The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century
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Ibn Battuta was not of course in the same league with the great commanders of the realm, but he lost no time piling up debts to finance his gifts to the sovereign and a properly luxurious household. He confesses frankly in the Rihla that he developed a reputation for extravagance and that the sultan was well aware of it. We should not conclude, however, that he was necessarily a bigger spender than other men of comparable status. He admits freely of his prodigality, not to confess humbly to a bad habit, but to show that he lived generously and expansively as befitting a qadi of Delhi. Nonetheless, he had to find a way to pay off the merchants who had staked him to his début in the capital because they were preparing to leave the country on a commercial venture. The amount in question was 55,000 silver dinars. The Rihla rather tires the reader with its lengthy description of his strategies for getting Muhammad Tughluq to pay his bills for him, suggesting that he spent a good part of his first half year in Delhi preoccupied with his personal finances. To broach the subject before his master he composed a praise poem to him in Arabic that ended, candidly enough, with the lines:
Make speed to aid the votary to thy shrine,
And pay his debt — the creditors are dunning.
The sultan was pleased with the ode and agreed to pay, but the disbursement from the treasury was held up. Ibn Battuta then got his creditors to make an appeal to Muhammad on his behalf. Success again, but payment was delayed a second time because of certain procedural improprieties involving another official. Ibn Battuta appealed once more, this time sending the sultan three camels, two gilded saddles, and plates of sweets. At long last the money was released, not only the 55,000 dinars for the debt but also the 12,000 the sultan had earlier agreed to give him.
By the time all this was settled Muhammad Tughluq was preparing to leave the capital once again. Sometime in 1334 rebellion had broken out in Ma’bar, the Tamil-speaking region in the far southeast of the subcontinent that had been annexed to the empire by Muhammad Tughluq’s father only eleven years earlier. The leader of the rising was not a Hindu prince but Jalal al-Din Ahsan Shah, the sultan’s own governor. Rallying the support of the Muslim amirs and soldiers under his authority, he proclaimed himself Sultan of Ma’bar. Despite the political perils of campaigning 1,300 miles from the capital, Muhammad mustered an army to march to Daulatabad, then on to Madurai, chief city of Ma’bar. Ibn Battuta expected to be ordered to go along on the expedition. To his surprise and relief, the sultan instructed him to remain in Delhi and, aside from his judgeship, appointed him administrator of the mausoleum of Qutb al-Din Mubarak, the Khalji sultan who reigned from 1316 to 1320 and under whom Muhammad Tughluq had entered military service as a young man. Just before the royal departure on 5 January 1335,21 Ibn Battuta gained one more audience with his master, this time persuading him to allot extra funds for the upkeep of the tomb, not to mention money to repair his own residence.
During the next two and a half years, he resided in Delhi, refurbishing his house, building a little mosque next to it, and running up more debts. He even spent, much to his later embarrassment, 1,060 dinars a friend had left in his trust before leaving with the sultan. He and his substitutes may have heard legal cases in Delhi during this period, but he makes no mention of them. His principal interest seems to have been the mausoleum. The burial place of a sultan was often an important royal endowment. It was first of all a mosque but might also have associated with it a college, a Sufi retreat, and facilities to dispense food and lodging to wayfarers and the needy. Ibn Battuta had to supervise all these functions. He recalls that this complex employed 460 persons, including Qur’an reciters, teachers, theological students, Sufis, mosque officials, clerks, and various classes of cooks, servants, and guards. All of these people were supported from the revenue of 30 villages whose crops were assigned to the tomb and with funds allocated directly from the state treasury. He also busied himself overseeing construction of a dome over the sepulchre.22
His responsibilities were made even greater by the disastrous famine that hit North India in 1335 and lasted seven years. Barani reports that “thousands upon thousands of people perished of want,”23 and Ibn Battuta speaks of Indians being reduced to eating animal skins, rotten meat, and even human flesh. As the famine became general and starving country folk poured into Delhi to find relief, Ibn Battuta distributed quantities of food from the stores allocated to the mausoleum. He presents a picture of himself in this work as an exemplary administrator, mentioning that the sultan sent him a robe of honor from Daulatabad after hearing from one of his officers about the fine job the Maghribi was doing dispensing welfare to the stricken.
