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

by Ross E. Dunn

  After a presumably short stay in al-Qatif, he set off across Arabia, now for the fourth time and from a third new direction. Traveling southward to the oasis of al-Hasa (now al-Hufuf), then southwestward across the al-Dahna sand dunes, he arrived at al-Yamama, today a ruin 58 miles southeast of the modern Saudi capital of Riyadh. Here, he met a tribal chieftain of the Banu Hanifa Arabs and joined his party going to Mecca. The Rihla says nothing of the remaining stages nor of the date of arrival in the Holy City. If he left Oman about November, he would probably have reached Mecca some time in the winter of 1330 (1332). In any case, having climbed through the highlands of Yemen, crossed the equator to tropical Africa, endured several wearisome sea voyages through the hottest regions on earth, and almost lost his life for a clean suit of clothes, he was well deserving of another interlude of rest with his Qur’an and his law books in the shade of the Haram.

  Notes

  1. A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (New York, 1955), p. 211.

  2. IB states that he performed the hajj four successive times beginning in 1327 (727 A.H.) and that he resided in Mecca for approximately three years. It is possible, however, that he stayed in the city only about one year, leaving for Aden and East Africa following the pilgrimage of 1328 (728 A.H.). The question of the length of his residence in Mecca is bound up with a much bigger chronological problem, which we must introduce here.

  IB tells us that he left Mecca for East Africa following the hajj of 1330 (730 A.H.) and that he arrived back in the city some time before the pilgrimage of September 1332 (732 A.H.). He states that he then left Mecca again following the 732 hajj en route to Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Central Asia, and India, and that he arrived at the banks of the Indus River on 12 September 1333 (1 Muharram 734), thus accomplishing that ambitious journey in the space of one year. Yet his own itinerary and chronological clues show that the trans-Asian trip took about three years. Therefore, the two dates are irreconcilable and present the most baffling chronological puzzle in the Rihla.

  For the entire complex and roundabout journey from Mecca to India IB offers not a single absolute date, nor does anything he says in connection with his long sojourn in India absolutely verify the year of his arrival there. Even the day he gives for crossing the Indus, 1 Muharram, that is, the first day of the new year, suggests a literary convention, symbolizing the start of the second major part of his narrative. Yet I am inclined to agree with Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, pp. 529–30) that IB’s India arrival date of September 1333 is approximately correct (see Chapter 8, note 26). Working backward through the itinerary from that date, IB’s description of traveling times, feast day celebrations, and seasons suggests that he must have left Arabia for Syria, Anatolia, and Central Asia no later than the winter or spring of 1330 (730 A.H.). If that dating is correct, he must have left Mecca for East Africa following the pilgrimage of October 1328 (728 A.H.). Returning from Africa to Arabia, he states that he celebrated the Feast of Sacrifice (that is, the ceremony culminating the hajj festival) off the South Arabian coast. He does not mention the year, but if my hypothesis is correct, it would have been 3 October 1329 (10 Dhu l-Hijja 729). From South Arabia he traveled through Oman and the Persian Gulf region, then returned to Mecca. If he stayed in the city a relatively short time (not waiting for the pilgrimage of 730 A.H. to come around) and then started on his India journey, he would have traveled through Egypt and Syria in 1330 (730 A.H.), a chronology which accords with the 1333 India arrival date.

  Hrbek, contrary to Gibb, argues that IB’s Mecca departure date of 1332 (732 A.H.) is correct and that the India date is wrong (Hr, p. 485). He believes that IB could not have erred or lied in asserting that he attended the pilgrimages of 1329, 1330, and 1332 without the learned and well-traveled Moroccans for whom the Rihla was written knowing the truth of the matter. Unfortunately, Hrbek never published the second part of his study of the chronology, so we have no idea how he might have argued that IB arrived in India two years later than he says he did.

  Hrbek’s argument about the Mecca departure date is in any case weakened by his admission that Gibb is probably correct in asserting that IB traveled in Egypt and Syria in 1330 (730 A.H.). That is, some of the events the Rihla groups with IB’s travels in Egypt and Syria in 1326 actually occurred in 1330. Most of the evidence that Gibb and Hrbek present centers on known dates of office of governors or religious officials whom IB says he met (Gb, vol. 2, pp. 536–37; Hr, pp. 483–84). Hrbek (Hr, p. 483) also points out IB’s statement, linked in the Rihla to 1326, that he attended a celebration in Cairo marking Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad’s recovery from a fracture of his hand. All independent chronicle sources state that this event occurred in March 1330. Hrbek fits this evidence into his own hypothesis by suggesting, I think rather lamely, that IB sandwiched a trip to Egypt and Syria (utterly unreported in the Rihla) between the pilgrimages of 1329 and 1330. I prefer Gibb’s argument that IB was already heading in the direction of Anatolia in 1330. Gibb indeed presents some interesting though inconclusive evidence, which Hrbek fails satisfactorily to refute, that IB traveled in Asia Minor in 1331 (Gibb, vol. 2, pp. 531–32; Hr, pp. 485–86).

