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

by Ross E. Dunn

  Ibn Battuta’s serious academic work would have taken place during the first seven months of the year, beginning in mid Muharram when the pilgrim throng had departed. These were the tranquil, slow-paced months in the life of the town, when a young scholar might study in leisure, extending his knowledge of the shari’a, learning some fine points of grammar, or perhaps penetrating more deeply the spiritual mysteries of Sufism. In the eighth month (Sha’ban) the curriculum shifted to inspirational and didactic talks on the approaching month of fasting. With the arrival of Ramadan the regular teaching year came to an end. In the tenth and eleventh months (Shawwal and Dhu l’Qa’da) lectures were given on the subject of the hajj and how to perform it properly. But as the Day of Standing approached, the influx of pilgrims, chanting and chattering, made public lecturing progressively impractical. Only when the crowds drifted away in the first weeks of the new year would the academic cycle begin once again.

  As little as Ibn Battuta reveals about his months of contemplative immobility, there is little doubt that he became better educated, mainly, one supposes, in the corpus of Maliki jurisprudence. The depth of his education should not of course be overstated. He never became a jurist of first rank, and his judgeship in the Sultanate of Delhi was, as we shall see, a type of sinecure. But he also benefited from his sojourn by the fact that any individual who was known to have lived in the Holy City for an extended period commanded a degree of prestige not accorded the ordinary pilgrim who simply came and went. A veteran mujawir was credited with exemplary devotion to God and to His House. In a more practical light, a season or more in Mecca gave him the chance to make friends with all sorts of literate and influential people from distant countries, associations on which he might draw for hospitality over the ensuing two decades.

  When Ibn Battuta left Mecca after the hajj of 1328 (1330), his expressed intention was to visit the Yemen. He says nothing in the Rihla about plans to cross the equator into tropical Africa, or climb the mountains of Oman, or visit the pearl fisheries of the Persian Gulf. Yet he was already accustomed to finding himself in places he never intended to go. It is just possible that in Mecca he had heard reports of well-paying opportunities for foreign scholars at the royal court of Delhi and that he was already thinking of making his way to India in order to offer his services. The obvious way to get there was to go to the Yemen first, then take ship for Gujarat on the northwest coast of India. As it turned out, he went no further east than the Gulf of Oman on this adventure, delaying his journey to India another two years.

  Whatever his long-range plans may have been in 1328 (1330), he left Mecca and headed west to the coast following the pilgrimage events. He took two days getting to Jidda, the port of Mecca, where a motley fleet of Red Sea craft waited to ferry pilgrims across to ’Aydhab or transport them down to Aden in the Yemen from where they would board bigger ships bound for the Persian Gulf, Africa, and India. Experienced caravaner though he was, this was to be his first real sea voyage. He could hardly have been cheered by that prospect when, reaching Jidda harbor, he found the profit-minded captains loading passengers, to use Ibn Jubayr’s phrase, “like chickens crammed in a coop.” In fact, a Meccan sharif, a brother of the two ruling princes and a man certainly worth knowing, invited the young faqih to accompany him to the Yemen. But upon discovering that space on the sharif’s vessel would be shared with a number of camels, Ibn Battuta promptly declined the proposal and went looking elsewhere. He finally found passage on a jalba, probably a standard two-masted ship of modest proportions used commonly in the Red Sea trade.6

  Ibn Battuta’s refusal to set sail in the company of a small herd of dromedaries was none too cautious. The Red Sea was the most relentlessly dangerous of the waters on which the Mediterraneanto-China connection depended. Coral reefs lined both shores, shoals lay lurking in unknown places, and currents were irregular. Added to these hazards were the perils of the Saharan–Arabian desert which the Red Sea bisected: sandstorms, unendurable heat, and an absence of fresh water along most of the shore. If a ship went aground and the passengers managed to struggle ashore, they then faced the likelihood of perishing of thirst or being robbed and killed by pirate-bedouins, who waited patiently for just such accidents to occur.

