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

by Ross E. Dunn

  The Shaykh, moreover, commanded that the visitors be entertained in a residence for students of religion. Retiring there and ensconcing themselves on the carpets, the party addressed themselves to a meal of local fare, compliments of the palace: a stew of chicken, meat, fish, and vegetables poured over rice cooked in ghee; unripe bananas in fresh milk; and a dish comprised of sour milk, green ginger, mangoes, and pickled lemons and chilies. The citizens of Mogadishu, Ibn Battuta observed, did justice to such meals as these: “A single person . . . eats as much as a whole company of us would eat, as a matter of habit, and they are corpulent and fat in the extreme.”

  Dining with these portly notables over the course of the next three days, the young scholar would likely have found them all speaking Arabic. Neither Mogadishu, however, nor any other towns of the coast could be described as alien enclaves of Arabs or Persians, ethnically isolated from the mainland populations. On the contrary, these were African towns, inhabited largely by people of African descent, whether Somali or Bantu-speaking stock. The spread of Islamic culture southward along the coast was not synonymous with the peopling of the region by colonists from the Irano-Semitic heartland. The rulers, scholars, officials, and big merchants, as well as the port workers, farmers, craftsmen, and slaves, were dark-skinned people speaking African tongues in everyday life.

  Human migration, however, accompanied trade as one of the enduring consequences of the harnessing of the monsoons. It was seaborne settlers from Arabia and the Persian Gulf who introduced Islam into the little ports and fishing villages along the coast, and it was the continuing trickle of newcomers who, along with the visiting merchants, assured and reinforced the Islamic-mindedness of coastal society. For Arabs and Persians of the arid northern rim of the sea, East Africa was a kind of medieval America, a fertile, well-watered land of economic opportunity and a place of salvation from drought, famine, overpopulation, and war at home. There is even some evidence of a thirteenth-century plantation at Mogadishu of a group of settlers from Tashkent, refugees from a Central Asian war.30 The great majority of immigrants were males, who quickly married into the local families or took slave concubines, thereby obliterating any tendencies toward racial separatism.

  Among new arrivals, the warmest welcome went out to sharifs (or sayyids), who probably represented a substantial proportion of colonists from South Arabia. A sharif was a person recognized as a descendant of the Prophet. As a group, sharifs brought to the coastal towns two qualifications in unlimited demand. One was literacy and knowledge of the shari’a; the other was that elusive attribute called baraka, the aura of divine blessing that was believed to attend sharifian status. Aside from commerce, which everyone seemed to have had a hand in, sharifian families performed multiple functions as town officials, judges, secretaries, political mediators, Sufi teachers, miracle-workers, and general validators of the Islamic status of the community and its government. Above all, the sharifs, as well as other literate immigrants, strove to implant the Sacred Law, specifically the Shafi’i school predominant in South Arabia. This was their most significant contribution to East African cosmopolitanism, for the law was the seal of oceanic unity on which the towns thrived.

  On the fourth day of his visit Ibn Battuta went out to meet the Shaykh, a sharif of distant Yemeni origin whose family had emerged as sultans of the city in the previous century. It was Friday, and following prayer in the central mosque the young guest (outfitted in new robes and turban for the occasion) was formally introduced. Then the ruler (whose name was Abu Bakr) led his retinue back to the palace.

  All of the people walked barefoot, and there were raised over his head four canopies of colored silk and on the top of each canopy was the figure of a bird in gold. His clothes that day were a robe of green Jerusalem stuff and underneath it fine loose robes of Egypt. He was dressed with a wrapper of silk and turbaned with a large turban. Before him drums and trumpets and pipes were played, the amirs of the soldiers were before and behind him, and the qadi, the faqihs, the sharifs were with him. He entered his council room; in that order, the viziers, amirs and the commanders of the soldiers sat down there in the audience chamber . . . They continued in this manner till the afternoon prayer.31

