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

by Ross E. Dunn

  Except for its thick forests of date-palms, the city had little to recommend it that was not past and gone. Ibn Battuta must have devoted most of his time there to visiting the mosque and the graves of several of the early immortals of Arab letters, as well as some of the Companions of the Prophet. As usual the local Sunni worthies, a small and undistinguished group, favored him with money, clothes, and food. The Ilkhanid governor also received him and gave him presents. He probably stayed not more than a week or two.16

  From Basra he took passage on a sambuq, a small, lateen-rigged boat common in the Mesopotamian river trade, and sailed for ten miles along the Ubulla canal, passing “through an uninterrupted succession of fruit gardens and overshadowing palmgroves both to right and left, with traders sitting in the shade of the trees, selling bread, fish, dates, milk, and fruit.” The canal emptied into the Tigris estuary, called the Shatt al-’Arab, which linked the region of Basra with the gulf.17 Here, he transferred to a second vessel and sailed overnight to Abadan, which in that century was a few miles from the coast, though today it is more than twenty miles owing to the gradual build-up of the alluvial delta.18

  While stopping at a small hospice in Abadan, he learned of a local Sufi anchorite, who lived year round in the marsh and sustained himself entirely on fish. He immediately went looking for this hermit and found him seated in the shell of a ruined mosque. The shaykh gave the young man the blessing he sought and even offered him a large fish for his supper. Ibn Battuta recalls in the Rihla that he was deeply moved by this meeting, to the point that “for a moment I entertained the idea of spending the rest of my life in the service of this shaykh.” Indeed, he seems to have had a recurring fascination for this sort of uncompromising asceticism, probably a tug of the heart that many gregarious, worldly men feel from time to time. At a number of junctures in his career he experienced little crises of the soul, when he thought of throwing up his life of adventure for the self-denying and rapturous existence of a true Sufi disciple. In the end, however, what he calls “the pertinacity of my spirit” won out, and he was back on the road and into the world of affairs.

  In this case he was back on the road in no time. Under the urging of an acquaintance from Basra, he contrived to get to Baghdad, not by turning around and heading back up the Tigris, but by making for the mountains of Persian Luristan, which was decidedly in the wrong direction. His plan was to make a long looping tour east of Mesopotamia through the Persian region of Jibal, or what he calls Iraq al-Ajami. Indeed it is at this point in the narrative that he speaks of his “habit” of shunning any road he had already traveled by.

  As it worked out, his next important destination was to be the city of Isfahan in the Jibal province on the far side of the lofty Zagros Mountains. Apparently in the company of his Basran friend, he went by ship from Abadan eastward along the delta coastline to the port of Machul, now Bandar-e-Ma’shur, in the Iranian part of Mesopotamia. There he hired a horse from some merchants and headed northward across the plain of Khuzistan, a province of marshes and sugar-cane fields. He followed a generally northward route through the agricultural towns of Ramhormoz (Ramiz) and Shushtar (Tustar), then turned westward to meet the Zagros, which rose suddenly as a barricade of rock along the eastern rim of the plain.

  The mountain crags and pinnacles, which formed the natural frontier between Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, were inhabited by fierce herding peoples called the Lurs. The Mongols had subdued this country perfunctorily in Hulegu’s time, but owing to its wild isolation from the centers of administration, they left law and order in the hands of a client dynasty of tribal barons, called atabegs. Ibn Battuta regarded some of the Lurs customs that came to his attention as thoroughly brutish and heterodox, but the atabeg and the little groups of literate men of the villages and hospices treated him well and gave him the usual presents owing to wayfarers.19 From Idhaj (or Malamir, and now Izeh), the mountain capital of the atabegs, he advanced northeastward through the frigid high passes of the Zagros (it was probably March) and thence to the orchard city of Isfahan, which lay at the western edge of the central plateau at an altitude of 4,690 feet. He was now in the heart of Persia.

