The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century
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By successfully defending North India against the Tatars over the course of more than a century, the sultans earned well-deserved reputations in the wider world as champions of Muslim civilization, a status akin to their contemporaries, the Mamluks of Egypt. Thus Delhi, along with Cairo and the Turkish-ruled towns of Anatolia, became a refuge for skilled and literate men who had fled Transoxiana or Persia before the Mongols killed or enslaved them. The silver lining around the devastations of the Islamic heartland was the consequent flowering of civilized life in cities just beyond the reach of Mongol cavalry. In the time of the early Slave dynasty, Delhi had been an armed camp, an outpost of hardy faith fighting for its survival against Hindu idolators on three sides and Mongol devils on the fourth. But once the sultans showed they could defend the community of believers against such powers of darkness, Delhi rose quickly as the central urban base for the advance of Islam into the subcontinent. The rulers basked in their hard-won prestige by opening up their court and administration to all Muslims of talent, skill, or spiritual repute and patronizing them with stipends and gifts, as well as grand public edifices in which to pursue their vocations.
From Khurasan and Transoxiana came theologians and legists who introduced the universalist standards of the Sacred Law. The sultan appointed immigrant scholars as qadis and legal advisers and generally deferred to them to enforce the shari’a in matters of religious practice and civil disputes involving believers. Since the Hanafi madhhab was dominant in Khurasan and Central Asia, it became the basis of juridical practice in the sultanate. As the Muslim population grew, so did the demand for qualified jurists, requiring the construction of colleges offering studies in Hanafi fiqh and the other religious sciences. According to the Egyptian scholar al-Umari, who wrote from plainly exaggerated information supplied by travelers returned from India, there were “one thousand madrasas in Delhi, one of which is for the Shafi’ites and the rest for the Hanafites.”2
Also from central Islamdom came belle-lettrists, historians, poets, and musicians to entertain the imperial court, chronicle its achievements, and extol the virtues of the king. Though Hindi, Turkish, Gujarati, and numerous other Indian tongues could be heard in the streets and bazaars of Delhi, Persian was used in polite circles, thus extending its range as the language of literate prestige all the way from Anatolia to Bengal. Speaking and writing in Persian, the Muslim elite of India reaffirmed in effect their cultural and historical connections to the central lands and at the same time created a linguistic barrier of exclusivity and privilege between themselves and the Hindu masses.
Craftsmen migrating from the west imported Arabo-Persian architectural and decorative traditions. Delhi, like other rising Muslim cities of that period, grew outward from a hub of grand public buildings — mosques, palaces, Sufi khanqas, colleges, and mausolea — that incorporated the domes, arches, and calligraphic inscriptions characteristic of Middle Period architecture in Persia. Since the immigrant community was small, however, Hindu artisans and laborers had to be hired in large numbers to carry out most of the work. Thus all sorts of native structural and decorative elements found their way into these buildings, some of them built with the sandstone blocks of demolished Hindu temples.
The earliest Muslim Delhi was established within the refortified walls of the old Hindu town, Kil’a Ray Pithora. Here Sultan Qutb al-Din Aybek (and several of his successors) built the congregational mosque and mausolea complex called the Quwwat al-Islam. Near it rose the Qutb Minar, the great tapering sandstone tower whose bands of Arabic inscriptions proclaimed Koranic truths and the military triumphs of the first Slave sultans. By Ibn Battuta’s time three additional urban aggregations — three more cities of Delhi — had been founded, all on the west bank of the Yamuna River within about five miles of one another. One was Siri, built by ’Ala al-Din Khalji as a military camp and later walled in. The second was Tughluqabad, a walled complex and fortress founded by Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq. The third was Jahanpanah, where Muhammad Tughluq built a magnificent residence, the Palace of a Thousand Pillars.