  Ibn Battuta seems to have witnessed more of these proceedings in subsequent days and may have stayed in Mogadishu for a week or two. But he was soon aboard ship again and continuing southward along the tropical coast known to the Arab geographers as the land of Zanj. Crossing the equator near the modern border between Somalia and Kenya, he saw the dry scrub land of the north gradually giving way to lusher vegetation and dense clusters of mangrove forest around the estuaries of creeks and narrow rivers. The ship anchored for one night off the island-town of Mombasa, a modest commercial center at the time, though it would become one of the leading ports of the coast in the next century. After Mombasa, they passed between the mainland and the islands of Pemba and Zanzibar, finally putting in at Kilwa, an islet just off the coast of what is today Tanzania. This was as far south as the ocean merchants normally went. With fair winds and calm seas, the voyage from Mogadishu to Kilwa should have taken something well short of two weeks, bringing the Moroccan and his shipmates there sometime in March 1329 (1331).32

  Traveling through the Islamic world in the relatively stable times of the early fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta had the good fortune to intersect with a number of kingdoms and cities just as they were experiencing an eruption of cultural energy. Kilwa was a case in point. Growing up alongside other East African towns as a rustic fishing village awakened to the promise of upland ivory and gold, it was fast surpassing Mogadishu at the start of the century as the richest town on the coast. The rise of Kilwa (Kulwa) seems to have been linked to the sudden and shadowy appearing of a new ruling family, called the Mahdali, who traced their line to a sharifian clan of the Yemen. In all likelihood they came south along with other families of Arabian descent, not directly from the peninsula, but from Mogadishu or other northerly ports. In any case they staged a coup, bloodless or not, against the earlier rulers of Kilwa sometime near the end of the thirteenth century.

  Before the appearance of the Mahdali, most of the gold trade seems to have been controlled by the merchants of Mogadishu, but about three or four decades before Ibn Battuta’s visit, Kilwa seized Sofala and other, smaller ports south of the Zambezi River through which the gold was funneled to the market from the mines of Zimbabwe. Consequently, the Kilwans clamped a near monopoly on the trade, elevating their city to the status of the principal transit center for gold in the western ocean. All this was achieved without marshalling a great navy. Kilwa’s goals were limited economic ones, not the creation of a seaborne empire. Indeed the political organization of the coast was more akin to a configuration of city-states on the fourteenth-century Italian model than to the land kingdoms of the Middle East. And though Ibn Battuta speaks of Kilwa’s “jihads” against the Africans of the mainland, relations with the upcountry people must have been reasonably good most of the time if trade were to flow.

  Kilwa’s gold rush made its merchants, the Mahdali family among them, extravagantly wealthy by coast standards. Living amongst the laboring and seafaring population in the unwalled and thoroughly unplanned town at the northern end of the island, the well-to-do families enjoyed a style of living that was, in the words of a scholar of coastal archaeology, “competent, comfortable, and satisfying.”33 They lived in stone houses of up to three storeys and entertained guests in spacious sunken courtyards. They wore silk and cotton garments and plenty of gold and silver jewelry. They had indoor plumbing. They ate off imported Chinese porcelain. They attended the Friday sermon in a domed and vaulted mosque of coral rock that had been expanded to four or five times its size in the early part of the century.

  When the leading citizens had audience with Sultan al-Hasan ibn Sulayman (Abu l-’Mawahid Hasan), fourth ruler in the Mahdali line (1309–32),34 they climbed to the highest point of the island overlooking the sea, where the great stone palace
of Husuni Kubwa was being constructed. When they had business with him or his factor (for the sultan was probably the richest merchant in the city), they probably appeared at the spacious emporium, resembling the plan of a Middle Eastern khan, which took up nearly half the area of the palace. The working folk down in the town enjoyed a reasonable standard of living, but they lived in closely packed little houses of mud-and-wattle and dined off coarser ware than Chinese celadon.35

  Ibn Battuta was used to seeing impressive public monuments and in the Rihla he makes no mention whatsoever of the town’s distinctive architecture, though he certainly prayed in the central mosque and probably visited Husuni Kubwa.36 Wherever he traveled, however, he invariably took notice of pious and generous kings, believing as any member of the ’ulama class did that piety and generosity were the essential qualities of any temporal ruler worthy of his title. He describes al-Hasan ibn Sulayman as “a man of great humility; he sits with poor brethren, and eats with them, and greatly respects men of religion and noble descent.”