  He found lodging in what seems to have been a Sufi center of abundant proportions, possessing not only a mosque, a kitchen, and rooms for disciples and travelers, but also a fine marble-paved hammam, or bath. The local head of the zawiya, a Persian named Qutb al-Din Husain, was also a shaykh of the Suhrawardiyya, one of the largest mystical orders of the later Middle Period with widespread affiliations in the eastern Islamic lands, including India. One day the young visitor was looking out the window of his room in the lodge and noticed a white khirqa, or patched Sufi’s robe, spread out in the garden to dry. He recalls thinking to himself that he would like to have one of them, just as he had collected one from the Rifa’i shaykh in Jerusalem, as a symbol of honorific connection with the Suhrawardiyya. In the next moment Qutb al-Din abruptly entered his room and ordered a servant to bring the robe, which he threw over his guest’s shoulders. Astonished, Ibn Battuta fell to kissing the shaykh’s feet, then, in his impetuous way, begged if he might not have his blessed skull cap as well. The request was granted forthwith. In the Rihla Ibn Battuta takes pains to list the chain of authority (isnad) linking him by virtue of this investiture with the twelfth-century founder of the brotherhood. But as in the Jerusalem episode, he assumed no obligation to pursue the Sufi way simply by accepting the shaykh’s casual blessing on a God-fearing traveler.

  He spent two weeks with Qutb al-Din in Isfahan, enjoying the preserved watermelon and other fruits of the Isfahan plain laid out at the zawiya’s table. At this point in history the city was not the noble capital it had been under the Seljuk Turks and would be again three centuries later under the Shi’i Safavids. Because of a sad inclination among the inhabitants to engage in violent factional rows, coupled with the turmoil of the early Mongol years, the city was only beginning to recover some of its earlier vigor.20 Perhaps dissatisfied with what the town had to show him of Persian culture, Ibn Battuta decided to travel another 300 miles south to Shiraz, chief city of the province of Fars.

  This journey, accomplished in ten days, took him along one of the historic trade routes of central Iran and through the central region of the ancient Persian empire. Since it was probably about mid April,21 he followd the so-called summer road through the Zagros foothills rather than the winter road which ran nearer the high desert to the east.22 During the final days of the trip he climbed through a series of blooming mountain valleys and thence into the fertile, mile-high basin that sheltered Shiraz, the “Garden City.”

  The luck of Shiraz in the Middle Period was that the Mongol monster had not been inclined to devour Fars province, the region being too hot for steppe herdsmen and too far away from the main Tatar centers in Azerbaijan. The city not only survived but opened its gates to refugees from the north, and so, as with Cairo, its intellectual life received a fillip from the arrival of well-educated fugitives. Ibn Battuta was attracted to Shiraz partly because of its reputation as the greatest center of Persian letters and partly because it was a city where, according to his contemporary Mustawfi, “most of the people strive after good works, and in piety and obedience to the Almighty have attained a high degree of godliness.”23 The city was sometimes called the Tower of Saints (Burj-i-Awliya) because of the profusion of holy tombs. It was also one of the loveliest towns in Persia, and still is. Ibn Battuta remembers that “its inhabitants are handsome in figure and clean in their dress. In the whole there is no city except Shiraz which approached Damascus in the beauty of its bazaars, fruit-gardens and rivers.”

  The young jurist wanted above all to meet the chief qadi of the city, Majd al-Din, a famous Persian scholar especially admired among Sunnis for having brilliantly defied the Shi’i Ilkhan Oljeitu. When this ruler converted to Shi’ism, according to the version of the story recounted in the Rihla, he ordered that the khutba, the praise formulas recited at the beginning of the Frida
y mosque sermon, be changed throughout the land to exalt the name of ’Ali. When the people of Shiraz refused to cooperate, he commanded that Majd al-Din be executed by being thrown to a pack of ferocious dogs trained to eat humans. But when the dogs were let loose, Ibn Battuta relates, “they fawned on him and wagged their tails before him without attacking him in any way.” The Ilkhan was so astounded at the deliverance of this Muslim Daniel that he played out the Darius role perfectly, prostrating himself at the qadi’s feet, showering him with honors, and renouncing his errant doctrine for the Sunni faith. Ibn Battuta’s ending to the story is a bit artful, since we know from other sources that the most Oljeitu did was to call off persecutions of Sunnis while remaining a loyal Twelver until his death in 1316. Majd al-Din meanwhile held his post throughout the reign of Abu Sa’id and for twenty years after the collapse of the Mongol state.24