Some time during this period, probably in the summer of 1335 or 1336, he left Delhi for two months to make an official inquiry in the region of Amroha, a town located across the Ganges about 85 miles east of Delhi.24 He traveled with a proper retinue, including 30 companions and “two brothers, accomplished singers, who used to sing to me on the way.” Charges had been made that ’Aziz al-Khammar, the district’s tyrannical tax-collector, was holding back on grain shipments assigned from a number of villages to the mausoleum. Meeting first with the notables of Amroha, Ibn Battuta learned that al-Khammar was to be found in a village on the Sarju River, requiring a journey of another 190 miles or so eastward across the north Gangetic plain.25 Finally catching up with his man, he succeeded in having him arrange for transport of a large quantity of grain to Delhi.
But more revealing of the young qadi’s authority was his official investigation of a violent feud that had broken out between al-Khammar and the amir of the military district. Al-Khammar presented a number of complaints against the officer, including the charge that one of the amir’s servants, a man named al-Rida, had broken into his house, stolen 5,000 dinars, and drunk some wine.
I interrogated al-Rida on this subject and he said to me “I have never drunk wine since I left Multan, which is eight years ago.” I said to him “Then you did drink it in Multan?” and when he said “Yes” I ordered him to be given eighty lashes and imprisoned him on the charges preferred, because of the presumptive evidence against him.
Ibn Battuta was not behaving with arbitrary severity here. Rather he was imposing the precise shari’a punishment for imbibing wine — 80 lashes, no more, no less. It was a religious infraction falling within a qadi’s normal authority. On the charge of burglary, however, the man was to suffer the penalty of the sultan’s law and thus sent off to Delhi in chains. If Ibn Battuta sentenced other malefactors to the lash while he served in Delhi, we have no way of knowing, for this is the only judgment he reports having made during his years in India.
Some time in 1337 or 1338 the sultan returned north. Because of the famine that still raged around Delhi, he apparently stopped there only briefly before moving to a temporary capital at a place on the west bank of the Ganges some distance north of the town of Kanauj (Qinnawj).26 Intending to remain there several months, he ordered construction of a modest palace and called it Sargadwari, the Gate of Paradise. It was hardly so happy a residence, for the expedition against Ma’bar had ended in total failure. Muhammad had advanced as far as the central Deccan when an epidemic broke out among his troops, forcing him to return to Daulatabad and leaving the traitorous Ahsan Shah still on his throne in Madurai. Not only did the embattled sultan lose any hope of preventing the secession of Ma’bar, but between the time he left Delhi and returned to the north, several other defecting Turkish or Afghan commanders raised rebellions, effectively terminating imperial rule over much of South and Central India.
The empire disintegrating around him, the sultan summoned many of his Delhi officials to join him at Sargadwari, Ibn Battuta among them. Some time after the qadi and his entourage arrived there, ’Ain al-Mulk, the Indo–Muslim governor of the province immediately east of the Ganges, revolted out of fear that the emperor wrongly suspected him of disloyalty. After boldly raiding the army’s stocks of elephants and horses, ’Ain al-Mulk, four of his brothers, and a force of Hindu soldiers e
scaped eastward across the river to safety. At this point the sultan contemplated marching back to Delhi to reinforce his depleted army and deal with the rebels at some later time. Ibn Battuta, who was in the thick of the crisis and an eye witness to all that occurred, reports that Muhammad’s commanders urged him to strike back at the rebels before they had time to consolidate their position. If Muhammad Tughluq was a disaster as a politician, he had proven himself a skillful soldier and tactician from the time of his father’s reign. Taking his officers’ advice, he advanced by forced march along the west bank of the Ganges to Kanauj to secure the town ahead of ’Ain al-Mulk. Ibn Battuta was traveling in the vanguard under the command of the vizier Khwaja Jahan. In the meantime ’Ain al-Mulk and his company crossed the river again. Foolishly overestimating his own military talents and the likelihood of defections from the sultan’s ranks, ’Ain al-Mulk attacked the imperial vanguard near Kanauj in the early hours of the morning.
