The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century

by Ross E. Dunn

  When a pilgrim reached Mecca and circuited the Ka’ba, he still had, in an important religious sense, twelve miles to go before he would terminate his sacred journey. No Muslim was privileged to claim the title “al-Hajj” until he had traveled through the desert ravines east of the city to the plain of ’Arafat and, on the ninth day of Dhu l-Hijja, stood before the Mount of Mercy, the place where Adam prayed and where in 632 Muhammad preached his farewell sermon to his pristine congregation of believers. This annual retreat into the Meccan wilderness embraces the complex of ceremonies that makes up the hajj proper, or Greater Pilgrimage, which Muslims regard as separate from (though also including) the rituals of the tawaf and the sa’y. The Meccan rites, performed alone and at any time of the year, are called the ’umra, that is, the Visit or Lesser Pilgrimage.

  Before Islam, Mecca was the center for a yearly pilgrimage of Arabian tribes that was purely pagan. The Prophet retained some of those rites but utterly transformed their purpose into a celebration of Abraham’s unyielding monotheism. The ceremonies rested on the authority of the Qur’an and on the traditionally accepted practices of the Prophet. Although minor details of the procedures vary according to the different juridical schools (such as that male Shafi’is have their heads shaved at a different point in the sequence of rites than do members of the other madhhabs), the hajj is the supreme expression of the unity of all believers. Indeed, when on the tenth of Dhu l-Hijja each pilgrim kills a goat or sheep in remembrance of God’s last-minute instruction to Abraham to sacrifice a ram rather than his own son, Muslims the world over do the same, thus uniting themselves symbolically with their brothers and sisters in the Arabian desert.

  Today, more than two million Muslims commonly arrive in Mecca each year and set out for ’Arafat in a white-robed horde on the eighth and ninth days of the sacred month. Many walk, but others travel in buses and cars along the multilane highway which winds out from the city. Saudi government helicopters circle overhead and crowd control experts monitor the proceedings from closed circuit television centers. First aid stations line the route, cropdusters spray the plain against disease, and an army of vendors greets the tired pilgrims at their destination with soft drinks and barbecued chicken. In Ibn Battuta’s time the journey was of course far less agreeable, even dangerous if the local bedouin took the occasion to plunder the procession. Those who could afford the price rode in enclosed camel-litters. But most of the pilgrims walked the hot stony trail; the pious did it barefoot.

  By tradition the pilgrims spend the night of the eighth day at Mina, a settlement in a narrow valley four miles east of the city. On the following morning they go on to the ’Arafat plain and range themselves in a great circle around the jagged little hill called the Mount of Mercy. A city of tents and prayer mats is quickly unfurled. At noon begins the Standing, the central and absolutely essential event of the hajj. Throughout the afternoon and until the sun sets the pilgrims keep vigil round the Mount, or on its slopes if they can find room, reciting the prayer of obeisance to God (“What is Thy Command? I am Here!”) and hearing sermons preached from the summit.

  Precisely at sunset the Standing formally concludes and the throng immediately packs up and starts back in the direction of Mecca. By tradition the pilgrim must not perform his sunset prayer at ’Arafat but at Muzdalifah, a point three miles back along the road to Mina. And equally by tradition everyone who is physically able races to get there as fast as he can. In Ibn Battuta’s time the “rushing” to Muzdalifah might have brought to mind the millennial charge of some gigantic army of white-clad dervishes. Today it has more the character of a titanic California commuter rush, meticulously orchestrated by the Saudi authorities to prevent hopeless traffic jams. Once arrived at Muzdalifah most of the pilgrims bed down for the night, though women, children, and the infirm may continue immediately on to Mina ahead of the crowd.