  If Ibn Battuta arrived at Kilwa in March, he is likely to have stayed no more than a few weeks. The recommended seasons for leaving the tropical coast were near the beginning (March and April) or the end (September) of the southwest monsoon. Sailing from Kilwa harbor in April, a captain could expect to reach an Arabian or even Indian destination before high summer, when the winds blasted those coasts with such force that ports had to be closed.37 The Rihla has no comment on the voyage or the ship other than the destination, the port of Zafar (Dhofar) on the South Arabian shore. A month’s voyage would have brought Ibn Battuta there sometime in early May.38

  Governed by an autonomous Rasulid prince, Zafar was one of the chief ports of South Arabia, an entrepôt on the India-to-Africa route and an exporter of frankincense and horses, the latter collected from the interior districts and shipped to India. It was a torrid place (the people bathed several times a day, Ibn Battuta reports), but in contrast to its grim hinterland it was also verdant, owing to monsoon rains along the low shore. It was not a bad town to spend a summer, which the traveler very likely did, since there was little ship traffic until September, when the southwesterly winds broke up. He lodged and boarded with the usual dignitaries, feasting on fish, bananas, and coconuts, and chewing betel leaves, a favored breath sweetener and aid to digestion.

  If he was contemplating a voyage to India at this point, he could easily have found a ship to sail him directly there in September. Instead, he took passage on “a small vessel” making for the Gulf of Oman. The ship was probably a coastal tramp, for the pilot was a local fellow. He put in at several anchorages along the way, including an island, perhaps one of the Kuria Muria Islands (where Ibn Battuta met an old Sufi in a hilltop hermitage), the long island of Masira (where the pilot lived), and finally, at the far side of the headland of Ras al-Hadd, the little port of Sur on the Gulf of Oman.39 It was a scorching, thoroughly disagreeable voyage. Ibn Battuta lived on dates, fish, and some bread and biscuits he bought in Zafar. He might have had meals of roasted sea bird, but when he discovered that the blasphemous sailors were not killing their game by slitting the throat as the Qur’an prescribes, he kept well away from both the crew and their dinners. Somewhere along that desert coast he and his fellow passengers celebrated the Feast of the Sacrifice of the year 729 A.H., or 3 October 1329 (or 731 A.H., 12 September 1331).

  Anchored off Sur a few days later, Ibn Battuta saw, or thought he could see, the busy port of Qalhat, which lay 13 miles further up the coast. His ship was to put in there the following day, but he had taken an intense dislike to the impious crew and wanted as little to do with them as he could. And since Qalhat promised to be a more interesting place to spend the night than Sur, he resolved to go there on foot. The intervening coastline was hot, rugged, and completely waterless, but the locals assured him that he could make the distance in a few hours. To be on the safe side, he hired one of the sailors to guide him. A passenger friend, a scholarly Indian by the name of Khidr, decided to go along as well, probably for the lark. Grabbing an extra suit of clothes and leaving the rest of his possessions on board with instructions to rendezvous the next day, he and his companions set off. It promised to be a day’s promenade followed no doubt by a good dinner and lodging at the house of the qadi of Qalhat.

  In fact if things had gone any worse the two gentlemen would never have reached Qalhat at all, and the travels of Ibn Battuta might have ended in the wilds of Oman. Not long after leaving Sur, he became convinced that their guide was plotting to kill them and make off with the bundle of extra clothes, which would probably fetch a good price in the local bazaars. Luckily, Ibn Battuta was carrying a spear, which he promptly brandished when he realized that the villainous guide had in mind to drown his employers as they were crossing a tidal estuary. Cowed for the moment, the sailor led them further up into the rocks, where they found a safe ford and continued on through the desert. Thinking all the time that Qalhat was round the next bend, they tramped on and on, scrambling across an endless succession of treacherous ravines that connected with the shore. They had not brought along nearly enough water, although some horsemen passed by and gave them a drink.