The troops, then, drawing their swords, advanced towards their adversaries and a hot battle ensued. The sultan gave orders that his army’s password should be “Dilhi” [Delhi] and “Ghazna”; each one of them therefore on meeting a horseman said to him “Dilhi” and if he received the answer “Ghazna” he knew that he was one of his side and if not he engaged him. The aim of the rebel had been to attack only the place where the sultan was, but the guide led him astray and he attacked the place of the vizier instead . . . In the vizier’s regiment there were Persians, Turks and Khurasanians; these, being enemies of the Indians, put up a vigorous fight and though the rebel’s army contained about 50,000 men they were put to flight at the rising of the day.
Numerous rebel soldiers drowned trying to reach the east bank of the river; others were captured, including ’Ain al-Mulk himself, and brought before the sultan. “Muleteers, peddlars, slaves and persons of no importance” were released, but on the very afternoon of the battle 62 of the traitorous leaders were thrown to the elephants. “They started cutting them in pieces with the blades placed on their tusks and throwing some of them in the air and catching them,” Ibn Battuta remembers, “and all the time the bugles and fifes and drums were being sounded.” ’Ain al-Mulk must have expected a similar fate, or worse. But what Muhammad Tughluq could take away he could also give. Convinced that his governor had acted rashly “through mistake,” as Barani has it,27 the emperor pardoned him and gave him the modest post of supervising the royal gardens in Delhi.
Despite his total victory, Muhammad returned to his capital in a fury of despair.28 The famine raged on, Bengal had broken away from the sultanate or was about to, other revolts were igniting here and there, and all his dreams of a tidy, productive empire were falling to ruin. Thus he lashed out at whatever enemies, real or imagined, happened to be at hand. In such a sinister environment as this, only the most circumspect, inconspicuous officeholder might expect to survive indefinitely. Eager, sociable young qadis, on the other hand, were likely to make a disastrous slip sooner or later.
It might well have happened earlier than it did. At some point during his residence in Delhi, Ibn Battuta married a woman named Hurnasab and had a daughter by her. As usual we learn almost nothing in the Rihla about his domestic affairs, except that this woman was a daughter of Ahsan Shah, leader of the Ma’bar rebellion, and a sister of Sharif Ibrahim, a court official and governor who had plotted a rebellion and was subsequently executed in the palace while Ibn Battuta was in attendance there. Although the Rihla gives no hint that his marriage to Hurnasab brought him under suspicion, having family ties with men guilty of high treason was hardly an advantage at the court of Muhammad Tughluq. Ibn Battuta would later in his travels be a guest of one of Ahsan Shah’s successors in Ma’bar, suggesting that he may well have had some concealed sympathy for the rebellion there.29
The event that finally got him into trouble was his friendship with Shaykh Shihab al-Din, a venerable Sufi originally from Khurasan. It was a long-held tradition among the most pious and principled divines of Islam to shun relationships with secular rulers on the argument that such collaboration would taint them and detract from their total service to God. Nizam al-Din Awliya, the illustrious master of the Chishti brotherhood who died eight years before Ibn Battuta came to India, bluntly cold-shouldered both Khalji and Tughluq emperors at every opportunity. “The house of this humble one has two doors,” Nizam al-Din is known to have said. “If the Sultan enters through one, I shall go out by the other.”30 Such aloofness as this was quite unacceptable to Muhammad Tughluq, whose political theory included the idea that Sufi ascetics and ivory-tower theologians should submit to his will as much as the official ’ulama.