  On the morning of the tenth the pilgrims assemble at Mina for the start of the Feast of the Sacrifice (’Id al-Adha), four days of celebration and desacralizing rites that bring the hajj to conclusion. Mina’s sacred landmarks are three modest stone pillars, which stand at intervals from the eastern to the western end of the valley. As his first act the pilgrim must take a handful of pebbles (which he usually picks up along the road from ’Arafat) and cast seven of them at the western pillar. Just as the faithful Abraham threw stones at the devil to repulse his mesmeric suggestions that the little Isma’il need not after all be sacrificed, so the pilgrim must take aim at the devil-pillar as witness to his personal war against evil in general. When he has completed the lapidation, he buys a sheep or goat (or even a camel if he is rich) from any of the vendors who have collected thousands of animals for the occasion. He sets the face of the creature in the direction of the Ka’ba and kills it by cutting its throat as Abraham did after God mercifully reprieved his son. This act brings to an end the period of ihram. The pilgrim must find a barber (dozens are on hand) and have his head shaved, or at least some locks cut, and then he is free to exchange his ritual garb for his everyday clothing. As soon as the rites of Mina are accomplished he returns to Mecca to perform the tawaf once again, now released from all prohibitions save for sexual intercourse.

  From the tenth to the thirteenth the solemnities of the Standing give way to jubilation and fellowship. The pilgrims return to Mina for two or sometimes three nights. They throw pebbles at all three of the devil-pillars each day, sacrifice additional animals, and socialize with countrymen and new-found friends. On the twelfth the first groups of hajjis begin leaving for home, taking care to perform the tawaf of farewell as their final ritual act.

  From the fourteenth century to today the fundamental ceremonies of the hajj have been altered only in the merest details. Ibn Battuta’s own brief and matter-of-fact recounting of these events in the Rihla might be startlingly familiar to some young civil servant of Tangier, making the sacred journey by Royal Air Maroc.

  The great majority of pilgrims who streamed out through the Meccan gullies in mid November 1326 were heading back to the prosaic lives they had temporarily abandoned to make the holy journey. Some of them would take many months to reach home, working their way along, getting stranded here or there, or taking time to see the great mosque and college cities of the Middle East. Ibn Battuta does not tell us in the Rihla just when he decided that he would not, for the time being, return to Morocco. When he left Tangier his only purpose had been to reach the Holy House. Once there, did the Meccan bazaar, the exotic faces, the stories of strange sights and customs set his mind to some master plan for exploring the hemisphere? Was it there that he made his impossible vow to roam the world without ever retracing his steps? Had he begun to realize the possibilities of traveling thousands of miles in every direction from Mecca without ever going beyond the limits of the familiar society of men who shared his values, his habits, and his language? Whatever soul-stirring effects his first hajj may have had on him, he was certainly no longer the boy who stood forlornly in the center of Tunis with nowhere to go and no one to talk to. After a year and a half away from home, he had already seen more of the world than most people ever would, he was cultivating a circle of learned and internationally minded friends, and he had won the title of “al-Hajj,” itself an entrée to respect among influential and well-traveled people. When he set off for Baghdad with the Iraqi pilgrims on 20 Dhu l-Hijja, one fact was apparent. He was no longer traveling to fulfill a religious mission or even to reach a particular destination. He was going to Iraq simply for the adventure of it. It is at this point that his globetrotting career really began.

  Notes

  1. Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (New York, 1955), p. 86.

  2. Theophilus Bellorini and Eugene Hoade, eds. and trans., Visit to the Holy Places of Egypt, Sinai, Palestine and Syria in 1384 by Frescobaldi, Gucci and Sigoli (Jerusalem, 1948), p. 23.

  3. The Syrian caravan normally left Damascus on 10 Shawwal, or 10 September in 1326. ’Abdullah ’Ankawi, “The Pilgrimage to Me
cca in Mamluk Times,” Arabian Studies 1 (1974): 149. Since the Rihla is sometimes given to rounding off significant dates at the first day of the month, Ibn Battuta may well have left on or about 10 Shawwal rather than the 1st.

  4. ’Ankawi, “The Pilgrimage to Mecca,” pp. 160–61.

  5. Arberry, Koran, pp. 54–55.

  6. IB gives the traveling time from Rabigh to Khulais (a palm grove on the route) as three nights. Ibn Jubayr made the trip from Mecca to Khulais in four days. The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, trans. R. J. C. Broadhurst (London, 1952), pp. 188–91.

  7. A pilgrimage prayer translated in Ahmad Kamal, The Sacred Journey (London, 1961), p. 35.

  8. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, pp. 116–17.

  9. Ibid., p. 117.

  10. C. Snouk Hurgronje, Mecca in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century (Leiden, 1931), pp. 171–72.

  11. Eldon Rutter, The Holy Cities of Arabia, 2 vols. (London, 1928), vol. 1, p. 117.

  12. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, p. 80.

