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

by Ross E. Dunn

  Then that evening a storm came up. Calicut harbor was not a deep, sheltered bay but a shallow roadstead. Recognizing the danger of riding at anchor close to shore, the captains of the junk, the kakam, and a third large vessel quickly put out to sea. Throughout the night Ibn Battuta waited helplessly on the beach and the next morning watched in horror as the two larger ships went aground in the shallows, broke up, and sank. Some of the passengers and crew on one of the junks were saved, but no one survived on the vessel he himself was to have boarded the previous day. On Sunday morning the bodies of Zahir al-Din and Sumbul washed ashore, the one with his skull broken in, the other with an iron nail piercing his temples. The slaves, pages, and horses were all drowned, and the precious wares either sank or washed up on the beach, where the zamorin’s gendarmes struggled to prevent the townsfolk from making off with the loot. Meanwhile, the captain of the kakam steered his ship safely out to sea and, not wanting to risk entering the harbor again, sailed southward down the coast. On board were Ibn Battuta’s baggage, servants, and concubines, one of these women carrying her master’s child.

  Alone on the Calicut shore, the lofty ambassador found himself suddenly reduced to the status of a penniless faqih. He had nothing to his name, save his prayer rug, the clothes on his back, and ten dinars an old yogi had given him. But for all that, he was fortunate to be alive. And it seems he still had the company of al-Tuzari and perhaps one or two other companions. Even more hopeful, there was still a chance of catching up with the kakam. The vessel, he was told, was almost certain to put in at the port of Quilon (Kawlam) 180 miles down the coast before sailing away from India altogether. So, hiring a Muslim porter to carry his carpet for him, he made his way to Quilon, traveling this time by riverine craft that plied the lagoons and interconnecting canals paralleling the southern Malabar shore.

  After ten miserable days in the company of the porter, who turned out to be a quarrelsome drunkard, he arrived in the city, not to the applause of the local raja’s court, but to a modest reception in a Sufi hospice, the usual refuge of an anonymous wanderer. Much to his surprise his old associates, the Chinese envoys, turned up while he was there. They had left Calicut somewhat before the sea tragedy had occurred, but they had also barely escaped with their lives when their own ship ran aground. The Chinese merchants resident in Quilon helped them out with clothes and assistance and later sent them home on another junk. The forlorn ex-ambassador, however, waited in vain for his kakam to show up and after several hopless days in the Sufi lodge decided to move on.

  But where indeed was he to go? “I wanted to return from Quilon to the sultan,” he remembers, “in order to tell him what had happened to the gifts. But I feared that he would condemn me, saying ‘Why did you separate yourself from the presents?’ ”16 If the mission’s two other officials, together with the slaves, horses, and magnificent wares all went to the bottom of the sea, why was the Maghribi so shiftless in his duty that he failed to go down with them? Knowing well that his wish to travel in private comfort with his slave girls was hardly a convincing explanation for not boarding the junk, and perhaps imagining his head affixed to a pole or his skin stuffed with straw hanging from the wall of Jahanpanah palace, he concluded easily enough that, no, he would not return to Delhi. He did, however, need a patron to restore him to a position of dignity and perhaps give him a job while he waited for news of the kakam or figured out some new plan. The closest and most likely seigneur was Jamal al-Din Muhammad, the pious Sultan of Honavar and the only Muslim ruler on the southwestern coast of India.

  Returning to Calicut, he found there a fleet of ships belonging to Muhammad Tughluq himself. They were en route to the Persian Gulf to recruit more Arab notables for service in the sultanate. Ibn Battuta struck up an acquaintance with the chief of the expedition, a former chamberlain in the Delhi government, who advised him to stay away from the capital but invited him to accompany the fleet as far up the coast as Honavar. Ibn Battuta gladly accepted the offer and sailed northward out of Calicut sometime around 1 April 1342.17

  If he expected Jamal al-Din of Honavar to elevate him at once to a high office on the strength of the imperial rank he had held the first time he visited the town, he was to be disappointed.

