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

by Ross E. Dunn

  For about the first ten days of his visit Ibn Battuta managed to preserve his secret, as he and his companions explored the coconut groves of the island and enjoyed the hospitality of the government. But then a ship arrived from Ceylon carrying a group of Arab and Persian Sufis. Some of them happened to know Ibn Battuta from his Delhi years and immediately let the cat out of the bag. The Moroccan visitor, the queen and her court were told, had been an important qadi in the service of the mighty Muhammad Tughluq. The grand vizier was delighted at the news. Here was a celebrity who should be specially honored and must not be allowed to escape the islands too easily or too soon!

  To his dismay, but also, the tone of the Rihla makes clear, to his vain satisfaction, Ibn Battuta was suddenly the center of attention. At first Jamal al-Din tried to flatter him into staying on Male with gifts and preferments. He invited him to the nightly feasts of Ramadan in the queen’s palace. He gave him a piece of land and offered to build him a house on it. He sent him slave girls, pearls, and golden jewelry. Ibn Battuta accepted all this fuss with grim courtesy, but he was in no mood to revise his travel plans, even less so when he fell seriously ill for some weeks, possibly with the malaria that was endemic in the islands.29 As soon as he recovered sufficiently to move about, he tried to hire passage on an outbound ship, but Jamal al-Din made it impossible for him by obstructing the financial arrangements. Finally he had to conclude that the grand vizier was going to keep him on Male whether he liked it or not. Under such circumstances as these, it was better to negotiate his fate voluntarily than to be coerced into service. Presenting himself before Jamal al-Din, he gave his word that he would remain in the islands indefinitely, making the condition, however, that he would not go about Male on foot and that the Maldivian custom of allowing only the vizier to appear publicly on horseback (the queen rode in a litter) would in his case have to be set aside.

  The brashness of this demand was the first sign that Ibn Battuta’s sojourn in the Maldives was to be unlike any of his other traveling adventures. His years in India reveal plainly that he had political ambition. But there he had been a relatively small fish in a large, shark-infested pond. Among the ingenuous Maldivians, however, his prestigious connections to the sultanate gave him a status of eminence out of all proportion to the power he had actually exercised in Delhi. Once he agreed to stay in the islands, he seems to have determined to capitalize on his reputation and throw himself into politics. To be sure, the upper-class factional quarrels of this remote equatorial paradise had something of a comic opera quality about them in contrast to the majestic affairs of the sultanate or the Mongol kingdoms. Nevertheless, Ibn Battuta became a very big man in the Maldives for a few fleeting months, and he is at pains to have the reader of the Rihla understand that this was the case. Even though the account of his involvement is disjointed, incomplete, and ambiguous, he reveals more about his personal social and political relations there than he does in connection with any of his other experiences, including his years in Delhi. There is no reason to doubt that he became deeply enmeshed in the rivalries of the Maldivian nobility, even to the point where, if things had gone his way, he might have ended his traveling career there in a position of lasting power.

  In February 1344, probably less than two months after his arrival, he married a woman of noble status.30 She was the widow of Sultan Jalal al-Din ’Umar, who was the father (by another marriage) and a predecessor of Queen Khadija. This noblewoman also had a daughter who was married to a son of the grand vizier. Marriage among the governing families of the Maldives was as much a political tool as it was in any other kingdom in that age. Ibn Battuta, like other scholars who circulated among the cities and princely courts of Islam, sought marriage as a way of gaining admission to local elite circles and securing a base of social and political support. By wedding this woman (whose name is never mentioned in the Rihla, though he says he found her society “delightful”), he allied himself to both the royal family and the household of the grand vizier.

  Jamal al-Din had in fact urged the marriage on him and as soon as it was consummated invited his new cousin to fill the office of chief judge of the realm. Ibn Battuta pleads rather coyly in the Rihla that “Jamal al-Din compelled me against my will to accept the qadi’s post,” but he hardly discouraged his own candidacy when he criticized the incumbent judge for being “absolutely no good at anything.” Ibn Battuta makes it plain that once he got the job he used the office to wield considerably more power over other men than he ever had in his opulent sinecure in Delhi:

  All sentences proceed from the qadi, who is the most influential man with them, and his orders are carried out like those of the sultan or even more punctiliously. He sits on a carpet in the council-hall and has three islands, the income which he appropriates for his personal use according to an old custom.