  13. Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah, 2 vols. (New York, 1964), vol. 2, p. 161.

  14. IB states in the Rihla that when he assumed the ihram garments he declared his intention of performing the rites of the Greater Pilgrimage (hajj) without the Lesser Pilgrimage (’umra, or visit). The latter, comprised essentially of the tawaf and the sa’y, could be performed at any time of the year. When a Muslim entered Mecca at a time other than the hajj season, he could deconsecrate himself following the tawaf and the sa’y of arrival. He would then be in a state called tamattu’, meaning that he could enjoy a normal life and wear everyday clothes until the start of the hajj, if in fact he planned to remain in the town until then. IB, however, vowed to perform the hajj, which included the tawaf and sa’y plus the rites of the walk to Arafat, without interrupting the state of ihram. Therefore, he was required to wear his white clothes and obey the attendant prohibitions until his hajj was completed. See “Hadjdj,” EI2, vol. 3, p. 35.

  15. Gb, vol. 1, p. 203 n. IB counts five minarets, but Ibn Jubayr (Travels, p. 87) says there were seven, which agrees with nineteenth-century observers. There are seven today, though the precise locations of the towers have varied over the centuries.

  16. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, p. 86.

  17. Burckhardt, Travels, vol. 1, p. 273.

  5 Persia and Iraq

  He also said: “After us the descendants of our clan will wear gold embroidered garments, eat rich and sweet food, ride fine horses, and embrace beautiful women but they will not say that they owe all this to their fathers and elder brothers, and they will forget us and those great times.”1

  The Yasa of Chinggis Khan

  When Ibn Battuta made his first excursion to Iraq and western Persia, more than a century had passed since the birth of the Mongol world empire. For a Moroccan lad born in 1304 the story of Chinggis Khan and the holocaust he brought down on civilized Eurasia was something to be read about in the Arabic version of Rashid al-Din’s History of the Mongols. The Tatar storm blew closer to England than it did to Morocco and had no repercussions on life in the Islamic Far West that Ibn Battuta’s great grandfather was likely to have noticed. For the inhabitants of Egypt and the Levant the Mongol explosion had been a brush with catastrophe, mercifully averted by Mamluk victories but imagined in the dark tales told by fugitives from the dead and flattened cities that were once Bukhara, Merv, and Nishapur. For the Arab and Persian peoples of the lands east of the Euphrates the terrible events of 1220–60 had been a nightmare of violence from which they were still struggling to recover in the fourteenth century.

  “With one stroke,” wrote the Persian historian Juvaini of the Mongol invasion of Khurasan, “a world which billowed with fertility was laid desolate, and the regions thereof became a desert, and the greater part of the living dead, and their skin and bones crumbling dust; and the mighty were humbled and immersed in the calamities of perdition.”2 The Mongols wreaked death and devastation wherever they rode from China to the plains of Hungary but nowhere more so than in Persia, where most of the great cities of the northern region of Khurasan were demolished and their inhabitants annihilated. A modern historian estimates that the total population of Khurasan, Iraq, and Azerbaijan may have dropped temporarily from 2,500,000 to 250,000 as a result of mass extermination and famine.3 The thirteenth-century chronicler Ibn al-Athir estimated that the Mongols killed 700,000 people in Merv alone.4 That figure is probably a wild exaggeration, but it suggests the contemporary perception of those calamitous events.

  Map 5: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Persia and Iraq, 1326–27

  The Mongol terror did not proceed from some Nazi-like ideological design to perpetrate genocide. Nor was it a spontaneous barbarian rampage. Rather it was one of the cooly devised elements of the greater Chinggis Khanid strategy for world conquest, a fiendishly efficient combination of military field tactics and psychological warfare designed to crush even the possibility of resistance to Mongol rule and to demoralize whole cities into surrendering without a fight. Once the armies had overrun Persia and set up garrison governments, wholesale carnage on the whole came to an end. Even the most rapacious Tatar general understood that the country could not be systematically bled over the long term if there were no more people left. After about 1260, and in some regions much earlier, trade resumed, fields were planted, towns dug themselves out, and remnants of the educated and artisan classes plodded back to their homes. Some cities, such as Tabriz, opened their gates to the invaders, and so were spared destruction. Others, Kerman and Shiraz for example, were in regions far enough to the south to be out of the path of the storm; they later acquiesced to Mongol overlordship while preserving a degree of political autonomy.