  He quartered me in a house where I had no servant and directed me to say prayers with him. So I sat mostly in his mosque and used to read the Qur’an from beginning to end every day. Later on, I recited the whole Qur’an twice daily . . . I did this without a break for three months, of which I spent forty consecutive days in devotional seclusion.

  While the Moroccan faqih quietly passed a steaming summer on the Kanara coast in a bout of spiritual renewal, Sultan Jamal al-Din busied himself plotting the violent overthrow of his neighbor, the raja of Sandapur. Wars between the little maritime states of the west coast do not appear to have occurred very often in medieval times. Conflict was terrible for trade, and in any case none of the petty princes had armies or fleets large enough to sustain control over long stretches of the coast for indefinite periods of time. Yet a fortuitous opportunity to seize a neighboring port and milk its customs revenues might be too tempting to pass up. As the Rihla explains it, an internal struggle had broken out within the ruling family of Sandapur, a fine port located on an island in the estuary of a river about 90 miles north of Honavar. (In 1510 Sandapur would become Goa, capital of Portugal’s seaborne empire in Asia.18) A son of the raja of Sandapur, scheming to wrest the throne from his father, wrote a letter to Jamal al-Din, promising to embrace Islam if the sultan would intervene on his side in the quarrel. Once victory was achieved, the new raja would marry the sultan’s sister, sealing an alliance between the two towns. Forthwith, Jamal al-Din outfitted a war fleet of 52 ships, two of them built with open sterns to enable his cavalry to make a rapid amphibious assault on Sandapur beach.

  Weary of inactivity and perhaps hoping to ingratiate himself with his patron by some more vigorous show of homage, Ibn Battuta had the idea of offering his services to the expedition. He claims that Jamal al-Din was so pleased with his proposal that he put him in charge of the campaign, though we may presume the office was more or less honorific. Preparations complete, the fleet set sail from Honavar on 12 October 1342.19

  On Monday evening we reached Sandapur and entered its creek and found the inhabitants ready for the fight. They had already set up catapults. So we spent the night near the town and when morning came drums were beaten, trumpets sounded and horns were blown, and the ships went forward. The inhabitants shot at them with the catapults, and I saw a stone hit some people standing near the sultan. The crews of the ships sprang into the water, shield and sword in hand . . . I myself leapt with all the rest into the water . . . We rushed forward sword in hand. The greater part of the heathens took refuge in the castle of their ruler. We set fire to it, whereupon they came out and we took them prisoner. The sultan pardoned them and returned them their wives and children . . . And he gave me a young female prisoner named Lemki whom I called Mubaraka. Her husband wished to ransom her but I refused.

  Having acquitted himself well in this day-long holy war and even acquired part of the living spoils, Ibn Battuta remained at Sandapur for about three months in the company of Jamal al-Din, who seems to have been in no hurry to turn the town over to his Hindu ally, the raja’s son. Then about the middle of January 134320 Ibn Battuta decided to take leave of his patron and travel back down the coast in search of information on the fate of the kakam. On this trip he visited once again most of the ports he had seen the previous year, including Calicut, and spent “a long time,” perhaps a few months, in Shaliyat (Shalia), a famous Malabar weaving town.

  Then, returning to Calicut, he came upon two of his own servants who had been aboard the kakam and had somehow made their way back to Malabar. The news was bad. The ship had sailed to the Bay of Bengal, apparently without stopping at Quilon, and after reaching Indonesia had been seized by an infidel ruler of Sumatra. The concubine who was carrying Ibn Battuta’s child had died
, and the other slave girls, as well as his possessions, were in the hands of this king. The mystery of the kakam finally settled in more tragedy, he returned immediately to Sandapur, arriving there in June 1343.21

  However, any expectation he had of taking up an official career in the service of Jamal al-Din soon ended in yet another disaster. Sometime in August the deposed raja of Sandapur, who had escaped at the time of the invasion, suddenly reappeared with a Hindu force, rallied the peasants of the hinterland, and laid siege to the town. Most of Jamal al-Din’s troops, apparently unaware of an impending attack, were scattered in the surrounding villages and could not get back into the city to defend it. Having attached himself to Jamal al-Din in victory, Ibn Battuta saw no reason to stick by him in defeat, a point of view in the best tradition of Muslim public men, for whom loyalty to one sultan or another was of no great importance. In the thick of the assault, he somehow managed to get past the siege line and headed down the coast again, perhaps this time by land. In a few weeks he reached Calicut, entering that city now for the fifth time.22