  The ships that braved this unfriendly sea could not have inspired much confidence in a landlubber like Ibn Battuta. Not only were Red Sea vessels usually small and overcrowded: like all Indian Ocean ships in that age, their hulls were constructed of wooden planks (usually of teak) laid end to end and stitched together with cords of coconut or palm fiber. Iron nails or bolts, which held together ships of the Mediterranean in the fourteenth century, were not used at all, and no ribbing or framework was installed to give the hull additional strength. Though stitched hulls may have proven more pliant in surf or in sudden contact with submerged rocks, Red Sea craft were fair weather vessels. Their pilots cast anchor at night, and when the weather looked bad they ran for port. “Their parts are conformable weak and unsound in structure,” remarks Ibn Jubayr on the jalbas of ’Aydhab. “Glory to God who contrives them in this fashion and who entrusts men to them.”7 On the other hand, experienced pilots had the measure of their ships, they knew every inch of the coast, and they could smell a storm coming long before it hit. “We observed the art of these captains and the mariners in the handling of their ships through the reefs,” continues Ibn Jubayr. “It was truly marvelous. They would enter the narrow channels and manage their way through them as a cavalier manages a horse that is light on the bridle and tractable.”8

  Though Ibn Battuta’s pilot, a Yemeni of Ethiopian origin, was probably one of these old salts, no display of good seamanship could reverse the fact that it was the wrong time of year to be sailing south from Jidda with any expectation of making a quick run to a Yemeni port. In the northern half of the Red Sea the winds are northerly or northwesterly the year round, and between May and September they blow as far south as the Strait of Bab al-Mandeb. In those months commercial shippers normally planned to embark from Jidda or ’Aydhab in order to catch a favoring wind all the way to Aden. During the rest of the year, however, the winds were southeasterly from the strait to a latitude not far south of Jidda. If, as we suggest, Ibn Battuta left Mecca shortly after the hajj of 1328, the southwesterlies had already blown up south of Jidda. And sure enough: “We traveled on this sea with a favoring wind for two days, but thereafter the wind changed and drove us off the course which we had intended. The waves of the sea entered in amongst us in the vessel, and the passengers fell grievously sick.”

  Sailing on the tack across the open sea but falling away to leeward, the pilot finally landed at a promontory on the African coast called Ras Abu Shagara (Ras Dawa’ir) whose location is not far south of Jidda.9 It was a common occurrence for ships crossing the Red Sea to miss their intended port either north or south and be forced to put in at roadsteads along the desert shore. Here, the Beja nomads of the Red Sea Hills made it their business to hire out camels and guides to lead travelers to a port, or, if it suited their fancy, to seize their possessions, plunder their ship, and leave them to die in the wilderness.10 It seems likely that Ibn Battuta’s captain was blown into shore by the storm and could not get out again with any hope of beating southward. In the event, the Beja were right on hand, and fortunately for the Moroccan and his seasick mates their intentions were honorable. Camels were rented and the company proceeded southward along the coast to the small Beja port of Suakin.

  There, Ibn Battuta found another ship, which managed to get out of port and make for Arabia. After sailing to windward for six days, he finally reached the coast at a latitude barely south of Suakin’s. Leaving his ship behind once again, he traveled 30 miles inland to the agricultural district of Hali (Haly), located in the coastal region known as Asir. He had already made acquaintance with the tribal ruler of Hali when they traveled together to Jidda after the hajj. He spent several days as the chieftain’s guest, taking time also to visit a noted ascetic and joining the local Sufi br
ethren in prayers and recitation of litanies.

  Back on the coast again, he boarded one of his host’s own vessels, which took him southward to a little port along the Yemeni coast.11 From there he proceeded overland across the arid coastal plain to Zabid, chief city of lowland Yemen.12

  After enduring the steaming cheerlessness of a Red Sea voyage for several weeks, his journey into the interior of Yemen must have seemed a happy relief, almost a reminder of home. Like Morocco, the Yemen was a land of geographical extremes. Terrain, soil, altitude, and temperature were to be experienced in profuse variety; almost any sort of vegetable or fruit could be grown in one subregion or another. The coastal strip fronting the Red Sea was dry and grim, but the highlands were temperate and green, utterly contradicting the usual stereotype of Arabia deserta. The summer monsoon winds, blowing out of Africa and brushing across the southwestern corner of the peninsula, drop their rains on the high mountain valleys, nourishing a dense population of sturdy farmers. These Arabic-speaking hill folk had strong traditions of tribal independence. But the agrarian economy encouraged, as it always did everywhere, the ambitions of statebuilders. As in Morocco in the Middle Period, the politics of the Yemen turned on the persistent tensions between centralizing sultans with their governors and tax-collectors, and the fissiparous tribesmen of the valleys, who much preferred to be left alone.