Whether Shihab al-Din was a Chishti or not is unclear, but twice he brashly refused to obey his sovereign’s commands. In the first incident he spurned a government post offered to him. In retaliation Muhammad had the shaykh’s beard plucked out hair by hair, then banished him to Daulatabad. Some time later he had him restored to favor and appointed him to an office, which in that instance Shihab al-Din agreed to accept. When Muhammad went off on the Ma’bar expedition, Shihab al-Din established a farm near the Yamuna River a few miles from Delhi and there dug himself a large underground house complete, as Ibn Battuta describes it, with “chambers, storerooms, an oven and a bath.” Returned to the capital, the sultan ordered Shihab al-Din to appear at court, but the troglodyte refused to emerge. When Muhammad had him summarily arrested, the shaykh retorted that the sultan was an oppressor and a tyrant. The court ’ulama pleaded with him to recant. When he would not, he was tortured in the most heinous manner, then beheaded.
Ibn Battuta, by contrast, was hardly the sort to martyr himself for rigid principles. The odor of politics did not bother him at all, and official service and reward were his ambition. Unfortunately, he had made the mistake of going out one day to see Shihab al-Din and his marvelous cave. Following the shaykh’s arrest, the sultan demanded a list of all who had visited him, and the Maghribi’s name was on it. “Thereupon,” Ibn Battuta recalls, “the sultan gave orders that four of his slaves should remain constantly beside me in the audience-hall, and customarily when he takes this action with anyone it rarely happens that the person escapes.” For nine days Ibn Battuta remained under guard, imagining in cold horror his short final journey to the main gate of the Jahanpanah palace where executions were carried out and the corpses left to lie three days in public view.
The day on which they began to guard me was a Friday and God Most High inspired me to recite His words Sufficient for us is God and excellent the Protector. I recited them that day 33,000 times and passed the night in the audience-hall. I fasted five days on end, reciting the Qur’an from cover to cover each day, and tasting nothing but water. After five days I broke my fast and then continued to fast for another four days on end.
Then, just after Shihab al-Din was executed, the terrified qadi, much to his surprise, was suddenly released and allowed to go home.
Shaken by this dreadful experience, he secured permission a short time later to withdraw from his official duties and seclude himself with Kamal al-Din ’Abdallah al-Ghari, a well-known Sufi who occupied a hermitage, indeed another cave, on the outskirts of Delhi. Kamal al-Din was a rigorous ascetic, living in extreme poverty and performing awesome feats of self-denial. Ibn Battuta had gone into brief periods of spiritual retreat previously in his career, but this time he threw himself into the abstinent life, ridding himself of his possessions, donning the clothes of a beggar, and fasting to the point of collapse. He remained in these penitent circumstances for five months, probably unsure of what he would do next. Apparently he had decided at least that life with Muhammad Tughluq was far too dangerous to continue.
Meanwhile, the sultan went on a military tour to Sind and from the town of Sehwan summoned his qadi to appear before him. Ibn Battuta presumably made the journey immediately, though the Rihla has no comment on it or the route.31 When he arrived, Muhammad received him “with the greatest kindness and solicitude” and pressed
him to return to his judgeship and rejoin the palace circle. Determined to avoid that fate at all costs, Ibn Battuta countered with a request to make the hajj, the most persuasive reason he could come up with for getting permission to leave the country. Much to his relief, the sultan agreed. For several weeks thereafter, beginning in June 1341, he resided in another Sufi khanqa, this time progressively extending his periods of self-denial until finally he could fast for 40 days at a stretch.
Then suddenly he was called into the royal presence again, this time to hear an astounding proposal. Knowing his “love of travel and sightseeing,” the sultan wished to make his North African qadi ambassador to the Mongol court of China. His mission would be to accompany 15 Chinese envoys back to their homeland and to carry shiploads of gifts to the Yuan emperor. Ibn Battuta was preparing to leave for Mecca and until that moment probably had no thought of traveling eastwards of India. Now he was being handed an opportunity, not only to get away from Muhammad Tughluq and the gloom of Delhi, but to visit the further lands of Islam and beyond — and to do it in grander style than he had ever traveled before. It was an offer much too promising to refuse.