  Sometime during the months following the Calicut tragedy, he decided to try to visit China on his own. His prospects for a career on the west coast of India were no longer encouraging, he could not return to Delhi, and he had no immediate urge to make another pilgrimage to Mecca. Moreover, he knew that he could find hospitality among the Muslim maritime communities all along the sea routes to the South China coast. He even had a potential entrée to the Yuan government through the 15 Chinese diplomats, who were presumably then on their way home. His plan would be to make a brief tour of the Maldive Islands (“of which I had heard a lot”), continue to Ceylon to see the famous religious shrine of Adam’s Peak, then cross over to the southeastern coast of India to visit the Sultanate of Ma’bar, whose ruler was married to a sister of Hurnasab, the ex-wife Ibn Battuta had left back in Delhi. From there he would go on to Bengal, Malaysia, and China.

  After staying in Calicut for an unspecified time, perhaps some months, he met up with a sea captain from Honavar named Ibrahim and took passage on his ship bound for Ceylon and Ma’bar by way of the Maldives.23 The idea of visiting this outlying tropical archipelago on his way to the Bay of Bengal was not such an erratic scheme as it might appear, even though the islands lay about 400 miles west and a bit south of Ceylon. Sea-going ships trading eastbound from the Arabian Sea could not sail through the Palk Strait that divided the subcontinent from Ceylon owing to the extremely shallow reef called Adam’s Bridge that traversed the channel. Rather, they had to go around the southern tip of Ceylon. For traffic moving both east and west, the Maldive atolls were close enough to this route to be drawn into the international commerce between the western and the eastern seas. Shuttle trade between Malabar and the Maldives seems to have been very regular in medieval times. Moreover, the islands exported two commodities that were of major importance in the trans-hemispheric economy. One was coir, or coconut fiber rope, used to stitch together the hulls of the western ocean dhows. The other was the shells of the little marine gastropod called the cowrie, which were used as currency as far east as Malaysia and as far west as the African Sudan.

  The people of the Maldives (Dhibat al-Mahal) were a brown-skinned fishing and sea-trading folk. They spoke Divehi, a language closely related to Sinhalese, evidence of ancient seaborne migrations from Ceylon. About the middle of the twelfth century they had been converted from Buddhism to Islam. In the Rihla Ibn Battuta recounts the legend, told even today by old men of the islands, of Abu l’Barakat, a pious Berber from the Maghrib who rid the land of a terrible demon (jinni) and brought the people to the faith of the Prophet.24 Each month the fiend had arisen from the sea and demanded a young virgin to ravish and kill. When Abu l’Barakat arrived in the islands and heard about the situation, he offered to go to the idol house where the sacrifice took place and substitute himself for the girl. He seated himself in the temple and recited the Qur’an through the night. As he expected, the demon refused to approach him out of fear of the Sacred Word. When Abu l’Barakat repeated this feat a second time a month later, the king of the islands razed the infidel shrines and ordered that the new faith be propagated among his subjects. Behind the veil of this heroic myth may be discerned the coming and going of Muslim merchants in the Maldives from as early as Abbasid times and the incorporation of the islands into the commercial network of the western ocean. Since North African and Andalusian Muslims seem to have been more active in the India trade in the eleventh and twelfth centuries than they were later on, there was nothing implausible about a Berber turning up to introduce the faith.25

  Approaching the Maldives from Malabar, Ibn Battuta may have blinked in wonder at the sight of tall coconut palms apparently growing directly out of the sea. He was to discover that the islands rise barely a few feet above the surface of the ocean and that not a single hill is to be found on any of them. Stretching 475 miles north to south like a string of white gems, the Maldives are divided into about twenty ring-shaped coral atolls. Each of these clusters of islands and tiny islets is grouped more or less around a central lagoon. With the help of a Maldivian pilot who knew his way through the dangerous reefs that surrounded the islands, Captain Ibrahim put ashore at Kinalos Island in the northerly atoll of Malosmadulu.26 As usual, the visiting faqih immediately found lodging with one of the literate men of the place.