  No evidence I have seen eliminates the possibility that IB left Mecca after the hajj of 1328 (728 A.H.) and traveled to East Africa in 1329. Yet why would he state that he stayed in Mecca throughout 1329 and most of 1330 and that he returned for the pilgrimage of 1332 if the truth were otherwise? And how can we challenge him when he describes, though briefly and impersonally, certain events which occurred in Mecca during those periods of time? While I share Gibb’s view that the India arrival date is nearly correct, I have no convincing answers to these questions. It must be remembered, however, that the relationship between the entire chronological structure of the Rihla, a work of literature, and IB’s actual life experience is highly uncertain.

  3. Gb, vol. 1, p. 203n.

  4. IB mentions only that the Muzaffariya, where he lived, had a classroom and that a Moroccan acquaintance lectured on theology in the building. But he does not report that he attended a course.

  5. In basing this description of education in Mecca mainly on the work of the Dutch orientalist C. Snouck Hurgronje, who lived in the city for a year in the 1880s, I am assuming that the general patterns endured over the centuries. Snouck Hurgronje notes that “from the chronicles of Mecca . . . we may conclude with certainty that a life of learning like that which we have described, has been astir in the town for centuries past.” Mekka in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century (Leiden, 1931), p. 211. Also A. S. Tritton, Materials on Muslim Education in the Middle Ages (London, 1957); and “Masdjid,” EI1, vol. 3, pp. 361–67, 368–71.

  6. Ibn Jubayr crossed the Red Sea on a jaiba and describes it. The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, trans. R.J.C. Broadhurst (London, 1952), pp. 64–65. Also G. R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese (London, 1971), p. 56; and R. B. Serjeant, The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast (Oxford, 1963), p. 134.

  7. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, p. 65.

  8. Ibid., p. 69.

  9. Hr, p. 439; Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, p. 413.

  10. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, pp. 64–65.

  11. He landed at a port he calls al-Ahwab. Gibb states that its precise whereabouts is a mystery, but Tim Macintosh-Smith (personal communication) tells me that the location is known locally. (Gb, vol. 2, p. 366).

  12. At this point we need to note that the chronology of the journey from Mecca to East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and back to Mecca again is extremely uncertain. Traveling times between stages and length of stays are not often provided, and the internal chronological evidence is more limited than for the earlier journeys. One can be only as precise about the chronology as is warranted by IB’s statements and other internal evidence. Hrbek’s method of rationalizing a chronology for each segment of the journey in order to make everything fit between the few dates IB provides seems to be excessively conjectural. But his guesses are more often than not plausible.

  1
3. Gaston Wiet, “Les marchands d’Épices sous les sultans mamelouks,” Cahiers d’Histoire Égyptienne, ser. 7, part 2 (May 1952): 88; “Rasulids,” El1, vol. 3, pp. 1128–29.

  14. Al-Khazrejiyy, The Pearl Strings: A History of the Resuliyy Dynasty of Yemen, trans. J. W. Redhouse, 5 vols. (Leiden, 1906–18), vol. 3, part 3, p. 108.

  15. Hrbek (Hr, pp. 440–41) suggests that a more rational route would have been Zabid-Ghassana-San’a-Jubla-Ta’izz-Aden and that IB may have failed to remember accurately the succession of stops. But he admits that there is no internal evidence in favor of revising the itinerary.