  And yet for the mass of Arabic- or Persian-speaking farmers, on whose productive labor the civilization of Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau had always rested, the disaster was chronic. Over the long run the military crisis was not so much an invasion of Mongol armies at it was the last great trek of Turkish steppe nomads from Central Asia into the Islamic heartland, a re-enactment and indeed a continuation of the eleventh-century migrations that had populated parts of the Middle East with Turkish tribes and put their captains in political control of almost all of it. Chinggis Khan could never have done more than found some unremarkable tribal state in Inner Asia were it not for his success at incorporating into his war machine numerous Turkish clans inhabiting the grasslands between Mongolia and the Caspian Sea. Turkish warriors trooped to the flag of Genghis by the tens of thousands, partly because the Mongols had defeated them, partly for the military adventure, partly because rain fell more often and grass grew taller progressively as one moved west and south. Turks far outnumbered ethnic Mongols in the mounted armies that attacked Persia, and they brought with them their wagons, their families, and their enormous herds of horses and sheep, which fed their way through Khurasan and westward along the flanks of the Alburz Mountains to the thick pastures of Azerbaijan.

  Although many of the Turkish invaders had themselves been converted to Sunni Islam in the preceding centuries as a result of contact with urban merchants and missionaries from Khurasan, they joined eagerly in the violent dismembering of Persian society, ridding the land of the farms, crops, irrigation works, and cities that obstructed the free movement of their herds. Over several decades thousands of Iranian peasants were killed, enslaved, and chased off their land. To make matters worse, the early Mongol rulers, beginning with Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulegu in 1256, could not quite make up their minds whether to carry through policies designed to reconstruct the country and revive agriculture or to treat the land as permanent enemy territory by taxing the peasants unbearably and permitting commanders, tribal chiefs, and state “messengers” to devour the countryside at the slightest sign of agrarian health.

  Ghazan (1295–1304), the seventh Ilkhan (or “deputy” of the Great Khan, as the Mongol rulers of Persia were called), made a determined effort to improve the administrative and fiscal syste
m in ways that would lighten the peasants’ tax load, relieve them of indiscriminate extortion on the part of state officials, and restore their will to produce. The reforms had modest success, but they did not drive the economy decisively upward, owing to the petulant resistance of officials and war lords and the failure of Ghazan’s successors to persevere with sufficient energy. The strength and well-being of any civilized society depended on the prosperity of its agriculture, and in this respect Persia and Iraq entered the fourteenth century still dragging the chains of the Mongol invasion. “There can be no doubt,” wrote the Persian historian Mustawfi in 1340, “that even if for a thousand years to come no evil befalls the country, yet will it not be possible completely to repair the damage, and bring back the land to the state in which it was formerly.”5

  Yet if the understructure of the Persian economy was weak, the Mongols succeeded remarkably well at paving over their own work of mass contamination with a new urban culture shiny enough to make an educated visitor forget all about the horrors of Merv. Like the Marinids, the Mamluks, and other crude conquerors fresh from the steppe, the Ilkhans were quick to surrender to the sophisticated civilization that enveloped them. Indeed the mind of the Mongol warrior was so culturally deprived that it presented a vast blank on which all sorts of refined and humane influences could be written. In the earlier phase of the conquest the Tatar leaders turned for guidance to their Turkish subordinates, some of whom were Muslims with literate skills gained as a result of two or three centuries of contact with the cities of Khurasan on the fringe of the steppe. These allies supplied the Mongol language with a written script (Uigur Turkish) and a corps of clerks and officials who did much of the initial work of installing Tatar government throughout the Genghis Khanid empire. Even as the invasion of Persia was still going forward, the people of distinctly Mongol origin in the forces, a minority group almost from the beginning, were intermarrying with Turks, taking up their language and ways, and rapidly disappearing into the great migrating crowd. By the end of the thirteenth century, purely Mongol cultural influences on Persia, excepting in matters of warfare and military pomp, had all but vanished.