  For all the tropical charm of the Maldives and their people, Ibn Battuta had no other intention than to play the tourist for a few weeks and get on with his planned itinerary. As soon as he arrived, however, he got fair warning that a different fate lay ahead. The islands were politically united, and had been since pre-Islamic times, under a hereditary king who ruled in a reasonably benign spirit in collaboration with his extended royal family and a small class of titled noblemen. The Maldives had no real towns, but the center of government was on the mile-long island of Male located about midway in the chain of atolls. At the time Ibn Battuta arrived, the monarch happened to be a woman, Rehendi Kabadi Kilege, called Khadija, the nineteenth in the line of Muslim rulers. Female succession to the throne was unusual in Maldivian history, and in fact Sultana Khadija’s administration was thoroughly dominated by her husband, the Grand Vizier Jamal al-Din (not the same man of course as the Sultan of Honavar). Aside from island governors and other secular officials, the queen appointed Muslim judges and mosque dignitaries and expected them to uphold the standards of the shari’a.

  However, the man who held the position of chief qadi at that time was not given much credit for ability. No sooner had Ibn Battuta set foot on Kinalos and revealed himself to be a scholar of refinement and worldly experience than one of the educated men there told him he had better not go to Male if he did not want the grand vizier to appoint him as judge and oblige him to stay on indefinitely. Ibn Battuta was no doubt better qualified for this job than he had been for his magistracy in Delhi. Not only was Arabic, rather than Persian, the language of jurisprudence and literate prestige in the islands, but the Maliki madhhab, Ibn Battuta’s own legal school, was practiced. The existence of a Maliki community in the Indian Ocean is odd, but if the men who introduced Islam to the Maldives were North Africans, they would have brought their Maliki learning with them. (In the sixteenth century the islanders would shift to the Shafi’i madhhab, which made more sense in the context of sustained maritime connections with Malabar and the other Muslim lands around the Arabian Sea.27)

  Anchoring his ship off Kinalos Island probably some time in December 1343,28 Captain Ibrahim hired a small lateen-rigged boat of the sort the Maldivians used in inter-island trade and set off for Male with Ibn Battuta and several unnamed companions aboard. As soon as they arrived, they went the short walk to the wooden, thatched-roof palace to be introduced to Queen Khadija and Grand Vizier Jamal al-Din. Captain Ibrahim, who had been in the islands before, guided the other visitors in the peculiarities of Maldivian ceremonial:

  When we arrived in the council-hall — that is, the dar — we sat down in
the lobbies near the third entrance . . . Then came Captain Ibrahim. He brought ten garments, bowed in the direction of the queen and threw one of the garments down. Then he bowed to the grand vizier and likewise threw another garment down; subsequently he threw the rest . . . Then they brought us betel and rose-water, which is a mark of honor with them. The grand vizier lodged us in a house and sent us a repast consisting of a large bowl of rice surrounded by dishes of salted meat, fowl, quail, and fish.

  Ibn Battuta had learned by experience that Muslim rulers whose kingdoms lay in the outer periphery of the Dar al-Islam were always avid to attract the services of ’ulama with previous links to the great cities and colleges of the central lands. He had also learned that once a scholar developed a public reputation for pious learning, his royal benefactor might use more than simple persuasion to prevent him from moving somewhere else. In order to forestall any complications over his own timely departure, Ibn Battuta decided to say nothing to the Maldivians about his legal background and enlisted Captain Ibrahim to honor the secret. The sultans of Delhi had never had the slightest authority, symbolic or otherwise, in the Maldives, but the small-time nobility of the islands nevertheless looked upon the empire with fear and awe. Any former high official of the sultanate who turned up in the atolls would have to carry a heavy load of distinction and might even stir up a certain apprehension.