  16. R. B. Lewcock and G. R. Smith, “Three Medieval Mosques in the Yemen,” Oriental Art 20 (1974): 75–86.

  17. The Rihla’s description of the journey Ta’izz-San’a-Aden is completely silent on the routes taken, the stages, and the length of stopovers. Moreover, the brief gloss on San’a is a combination of standard descriptive clichés and false information. The several lines devoted to this detour have the air of a purely literary adventure, possibly added by Ibn Juzayy (with or without IB’s complicity) on the grounds that readers would expect a traveler to the Yemen to tell them something of San’a, whether he had been there or not. The San’a trip might fall into the same category as the spurious journey to Bulghar described in Chapter 8, note 12, below. Robert Wilson, formerly of the Faculty of Oriential Studies, Cambridge University, has pointed out to me that everything IB says about San’a could have been drawn from the existing body of conventional geographical knowledge on the subject, from, for example, Ibn Rusta (tenth-century geographer), Kitab al-A’lak al Na fisa, ed. J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1892), pp. 109–10. Hrbek (Hr, pp. 440–41) doubts that IB went to San’a. So does Joseph Chelhod, a scholar of medieval Yemen. “Ibn Battuta, Ethnologue,” Revue de l’Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée 25 (1978): 9.

  18. This approximate time of year is suggested by both Gibb (Travels, vol. 2, p. 373) and Hrbek (“Chronology,” p. 441).

  19. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 542–48.

  20. On the economy and organization of monsoon trade in the southern seas see Phillip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (New York, 1984), pp. 96–135.

  21. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 373) and Hrbek (Hr, p. 441) agree that he was probably in Aden about that time of year.

  22. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, pp. 372–73, 378. This book is in part a translation of the nautical works of Ahmad ibn Majid, the famous Arabian mariner-author who died in the early sixteenth century. Aside from the navigational information contained in the translation, Tibbetts has added extensive notes and commentary to produce in all a richly detailed study of Indian Ocean seafaring in the later Middle Period. Alan Villiers, a modern successor to Ibn Majid, sailed from Aden to East Africa in an Arab dhow, leaving in December 1939. Sons of Sinbad (London, 1940).

  23. R. B. Serjeant, “The Ports of Aden and Shihr,” Recueils de la Société Jean Bodin 32 (1974): 212; S. D. Goitein, “Letters and Documents on the India Trade in Medieval Times,” Islamic Culture 37 (1963): 196–97.

  24. W. H. Moreland, “The Ships of the Arabian Sea about A.D. 1500,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1 (1939): 176; Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, pp. 48–49.

  25. Tibbets (Arab Navigation, p. 3) remarks that “Ibn Battuta is not very observant of nautical affairs.” The same point is made by Michel Mollat, “Ibn Batoutah et la Mer,” Travaux et Jours 18 (1966): 53–70.

  26. The design of the hull was the basis for classifying Indian Ocean ships. IB does provide a classificatory name for some of the vessels he traveled on during his career, but this is not necessarily very helpful. The connection between the medieval name of a ship and its precise hull design cannot be ascertained with certainty. See J. Hornell, “Classification of Arab Sea Craft,” Mariner’s Mirror 28 (1942): 11–40; A. H. J. Prins, “The Persian Gulf Dhows: New Notes on the Classification of Mid-Eastern Sea- Craft,” Persica 6 (1972–74): 157–165; George Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (Princeton, N.J., 1951), pp. 87–89.

  27. Alan Villiers (Sons of Sinbad, pp. 21–243, passim) describes in dramatic detail his voyage from Aden to Mogadishu, Zanzibar, and the Gulf of Oman in 1939–40.

  28. Neville Chittick remarks that the “Maqdishi” language IB says he heard in the town was either Somali or an early form of a Swahili dialect, probably the latter. “The East African Coast, Madagascar and the Indian Ocean,” Cambridge History of Africa, 5 vols. (Cambridge, England, 1977), vol. 3, p. 189.

  29. In his research on the dallals (brokers) of South Arabia, R. B. Serjeant notes the striking similarity between their functions and practices in modern times and IB’s description of the brokers of Mogadishu. “Maritime Customary Law in the Indian Ocean” in Sociétés et compagnies de commerce en Orient et dans l’Océan Indien, Actes du 8(ème) Colloque International d’Histoire Maritime (Paris, 1970), pp. 203–204.

  30. B. G. Martin, “Arab Migration to East Africa in Medieval Times,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 7 (1974): 368.

  31. I have quoted this passage from Said Hamdun and Noel King’s lively translation (H&K, pp. 16–17).

  32. Both Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 379n) and Hrbek (Hr, p. 442) suggest that he sailed from Mogadishu in late February or early March. By the end of March the northeast monsoon was dying out (Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, p. 378).

  33. Peter Garlake, The Early Islamic Architecture of the East African Coast (London, 1966), p. 117.

  34. On the regnal dates of the Mahdali dynasty see Elias Saad, “Kilwa Dynastic Historiography: A Critical Study,” History in Africa 6 (1979): 177–207.