  Ibn Battuta visited the country when the cycle of dynastic centralization was at a peak. The Yemen had not been far enough removed from the Middle East heartland to escape the ubiquitous Turk. Kurdo–Turkish invaders from Egypt had seized the region in the twelfth century and later proclaimed an independent dynasty known as the Rasulid.

  The heart of this realm was formed by a triangle of three major cities: Zabid, the lowland winter headquarters of the sultans; San’a, the bastion of the mountains; and Ta’izz, the dynastic capital and highland city of the south. The San’a region was the most difficult to hold, for it was the home of tribes adhering to the Shi’i sect known as the Zaydi, whose doctrines included a preference for choosing their own ’Alid imams as rulers. Zaydi imamism was thus an ever-present ideology of potential revolt against the sultans of Ta’izz, who, like the population of the greater part of the country, were Sunni Muslims of the Shafi’i school.

  At the time of Ibn Battuta’s passage, Malik Mujahid Nur al-Din ’Ali, fifth sultan in the Rasulid line (1321–62), had only just managed to pull the realm more or less together after spending the first six years of his reign squashing myriad plots and rebellions. In 1327 he seized Aden, the great port at the Strait of Bab al-Mandeb. Since Aden was the key transit center for virtually all the trade passing between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, the customs revenue was immense. When the sultan had his governors collecting it and pumping it directly into the treasury at Ta’izz, the investment in high urban culture rose accordingly.

  Despite the wild mountains and ferocious hill folk, Yemen’s cities drew freely on the cosmopolitan influences passing back and forth through the strait of Bab al-Mandab. Indian, Ceylonese, and Chinese ambassadors visited the Rasulid court, and the sultans, vigorous promoters of trade, enjoyed considerable prestige in the mercantile circles of the Indian Ocean.13 They competed furiously with the Mamluks for domination of the Red Sea and the spice trade, but the two states generally enjoyed peaceful relations. The Rasulids, not surprisingly, looked to Cairo for ideas as to what civilized government should be like. Court ritual and military regalia followed Mamluk models fairly closely, and the sultans had their own corps of slave soldiers in partial imitation of the mamluk system.14

  When Ibn Battuta stepped into this diminutive civilization tucked into the corner of the Arabian waste, he had no trouble connecting with the scholarly establishment. In Zabid, a date-palm city located about 27 miles in from the coast, they gave him lodgings and promenaded him through their cool groves on the outskirts of town. In their company he listened to tales of the life of one of their most famous saints, a thirteenth-century scholar and miracle-worker named Ahmad ibn al-’Ujayl. In the Rihla Ibn Battuta could not pass up the opportunity to recount how the shaykh had once demolished the rationalist doctrines of the local Zaydi Shi’a. One day, the story goes, a group of Zaydi doctors paid a visit to the master outside his hospice and enjoined him to debate the subject of predestination.

  The maintained that there is no predestined decree and that the [creature who is made] responsible for carrying out the ordinances of God creates his own actions, whereupon the shaykh said to them, “Well, if the matter is as you say, rise up from this place where you are.” They tried to rise up but could not, and the shaykh left them as they were and went into the hospice. They remained thus until when the heat afflicted them sorely and the blaze of the sun smote them, they complained loudly of what had befallen them, then the shaykh’s associates went in to him and said to him “These men have repented to God and recanted their false doctrine.” The shaykh then went out to them and, taking them by their hand, he exacted a pledge from them to return to the truth and abandon their evil doctrine.