  Soon after arriving in Shiraz in the company of three unnamed traveling companions, Ibn Battuta went to salute Majd al-Din, who questioned him about his homeland and his travels. The shaykh also offered him a small room in his college. Ibn Battuta does not say how long he stayed in the city, but the general chronological framework of the Persian tour would suggest that he remained something less than two weeks, visiting the mosques and the tombs of numerous Shirazi lights, including Abu ’Abdallah ibn Khafif, one of the forefathers of Persian Sufism, and the renowned poet Sa’di, who was buried in a lovely garden outside the city.25

  Since there were no more specially interesting towns to visit between Shiraz and the seaports of the gulf, Ibn Battuta resolved to turn west and head once again in the general direction of Baghdad. His route took him through two high passes of the southern Zagros and the little town of Kazarun, then northwestward into the Khuzistan plain. Somewhere north of the port of Machul he crossed his outbound trail of some three months earlier. Advancing once again into the Mesopotamian marshlands, he forded the Tigris at an unidentified point perhaps about midway between Wasit and Basra. He finally arrived at Kufa on the Euphrates five or six weeks after leaving Shiraz.26 He was now back on the main pilgrimage road. From Kufa, he continued upriver past the ruins of ancient Babylon and the Shi’i towns of al-Hilla and Karbala. About the first week of June 1327 he reached the Tigris and the city of the Caliphs.27

  He gives the definite impression in the Rihla that he was traveling to Iraq primarily to see Baghdad. But he was under no illusions about the sad state of the city in his own time. He went there to honor its past and perhaps to walk among the ruins along the west bank of the river, imagining the ghosts of the divines and jurisprudents who had lived there five centuries earlier, founding the moral and intellectual code of civilization by which his own generation still lived. In the Rihla he introduces his description of the city with a set of perfunctory praise formulas (“of illustrious rank and supreme pre-eminence”) but then goes on to reiterate the mournful admission of his twelfth-century predecessor Ibn Jubayr that “her outward lineaments have departed and nothing remains of her but the name . . . There is no beauty in her that arrests the eye, or summons the busy passer-by to forget his business and to gaze.”

  It was not in fact as bad as all that. As with the buildup of silt in the irrigation canals, the city’s waning had been gradual, in most periods almost imperceptible. Despite Turkish military coups, sectarian violence, urban gang warfare, and the menace of floods pouring over neglected dykes, Baghdad retained a good share of both its international commercial prosperity and its residual prestige as capital of the Caliphs long after the glorious eighth and ninth centuries. Even the rampaging Mongols left many of its public buildings standing and quite a few of its people alive. In fact Hulegu’s army had barely finished the sacking when he ordered, in typical fashion, that a vigorous restoration program should begin. Under an administration of local Arab and Persian officials, the city quickly pulled itself up to the status of provincial capital of Mesopotamia.

  Baghdad was no longer an important stop on a Middle Eastern study tour and Ibn Battuta found most of its numerous colleges in ruins. But teaching continued, notably in the Nizamiya, the eleventh-century prototype of the four-sided madrasa, and in the Mustansiriya, a college built in 1234 to provide professorial chairs and lecture rooms for all four of the major juridical schools.28 The Mosque of the Caliphs, one of the great congregational mosques located on the east bank of the river, had been burned down in the Mongol assault, but Ibn Battuta found it fully rebuilt and offering advanced studies. Although he stayed only two or three weeks in the city, he found time to go to the mosque to hear a set of lectures on one of the important compilations of Prophetic Traditions.

  If Baghdad’s intellectual life had had more to offer, he might have been content to remain there throughout the summer, awaiting the departure of the hajj caravan in mid-September. Any traveler less obdurate than he would probably have been thankful for a long rest at this point before starting another trek across the Arabian waste. But unexpectedly, a new adventure suddenly came his way, and it would have been entirely out of character for him to pass it up.

  He arrived in Baghdad to learn that the Ilkhan himself was currently in residence, perhaps having wintered there as the rulers sometimes did to escape the cold of Azerbaijan. Abu Sa’id was then making preparations to return to the north, most likely to Sultaniya, the capital founded by his father Oljeitu. The Ilkhan always traveled in the company of a huge retinue, called in Arabic the mahalla, or “camp,” which was in effect the entire royal court in motion: several amirs and their mounted troops, myriad religious and administrative personnel, and a small army of servants and slaves. In addition, the ruler’s wives and favorites, called the khatuns, all had their own suites of bodyguards and functionaries. Ibn Battuta jumped at the chance to tag along with the royal procession, “on purpose,” he explains, “to see the ceremonial observed by the king of al-’Iraq in his journeying and encamping, and the manner of his transportation and travel.” Either before leaving Baghdad or en route with the mahalla, he managed to secure the patronage of ’Ala al-Din Muhammad, one of the Ilkhan’s leading generals.