  In the absence of any independent observation, we cannot know how much he may have inflated his power in the islands for the benefit of admiring readers of the Rihla. He claims, in any case, to have gone about his judicial practice in the same spirit of orthodox zeal that had prompted him to expose the errant bath operators in that Nile town of Upper Egypt 18 years earlier. “When I became qadi,” he reports triumphantly, “I strove with all my might to establish the rule of law,” implying that the Maldivian bumpkins had much to learn about rigorous canonical standards and that he was just the man to rid the kingdom of “bad customs.” Among his reforms, he ordered that any man who failed to attend Friday prayer was to be “whipped and publicly disgraced.” He strove to abolish the local custom that required a divorced woman to stay in the house of her former husband until she married again; he had at least 25 men found guilty of this practice “whipped and paraded round the bazaars.” At least once he sentenced a thief to have his right hand severed, a standard shari’a judgment that nonetheless caused several Maldivians present in the council hall to faint dead away. In one matter, however, the populace refused to conform to his idea of scriptural propriety. Most of the women, he relates,

  wear only a waist-wrapper which covers them from their waist to the lowest part, but the remainder of their body remains uncovered. Thus they walk about in the bazaars and elsewhere. When I was appointed qadi there, I strove to put an end to this practice and commanded the women to wear clothes; but I could not get it done. I would not let a woman enter my court to make a plaint unless her body were covered; beyond this, however, I was unable to do anything.

  When the zealous magistrate was not hearing cases in the council chamber or ferreting out derelictions of Koranic duty, he was busy building up his network of political alliances with the chief families and making a high place for himself in the pecking order of power. Within a short time of his first marriage, he wed three more women, four being the most wives a man could have according to Islamic law. His second wife was the daughter of an important minister and great granddaughter of a previous sultan. His third was a widow of Queen Khadija’s brother and immediate predecessor. His fourth was a step-daughter of ’Abdallah ibn Muhammad al-Hadrami, a nobleman who had just been restored to a ministerial position after having spent a period of time in exile on one of the outer islands for some unnamed transgression against the state. “After I had become connected by marriage with the above-mentioned people,” Ibn Battuta tells us bluntly, “the vizier and the islanders feared me, for they felt themselves to be weak.”

  Despite the unity of Maldivian government, the political claustrophobia of tiny Male coupled with the fragmented geography of the kingdom encouraged both factional intrigues and dissidence.31 The Rihla makes it apparent that the grand vizier, the de facto ruler, did not have the whip hand over his nobility and could not fully control the actions of political cliques. Ibn Battuta’s recounting of the events that led to his precipitous departure from the islands is subjective and episodic and leaves the reader of the narrative straining to discern the deeper currents of the political drama. He leaves no doubt, however, that he had not been a figure in the royal c
ourt for very long before he began to make enemies. Vizier ’Abdallah, the minister who had returned from temporary exile, seems to have regarded him as an arriviste and a threat to his own position of power. The two men got on badly from the start, clashing over symbolic matters of precedence and protocol that concealed a far more serious rivalry for influence in the kingdom. As Ibn Battuta explains it, and we will never know anyone else’s side of the story, ’Abdallah and certain of his kinsmen and allies plotted to turn the grand vizier against his new qadi, and they finally succeeded. A nasty row broke out between Ibn Battuta and Jamal al-Din over a legal judgment involving a sordid affair between a slave and a royal concubine. The grand vizier accused Ibn Battuta of insubordination and called him before the ministers and military officers assembled in the palace.

  Usually I showed him the respect due to a ruler, but this time I did not. I said simply “salamu alaikum.” Then I said to the bystanders, “You are my witnesses that I herewith renounce my post as qadi as I am not in a position to fulfill its duties.” The grand vizier then said something addressing me, and I rose up moving to a seat opposite him, and I retorted in sharp tones . . . Thereupon the grand vizier entered his house saying, “They say I am a ruler. But look! I summoned this man with a view to making him feel my wrath; far from this, he wreaks his own ire on me.”