The prospering of Muslim life in Delhi and numerous other Hindustani towns in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was evidence of a continuous stream of native conversion. India’s immigrant population of Turks, Afghans, Persians, and Arabs never represented more than a small minority of the total. By the time Ibn Battuta visited the country, the great majority of Muslims there were Indian-born. Most of India’s rural population remained true to the Hindu tradition. Though the sultanate required Hindus, at least in theory, to pay special taxes (as Christians and Jews under Muslim authority were required to do), the government for the most part left them alone to live and worship as they wished. Nevertheless, Indo–Muslims were by the late thirteenth century working their way into the intelligentsia and the elite circles of the sultanate. Ministers and provincial governors of Indo–Muslim origin were being appointed. Indian-born scholars, poets, and religious doctors were appearing in the royal court. As Islam in the Indian context matured, the most conspicuous social tensions within the upper strata were occurring, not between Muslim and Hindu, but between the rising Indo–Muslim elite and the still dominant notables who traced their lineages to the older Islamic lands.
In fact the cultural ties between India and the rest of the Dar al-Islam were becoming stronger in the early fourteenth century. Under the Muslim Ilkhans Persia was restored to its old position as the hub of circulation throughout the Islamic world. As a result, merchants, Sufis, and envoys were moving in greater numbers between there and India over the high roads through Afghanistan. Both the Khalji and Tughluq sultans cultivated diplomatic ties not only with the Ilkhans but also with the Mamluks and, later, the rulers of Kipchak and Chagatay. These connections in turn helped broadcast information about the sultanate among international professional and scholarly circles. Ibn Battuta may have first heard in Cairo about attractive opportunities for official service at the brilliant court of Delhi.
The Qutb Minar, Delhi
Ray Smith
It was sometime between 1327 and 1330 that Sultan Muhammad Tughluq decided on the policy of systematically filling the highest posts of his administration and judiciary with foreigners and rewarding them with fabulous gifts and stipends. This plan was but one of several peculiarities of his reign. Ibn Battuta was himself one of the prominent chroniclers of that period and shared with other contemporary writers certain norms and expectations as to the behavior of a proper Sunni ruler.3 Most of the sultans and amirs who starred in the drama of the later Mongol Age complied outwardly with the standards of orthodoxy well enough that their historians applied the conventional panegyrics to them and their regimes. If the ruler upheld the shari’a in religious and civil affairs, patronized the scholars and spiritual luminaries, gave generously to the prominent and the poor, attended feasts and Friday prayers, condemned pagans and Shi’ites, and refrained from indulging publicly in things forbidden, then learned opinion normally gave its stamp of approval.
Muhammad Tughluq, however, was the odd duck of fourteenth-century rulers — eccentric, anomalous, baffling. In the eyes of the educated men who served him (and later wrote books about him), he repeatedly deviated from the norms of tradition and advocated policies that were visionary, extreme, and unfathomable. Though he presided over his court in the grand style of the Abbasid Caliphs, cultivated relations with the major states of Islam, and doubled, in God’s name, the size of the Indian empire, the official establishment could not adjust themselves to his quixotic schemes and contradictions. They ultimately deserted him wholesale.
Muhammad was a religious scholar of greater attainments than any of the other more or less polished rulers of his time. He insisted that his Muslim subjects perform the ritual prayers and abstain from wine. He took a lively interest in legal studies and memorized large sections of the corpus of Hanafi law. He mastered the art of calligraphy and wrote elegant Persian verse. He learned Arabic in order to read religious texts. He showered patronage on
scholars and divines. Yet he also pushed his inquiries well beyond the boundaries of orthodox propriety. He invited Hindu and Jain sages to court and engaged them in theological discussion. He consorted with yogis. He even took up the study of Greek philosophical rationalism, a subject anathema to fourteenth-century Sunni doctors.4
Muhammad was also a man of action in the best tradition of the Turkish war captain. Rather than confining himself to the usual policy of merely seizing chunks of Hindu territory and squeezing them for taxes, he pursued in a spirit of relentless logic a series of ingenious, sweeping, and unprecedented projects to reorganize government and society. Most of these schemes were initiated during the first ten years of his reign, that is, prior to Ibn Battuta’s arrival. All of them ended in disaster. The sultan developed a plan to rationalize and improve agricultural production and tax-gathering in the fertile Doab region between the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers southeast of Delhi. The result was a serious decline of productivity and a protracted peasant revolt. He conceived a grand strategy to take the offensive in the northwest and invade the Chagatay Khanate. He raised a huge mounted force, kept them on the muster role for a year at great expense, then abandoned the entire plan — except for dispatching an army into Kashmir, where Hindu mountain folk annihilated it.5 He issued copper coins backed by gold in the treasury in order to compensate for a shortage of silver, probably getting the idea from China. If the Chinese were amenable to token money, however, Indians were not. Counterfeiting became rampant, the coins dropped precipitously in value, and the sultan finally had to redeem them for gold at immense cost to the government.