  Abu Sa’id, the last of the Mongols of Persia, ascended the throne in 1316 at the age of twelve. He was in fact about a year younger than Ibn Battuta, who describes him as being “the most beautiful of God’s creatures in features, and without any growth on his cheeks.” The traveler also admired him for his civilized qualities. He was not only a committed Sunni, but a generous, pious, and tolerant one. According to the fifteenth-century Egyptian writer Taghribirdi, he was “an illustrious and brave prince, with an imposing aspect, generous and gay.”29 He wrote both Arabic and Persian with a beautiful hand, played the lute, composed songs and poems, and, in the latter part of his reign, even lightened some of the tax load on the peasantry. Whereas several of his Mongol predecessors were confirmed alcholics and some of them died of the consequences, he prohibited the use of spirits in the kingdom in accord with the Sacred Law — though with what success we do not know. There seems to have been little in his character that recalled his ancestor Chinggis Khan. He represents rather the definitive conversion of the Ilkhanid state to polished Persian culture. Perhaps if he had reigned longer, he would have been a great builder like his contemporary al-Nasir Muhammad of Egypt. As it was, the political foundations he laid during his last eight years were not strong enough to ensure the survival of the regime, which utterly collapsed at his death in 1335, leaving Persia to face the remainder of the century in fragmentation and war.30

  In the summer of 1327, however, the dynasty looked vigorous enough to the Moroccan traveler, when he witnessed the nosiy, fearsome extravaganza of a Mongol Khan on the march:

  Each of the amirs comes up with his troops, his drums, and his standards, and halts in a position that has been assigned to him, not a step further, either on the right wing or on the left wing. When they have all taken up their positions and their ranks are set in perfect order, the king mounts, and the drums, trumpets and fifes are sounded for the depar
ture. Each of the amirs advances, salutes the king, and returns to his place; then the chamberlains and the marshals move forward ahead of the king, and are followed by the musicians. These number about a hundred men, wearing handsome robes, and behind them comes the sultan’s cavalcade. Ahead of the musicians there are ten horsemen, with ten drums carried on slings round their necks, and five [other] horsemen carrying five reed-pipes . . . On the sultan’s right and left during his march are the great amirs, who number about fifty.

  Ibn Battuta may have had only a general notion of where he might be going when he left Baghdad with this mahalla in the latter part of June.31 In his description of the journey, he does not name any of the stations but states only that he traveled in the company of the Ilkhan for ten days. The king was almost certainly heading for the new capital of Sultaniya (172 miles northwest of Tehran), probably following the trans-Persian “Khurasan Road” by way of Kermanshah, the central Zagros, and Hamadan.32 Somewhere near Hamadan the amir ’Ala al-Din Muhammad, Ibn Battuta’s patron, was suddenly ordered to leave the mahalla and proceed northward to Tabriz, apparently on urgent business of state.33 He almost certainly traveled with a lean, fast-riding detachment, and Ibn Battuta was given leave to go along. Again, his route to Tabriz is a mystery, but the party may have taken the old Abbasid high road from Hamadan northwestward through the mountains, passing east of Lake Urmiya.34 Meanwhile, Abu Sa’id and his suite lumbered on toward Sultaniya.

  Ibn Battuta could count it a stroke of good fortune to have this unexpected visit to Tabriz, for it was the premier city of the Persian Mongols and, at just this moment in history, one of the key commercial centers of the Eurasian world. Located in a grassy plain dominated to the south by the 12,000 foot pinnacle of Mount Sahand, Tabriz had been nothing more than the main town of the region until the Turco–Mongol herdsmen flooded into Azerbaijan. This migration produced a dramatic shift of both military power and population growth away from Mesopotamia to the high northwestern rim of Persia. The local notability had been wise enough to greet the Mongol invaders with the keys to the city, thus offering the Ilkhans the convenience of establishing their first capital in a town that their fellow Tatars had not first demolished.