  On the heels of this stormy confrontation, Ibn Battuta paid off his debts, packed up his luggage, divorced one of his wives (probably ’Abdallah’s step-daughter), and hired a boat to take him to Captain Ibrahim’s ship, which was at that moment in the southern region of the atolls. Yet far from washing his hands of the Maldive government and sailing off in an offended huff, he reveals, tantalizingly and obscurely, that he was playing for bigger stakes than merely the independence of his authority as qadi. Describing his departure from Male, he writes in the Rihla, as if adding a forgotten detail.

  I made a compact with the vizier ’Umar, the army commander, and with the vizier Hasan, the admiral, that I should go to Ma’bar, the king of which was the husband of my wife’s [that is, Hurnasab’s] sister and return thence with troops so as to bring the Maldive islands under his sway, and that I should then exercise the power in his name.32 Also I arranged that the hoisting of the white flags on the ships should be the signal and that as soon as they saw them they should revolt on the shore.

  Then he adds rather disingenuously, “Never had such an idea occurred to me until the said estrangement had broken out between the vizier and myself.” He also hints that Jamal al-Din had at least a suspicion of this astonishing plot, but the vizier’s own political position had apparently weakened so much that he could not risk arresting his qadi. Whatever Jamal al-Din’s fears may have been, the threat of an invasion was not entirely far-fetched, for the Chola empire of South India had conquered the islands in early medieval times.33

  As it turned out, Ibn Battuta left Male without further incident and sailed in several days’ time to Fua Mulak (Muluk) island, which lay near the southern end of the archipelago just across the equator.34 Here Captain Ibrahim’s ship awaited him. Ibn Battuta had sailed out of Male with three wives in his company, but he divorced them all in a short time. One of these women, the wife of his first Maldive marriage, fell seriously ill on the way to Fua Mulak, so he sent her back to Male. Another he restored to her father, who lived on Fua Mulak. He offers no explanation for his divorcing the third woman, though she was pregnant. He stayed on Fua Mulak for more than two months, and there he married, and presumably divorced, two more women. Quite apart from his political motives in taking a total of six wives during his sojourn in the islands, such transitory alliances reflected the custom of the country:

  It is easy to marry in these islands because of the smallness of the dowries and the pleasures of society which the women offer . . . When the ships put in, the crew marry; when they intend to leave they divorce their wives. This is a kind of temporary marriage. The women of these islands never leave their country.35

  Ibn Battuta made a brief trip back to Male in the company of Ibrahim in order to help the captain iron out a dispute he had with the inhabitants of Fua Mulak. He did not, however, leave the ship while it was anchored in Male harbor. Then, after touching briefly at Fua Mulak once again, they set sail northeastward for the coast of Ceylon. The time was late August 1344.36

  Notes

  1. The Book of Duarte Barbosa, trans, and ed. Mansel Longworth Dames, 2 vols. (London, 1918–21), vol. 2, p. 74.

  2. The Rihla is the sole record of this event. No evidence of the embassy has come to light in Chinese sources so far as I know, though Peter Jackson notes that a Yuan mission is known to have visited Egypt in 1342–43. “The Mongols and India (1221–1351),” Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1977, p. 222. The envoys probably arrived several months before IB left Delhi. On the dating of his departure see note 5.

  3. Henry Yule identifies this town as Sambhal east of Delhi. Cathay and the Way Thither, 4 vols. (London, 1913–16), vol. 4, p. 18. Also MH, p. 150.