In 1326, he decided to found a new capital at Deogir, renamed Daulatabad, a city located in the barren Deccan plateau more than 400 miles south of Delhi. His aim was apparently to better assimilate newly conquered areas by shifting the center of government to South India. If the scheme was politically logical and reasonably planned, it was from a human standpoint grievously unrealistic. The official classes comfortably ensconced in Delhi resisted the move, wanting nothing to do with life in that remote province. The sultan responded to such recalcitrance by ordering a mass exodus of the royal household and almost the entire governing corps. Modern historians are divided on the question of the extent to which Delhi was depopulated and ruined in consequence of the migration. In any case the experiment failed. If Muhammad briefly achieved a tighter grip on the south, conspiracies and revolts were soon erupting in the north, forcing him to return. Moreover, about 1329 he was obliged to defend Delhi against the invading army of Tarmashirin Khan. Within but a few years of his decision to move his government to Daulatabad, his officials and their retinues were being given authorization to desert the city and trek back to Delhi.
The sultan appears to have decided early in his reign, perhaps following the resistance of his officials to resettling in Daulatabad, that he could best put his innovative policies into action by entrusting them to foreign political servants on whose personal loyalty he could count in return for salaries and perquisites. Since educated men were constantly circulating from one Muslim court to another in that age, it was easy enough to attract them to India. But once again the plan backfired. The more respectable Sunni gentlemen recoiled at the sultan’s queer orthodoxy. The less honorable tried to get rich on Muhammad’s naive generosity, then sneak out of the country at the first opportunity.
All of the sultan’s murky, fruitless dreams for a model Muslim state reveal both an impressive vision and a deplorable inability to accommodate his will to social and political realities. He was a bull in the china shop of Indian society, insensitive to the delicate compromises among social groups and power cliques that had held the sultanate together for more than a century. The intricate regional and caste divisions within Hindu society, the primitive communications system, and the dogged rivalries within the Muslim elite itself all put far greater limits on central authority than Muhammad could bring himself to admit.
As the criticisms of his ’ulama and the leading divines became known to him, he reacted with petulant brutality. Rather than compromise with opinion, he chose to ferret out and punish those who failed by their disloyalty or incompetence to make his reforms succeed. In any Muslim state of that age the ruling warrior class was expected to be arbitrary, capricious, and nasty up to a certain limit in the interest of public order. But Muhammad Tughluq went too far. It was one thing to chastise rebels and thieves by having them cut in half, skinned alive, or tossed about by elephants with swords attached to their tusks. It was quite another thing to inflict such humiliations on distinguished scholars and clerics for merely questioning public policy or happening to be a friend of someone who did. “Not a day or week passed,” reports the contemporary chronicler Barani, “without the spilling of much Musulman blood and the running of streams of gore before the entrance of his palace.”6
At the same time that he repressed and terrorized his own boon companions and officers of state, Muhammad continued to bestow stupendous prizes and salaries on those he happened to favor at the moment. Barani relates:
His indiscriminate liberality did not stop to differentiate between the deserving and the undeserving, between an acquaintance and a stranger, between a new and an old friend, between a citizen and a foreigner, or between the rich and the poor. All of them appeared to him just the same. Nay more, the gift of the monarch preceded the request and the amount or value of the donation exceeded the wildest expectations of the receiver; so that the latter was literally confounded.7
The political message such actions carried was that the sultan, the Shadow of God, was the temporal source of all power, whether for good or evil, and that the people must understand their utter subordination to his will. Thus to take service with Muhammad Tughluq was to live a life of reckless insecurity, to spin the wheel of chance with every word or action on which the sultan might choose to have an opinion.