  35. More is known about life in Kilwa than any other coastal town in that age thanks largely to the excavations of Neville Chittick, Kilwa: An Islamic Trading City on the East African Coast, 2 vols. (Nairobi, 1974).

  36. IB’s description of the East African coast, though brief, is the only eye-witness account of the medieval period, so historians have squeezed the Rihla for every tidbit of information. See Neville Chittick, “Ibn Battuta and East Africa,” Journal de la Société des Africanistes 38 (1968): 239–41.

  37. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, pp. 373, 377–78. Alan Villiers (Sorts of Sinbad, p. 191) left the mouth of the Rufiji River south of Kilwa in late March for his return voyage to Oman.

  38. Hamdun and King (H&K, p. 68) have it from East African sailors that the trip would take about four weeks. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 382n), based on Villiers’ journey from Zanzibar to Muscat, says three to four weeks. Hrbek (Hr, p. 444) suggests six to eight weeks, which seems too long.

  39. IB reports that he visited the hermit on “the Hill of Lum’an, in the midst of the sea.” Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, 391n) thinks this place must be the island of Hallaniyah. Tim Mackintosh-Smith, who traced IB’s journey along the southern coast of Arabia, has doubts. Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (London, 2001), pp. 256–58.

  40. The veracity of IB’s stay in Nazwa is uncertain, so I have not drawn attention to his description of the Banu Nabhan king of Oman, who he claims to have met, nor to his remarks on the religious beliefs of the Omanis. The interior region of Oman was the bastion of the Islamic sect known as the Ibadis. Reversing the Shi’ia doctrine of the supremacy of the House of ’Ali, the Ibadis believed that any member of the community of believers could be chosen as the Imam as long as he displayed the proper moral qualities and a capacity to uphold the Qur’anic law. If he failed, the community was obliged to withdraw its support. The Banu Nabhan (1154–1406), however, were not Imams, and their ascendancy represented a hiatus in the Imamate, which was restored in the fifteenth century. Roberto Rubinacci, “The Ibadis,” in A. J. Arberry and C. P. Beckingham (eds.), Religion in the Middle East, 2 vols. (Cambridge, England, 1969). vol. 2, pp. 302–17; and Salij ibn Razik, History of the Imams and Seyyids of Oman, trans. G. P. Badger (London, 1871).

  IB’s descri
ption of Nazwa is brief and fuzzy, he makes inaccurate or doubtful remarks about Ibadi customs, and his itinerary from Nazwa to Hurmuz on the far side of the Persian Gulf is a complete blank. Neither Gibb nor Hrbek explicitly questions the truthfulness of IB’s journey through the interior of Oman. J. C. Wilkinson, a scholar of Omani history, expresses grave doubts and has pointed out to me some of the textual problems with this section of the Rihla (personal communication).

  41. Hrbek (Hr. pp. 445–48) develops a line of argument suggesting that IB did not visit Hurmuz, Persia, or any point on the eastern shore of the Gulf in 1329 (1331), but rather has inserted into the narrative a description of a journey that actually took place in 1347 when he traveled from India to Hurmuz and thence to Shiraz. Hrbek thinks that in 1331 he went directly from Nazwa to al-Qatif overland along the eastern coast of Arabia. The argument is based heavily on the fact that IB’s description of Hurmuz, his meeting with its sultan (Tahamtan Qutb al-Din), and the civil war in which that ruler had been engaged all relate to a situation pertaining in 1347. The other points Hrbek makes to sustain his theory are inferential and speculative. I cannot accept it, partly on the grounds that IB may well have blended his descriptions of two trips to Hurmuz, and partly on the fact that in his report of an interview with the King of Ceylon in 1344 he speaks of having discussed with that monarch the pearls he had already seen on the island of Qais off the eastern shore of the Gulf. MH, p. 218.

  42. Hr, p. 450; Gb, vol. 2, p. 406n.

  43. Ibid., p. 407n. Gibb thinks he visited Qais; Hrbek (Hr, p. 450) believes it was Siraf. In the fourteenth century Qais was a far more important commercial center than Siraf and a likelier place for IB to embark for Arabia.

  44. IB refers to Bahrain as a city, but Hrbek (Hr, p. 451) believes his description of such a place refers in fact to al-Qatif, the chief town of the coastal district known in earlier Muslim times as Bahrain. The term later referred solely to the island.