  4. IB states that he left Delhi on 17 Safar 743 A.H., that is, 22 July 1342. Evidence suggests that he did not remember the year correctly or that an error was made in copying the Rihla. A departure date of 17 Safar 742 (2 August 1341) makes more sense within the context of subsequent statements in the Rihla about chronology and itinerary. The fundamental problem with IB’s chronology for the travels in India, the Maldive Islands, and Ceylon is that he claims to have left the Maldives (following the first and longer of two visits) in the middle part of Rabi’ II 745 (late August 1344), that is, a little more than two years after leaving Delhi. His own statements about traveling times and lengths of sojourns in particular places, however, indicate that about three years elapsed between his leaving Delhi and his first departure from the Maldives. For the period of travels between these two events, the Rihla is not very helpful, since IB offers not one absolute year date. The Maldive departure date of 745, however, is probably accurate. In the space of a few months following that date, he arrived in the Sultanate of Ma’bar in the far southeastern corner of the subcontinent. There he witnessed and was involved in events surrounding the death of Sultan Ghiyath al-Din and the accession of Nasir al-Din. Numismatic evidence shows that this regnal change took place in 745 A.H. (The last coin of Ghiyath al-Din is dated 744; the first coin of Nasir al-Din is dated 745.) S. A. Q. Husaini, “Sultanate of Ma’bar” in H. K. Sherwani and P. M. Joshi (eds.), History of Medieval Deccan, 2 vols. (Hyderabad, 1973–74), vol. 1, pp. 65, 74. If IB’s Maldive departure date is accurate, at least for the year, then we may hypothesize that the Delhi date should be pushed back a year to make room for three years of travel.

  5. As it is set forth in the Rihla, IB’s itinerary from Delhi to Daulatabad is erratic and illogical. Part of the explanation is probably that some of the stages have been placed in incorrect order. For example, he states that he visited Dhar before Ujjain, when it was almost certainly the reverse. Furthermore, he may have visited some of the places mentioned during earlier excursions out of Delhi which he does not report and whose descriptive information is woven into the account of the trip to Daulatabad. He indicates, for example, that he had visited Gwalior at some earlier time, though nothing is said about the circumstances of such a trip (D&S, vol. 4, p. 33). IB offers almost no help in deducing the chronology of his journey through the interior of India. Mahdi Husain calculates that he arrived in Daulatabad on 3 November. A general estimate of late autumn seems reasonable, but this author’s precise town-to-town chronology for the entire range of IB’s travels in India, the Maldives, and Ceylon is delusive, for it is based almost entirely on informed guessing and inferential evidence such as “normal” traveling times from one place to another. MH, pp. lxiv-lxvi.

  6. Gujaratis were well established in the East Indies in the fifteenth century and were probably arriving there in the fourteenth. M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz, “Trade and Islam in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago Prior to the Arrival of the Europeans” in D. S. Richard
s (ed.), Islam and the Trade of Asia (Oxford, 1970), pp. 144–45.

  7. Duarte Barbosa, vol. 1, pp. 134, 136, 138.

  8. Simon Digby, “The Maritime Trade of India” in Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, 2 vols (Cambridge, England, 1982), vol. 1, p. 152.

  9. P. M. Joshi, “Historical Geography of Medieval Deccan” in Sherwani and Joshi, Medieval Deccan, vol. 1, pp. 18, 20.

  10. IB states that the suzerain of Jamal al-Din was a ruler named Haryab, but historians have disagreed as to whether this individual is Ballala III of the Hoysalas or Harihara I of the Kingdom of Vijayanagar. See R. N. Saletore, “Haryab of Ibn Battuta and Harihara Nrpala,” Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society 31 (1940–41): 384–406; also MH, p. 180n.

  11. The location and identity of these ports, some of which no longer exist, are investigated in Duarte Barbosa, vol. 1, pp. 185–236, vol. 3, pp. 1–92; Yule, Cathay, vol. 4, pp. 72–79; and MH, pp. 178–88.

  12. According to the fifteenth-century navigator Ibn Majid, the best time for sailing from the west coast of India to the Bay of Bengal was around 11 April, or from mid March through April. G. R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese (London, 1971), p. 377.

  13. Yule, Cathay, vol. 2, p. 131.

  14. Junks normally left the Malabar coast for China after mid March (see note 12). However, it seems likely that IB’s vessels were planning to stop over at Quilon, a major port further down the coast, before departing for the Bay of Bengal. Moreover, the subsequent chronological clues IB gives suggest that his departure from Calicut was not scheduled for any later than about 1 March (see note 19).

  15. IB does not describe this vessel. Joseph Needham suggests the name may be related to cocca, coque, or cog, which was a medieval ship of the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. Science and Civilization in China, vol. 4, part 3, Civil Engineering and Nautics (Cambridge, 1971), p. 469n.