As Muhammad’s schemes went awry and the empire began to crack, the atmosphere of the imperial court became increasingly paranoid and brooding. By 1334 the constructive energies of the government were exhausted, a seven-year drought was about to begin, and the sultan was facing the earliest of the 22 major rebellions that would consume the last decade and a half of his reign. The Sultanate of Delhi had reached its peak of power and was about to founder. It was in these conditions of imminent disaster that the Moroccan traveler chose to arrive in Hindustan.
Ibn Battuta reached the valley of the Indus River at an uncharacteristically tranquil moment in the history of that tumultuous frontier. After more than a century of chronic hostilities between the sultanate and the Mongols, Muhammad Tughluq had accomplished something of a truce with his Tatar neighbor. The routes from Persia and Central Asia were busy with trade, and distinguished visitors were arriving regularly at the government immigration and customs posts set up at the main crossing points along the river.
At the Indus, intelligence officers charged with controlling the movements of persons in and out of the empire subjected the Moroccan and his friends to meticulous observation. Who is this individual? What does he look like? Where has he come from? How does he dress and behave? How many servants and animals does he have with him? The answers to these and numerous other questions were immediately written up and dispatched by rapid courier relay to the governor of the northwest frontier at Multan, a city east of the river in the Punjab region, and to the sultan in Delhi (or wherever in the kingdom he happened to be). The visitors were then instructed to proceed to Multan to await the sultan’s orders regarding their fitness to continue to Delhi and the degree of honor to be accorded them.
Ibn Battuta relates that he did not in fact go directly to Multan but set off on a side trip to visit Sind, the arid valley of the lower Indus and its delta. The region was of special historic interest to educated travelers — and to readers of the Rihla — since it had first been conquered for Islam by an Arab army early in the eighth century. The highlights of Ibn Battuta’s detour included a five-day boat t
rip down the great river to the delta port of Lahari in the company of its governor, meetings with various Sufi divines, and an unpleasant brush with a rhinoceros. The itinerary of the trip is ambiguous because Ibn Battuta fails to make clear where along the Indus, within a range of about 550 miles, he had first arrived from Afghanistan.8 Moreover, a study of chronological matters in the narrative suggests that the events he describes in connection with Sind may well have taken place at a later time, probably in 1341 when he traveled there from Delhi at the summons of the sultan.9 It seems plausible that he and his company did in fact go directly to Multan in order to secure official clearance before traveling further into the empire.
Located at that time near the Ravi River, one of the tributaries of the Indus, Multan was the military capital of the western borderlands. Multan was also known as the headquarters of the Suhrawardiya, one of the two important Sufi orders represented in India. Upon arriving in the city, Ibn Battuta presented himself before the governor, then took lodgings in a Suhrawardi khanqa just outside the town. He was even introduced to Rukn al-Din Abu l’Fath, the Grand Shaykh of the brotherhood, thus fulfilling the astonishing prediction that the old Egyptian mystic had made to him in Alexandria seven years earlier. (On the road from Multan to Delhi a short time later he would visit Ala al-Din Mawj-i Darya, master of the Chishti order. This man was not quite the second of the three divines the Egyptian told Ibn Battuta he would meet in India. Rather it was his grandson.)
Ibn Battuta remained in Multan at least two months and perhaps throughout much of the winter of 1333–34.10 There he had the company of traveling notables from Bukhara, Samarkand, and other cities to the west. Most prominent among them was Khudhawand-Zada Qiwam al-Din, qadi of the Chagatay city of Tirmidh. Ibn Battuta had been traveling off and on with this judge, two of his brothers, and a nephew on the journey through Afghanistan. When the intelligence reports on the new visitors reached Muhammad Tughluq, he replied that Qiwam al-Din was to be given special honors. Consequently, there arrived in Multan from Delhi one of the sultan’s chamberlains with instructions to accompany the qadi and other foreign gentlemen to the capital. Al-Makhdumah Jahan, the sultan’s mother, also sent along three eunuchs to escort Qiwam al-Din’s wife and children.