  Toward evening, the sailor insisted they work their way back down to the coast, which by that time was about a mile away. But Ibn Battuta refused, thinking the rogue’s only plan was to trap them among the rocks and run with the clothes. Then night fell, and though the sailor urged them to push on, Ibn Battuta insisted they leave the trail they were following and go into hiding. He had no idea how far they still had to walk, and, what was worse, he glimpsed a party of strange men lurking nearby. Khidr by this time was sick and utterly overcome with thirst. And so mustering as much strength and will as he could, Ibn Battuta kept watch throughout the night, holding the contested garments under his robe and clutching the spear, while Khidr and the malevolent guide slept.

  At dawn they returned to the trail and soon came upon country folk going into Qalhat to market. The sailor agreed to fetch water and after trudging across more ravines and precipitous hills they at last reached the gates of the city. By this time they were exhausted, Ibn Battuta’s feet so swollen inside his shoes “that the blood was almost starting under the nails.” To add insult to injury, the gatekeeper would not let them pass to find lodgings until they had presented themselves before the governor to explain their business.

  As Ibn Battuta might well have expected from previous experience, the governor turned out to be “an excellent man,” who invited the two prostrate scholars to be his guests. “I stayed with him for six days,” Ibn Battuta recalls, “during which I was powerless to rise to my feet because of the pains that they had sustained.” Nothing more is heard of their tormentor, who presumably returned to his ship a disappointed thief, but none the worse for trying.

  From the Rihla’s description of Qalhat and its environs, Ibn Battuta is likely to have spent at least a few days having a look around, following recovery from his ordeal. Politically a dependency of the Sultanate of Hurmuz, Qalhat, like Muscat, Sohar, and other ports stretched along the coast between Ras al-Hadd and the Strait of Hurmuz, was a monsoon town of the first order. Cut off from the rest of Arabia by the sea on three sides and the sandy waste of the Empty Quarter on the fourth, the city communicated with western India more easily than with any other shore. Strolling through the bazaar, Ibn Battuta would have seen many Indian traders, selling rice and other foodstuffs to the port and hinterland population, buying horses, and of course dealing in all sorts of Asian luxuries bound ultimately for Tabriz, Cairo, Kilwa, and Venice.

  Friend Khidr is mentioned no more after Qalhat. Perhaps he booked passage on a dhow and returned to India. By this time Ibn Battuta seems to have resolved to head for Mecca again. And perhaps he had had his fill, for the time being, of pitching, undecked boats and their rascally crews. Qalhat was in fact to be his last view of the Indian Ocean for twelve years. Turning westward into the grim canyons of the eastern Hajar Mountains in the company of
unnamed caravaners, he set a course across the rugged heartland of Oman. The only stage he mentions is Nazwa (Nizwa), the chief town of the interior and capital of a dynasty of tribal kings known as the Banu Nabhan.40

  His description of his journey from central Oman back to Mecca leaves such a baffling trail of gaps, zigzags, time leaps, and confused information that the route and chronology cannot be explained with any assurance, at least not until he arrives at al-Qatif, a town on the Arabian shore about half way up the Persian Gulf. He claims to have gone directly from Nazwa to Hurmuz, the great emporium guarding the narrow passage into the gulf and, at that time, the principal staging center for the overland caravan trade to Tabriz, Turkey, and the Black Sea. Hurmuz lay at the northern end of a barren little island (Jarun, or Jirun) five miles off the coast of Persia. Ibn Battuta says nothing about how he got there, but of course he would have had to make a short sea voyage across the strait, perhaps from Sohar, an important port on the coast of Oman about 120 aerial miles over the mountains from Nazwa. Nor does he indicate how long he stayed in Hurmuz, and his description of the town and its ruler seems to be associated entirely with a second visit he made there in 1347 on his way home from India and China.41

  From Hurmuz he crossed to the mainland and made a northwestward excursion by way of Lar through the interior of Fars, or southern Persia, with the aim of visiting a Sufi shaykh at a place he calls Khunju Pal, probably the village of Khunj.42 He then returned to the coast, but he mistakenly remembers the two ports of Siraf and Qais as one and the same place, leaving doubt as to which one he visited, if not both.43 He describes pearl fisheries off the eastern shore (pearls being the leading export from the gulf to India), but their location remains vague. From Qais (or Siraf) he traveled to Bahrain, meaning to him the Arabian coastal district opposite the island that carries the same name.44 But once again, he is completely mute on the matter of his return voyage to the western side of the gulf.