  After probably a brief sojourn in Zabid, Ibn Battuta decided to visit the tomb of this celebrated saint in the village of Bayt al-Faqih (Ghassana) about 25 miles north along the coastal plain. While he was there, he made friends with a son of the shaykh, who invited him to travel to the mountain town of Jubla (Jibla) southwest of Zabid to visit another scholar. He remained there for three days, then continued southward in the company of a Sufi brother assigned to lead him along the mountain trails to Ta’izz, the Rasulid capital. If Ibn Battuta remembers his route through the Yemen accurately, he was behaving in his characteristic way of meandering first in one direction, then in another, relying on serendipitous discoveries of good companionship to determine his itinerary.15

  Ta’izz lay at an altitude of 4,500 feet on the northern slope of the mountain called Jabal Sabir. Ibn Battuta describes the town as having three quarters, one for the sultan’s residence and his slave guards, high officials, and courtiers; a second for the amirs and soldiers; and a third for the common folk and the main bazaar. Though he does not mention it, he must have prayed in the beautiful three-domed mosque called the Muzaffariya, which still serves as the Friday mosque of the city.16

  Finding the citizenry of Ta’izz on the whole “overbearing, insolent and rude, as is generally the case in towns where kings have their seats,” Ibn Battuta nevertheless got the usual warm welcome from the scholars. He was even given the privilege of meeting the king himself at one of the public audiences held every Thursday. Just as the Ilkhan Abu Sa’id had done, Malik Mujahid questioned the visitor about Morocco, Egypt, and Persia, then gave instructions for his lodging. Ibn Battuta has left in the Rihla a precious eye-witness description of the ceremonial of the Rasulid sovereign:

  He takes his seat on a platform carpeted and decorated with silken fabrics; to right and left of him are the men-at-arms, those nearest him holding swords and shields, and next to them the bowmen; in front of them to the right and left are the chamberlain and the officers of government and the private secretary . . . When the sultan takes his seat they cry with one voice Bismillah, and when he rises they do the same, so that all those in the audience-hall know the moment of his rising and the moment of his sitting . . . The food is then brought, and it is of two sorts, the food of the commons and the food of the high officers. The superior food is partaken of by the sultan, the grand qadi, the principal sharifs and jurists and the guests; the common food eaten by the rest of the sharifs, jurists and qadis, the shaykhs, the amirs and the officers of the troops. The seat of each person at the meal is fixed; he does not move from it, nor does anyone of them jostle another.

  Ibn Battuta left Ta’izz on a horse given him by the sultan, but his immediate destination is none too certain at this point in the narrative. He may have journeyed 130 miles north along the backbone of the Yemeni mountains to San’a, spiritual capital of the Zaydis, and then back to Ta’izz again. But this excursion along treacherous t
rails through some of the grandest scenery in the world is described with such brevity and nebulous inexactitude as to raise serious doubts about its veracity.17 It is more likely that he went directly from Ta’izz to Aden on the south coast of Arabia, arriving there sometime around the end of 1328 (1330) or early part of 1329 (1331).18

  Looking out upon the Arabian Sea, Ibn Battuta was about to enter a world region where the relationship of Islamic cosmopolitanism to society as a whole was significantly different from what he had hitherto experienced. Up to that point he had traveled through the Irano–Semitic heartland of Islam, where the cosmopolitan class set itself apart from the rest of society in terms of its standards — urbane, literate, and committed to the application of the shari’a as the legal and moral basis of social relations. This class was the guardian of high culture and the means of its transmission within the Dar al-Islam. But it also shared its religious faith and its broader cultural environment with the less mobile and nearer-sighted peasants and working folk who constituted the vast majority. The lands bordering the Indian Ocean, by contrast, displayed a greater diversity of language and culture than did the Irano–Semitic core, and the majority of people inhabiting these lands adhered to traditions that were neither Irano–Semitic nor Muslim. In this immense territory Islamic cosmopolitanism communicated more than the unity and universality of civilized standards; it also expressed the unity of Islam itself in the midst of cultures that were in most respects alien. In the Middle East an individual’s sense of being part of an international social order varied considerably with his education and position in life. But in the Indian Ocean lands where Islam was a minority faith, all Muslims shared acutely this feeling of participation. Simply to be a Muslim in East Africa, southern India, or Malaysia in the fourteenth century was to have a cosmopolitan frame of mind.