among the educated population.3 In the Rihla Ibn Battuta recounts the achievements and miracles of several scholars and mystics of the city, most of them of Maghribi origin.
At one point during these weeks he spent a few days as the guest of one Burhan al-Din the Lame, a locally venerated Sufi ascetic. Among the special talents of more enlightened Muslim divines was the gift of foretelling the future. It was in the company of Burhan al-Din that the young pilgrim got a first inkling of his destiny. The holy man, perceiving that Ibn Battuta had in his heart a passion for travel, suggested that he visit three of his fellow Sufis, two of them in India, the third in China. Ibn Battuta recalls the incident: “I was amazed at his prediction, and the idea of going to these countries having been cast into my mind, my wanderings never ceased until I had met these three that he named and conveyed his greeting to them.”
For the moment, however, Ibn Battuta was content to wander in the valley of the Nile. Alexandria was not located on the river but linked to it by a canal, constructed a few years before his arrival, which ran eastward to the Rosetta Branch at the town of Fuwwa. Most commercial traffic to the interior went by river vessel through the canal and from there upstream to Cairo, which lay about 140 miles inland at the apex of the delta, a journey of five to seven days with the usual favorable northerly winds.
Ibn Battuta was in no particular hurry at this point, however, since the next season of the hajj was still about seven months off. Where most young scholars might have made a beeline for Cairo, the great metropolis, this pilgrim, already displaying his characteristic zeal to see everything, spent about three weeks, probably during April 1326, wandering through the rich commercial and textile-producing towns of the delta — Damanhur, Fuwwa, Ibyar, Damietta, Samannud, and others.4 Along the way he sought out and lodged in the houses of numerous judges, savants, and Sufi shaykhs, including a celebrated saint of Fuwwa who also prophesied that the young man would one day wind up in India. He continued to support himself with the gifts and hospitality of the pious, not the least of his benefactors being the Mamluk governor of Damietta, who befriended him and sent him several coins. It might be presumed that Ibn Battuta was traveling in the Delta in the company of the woman he had married in Libya, except that she is never mentioned
in the Rihla again.
At Samannud on the Damietta branch of the river he boarded one of the high-masted ships which thronged the river and sailed directly upstream toward Cairo. Numerous Christian and Jewish travelers — merchants, ambassadors, Holy Land pilgrims — sailed the Nile between the coast and Cairo during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and few of them (in the narratives they later wrote) failed to marvel at the crowded, colorful, ever-blooming life of the river. Symon Semeonis extolled its natural wonders:
This river is most pleasant for navigating, most beautiful in aspect, most productive in fishes, abounding in birds, and its water is most wholesome and pleasant to drink, never harmful or offensive, but well suited to man’s needs. Many other excellent things might be said about it were it not the retreat of a highly noxious animal, resembling the dragon, which devours both horses and men if it catches them in the water or on the banks.5
Ibn Battuta, a minority among travelers in his failure to mention the crocodiles, was impressed by the sheer crush of humanity along the banks, a density of habitation in startling contrast to what he had seen crossing North Africa:
There is no need for a traveler on the Nile to take any provision with him, because whenever he wishes to descend on the bank he may do so, for ablutions, prayers, purchasing provisions, or any other purpose. There is a continuous series of bazaars from the city of Alexandria to Cairo . . . Cities and villages succeed one another along its banks without interruption and have no equal in the inhabited world, nor is any river known whose basin is so intensively cultivated as that of the Nile. There is no river on earth but it which is called a sea.