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

by Ross E. Dunn

  You must know that from this kingdom of Melibar, and from another near it called Gozurat, there go forth every year more than a hundred corsair vessels on cruise . . . Their method is to join in fleets of 20 or 30 of these pirate vessels together, and then they form what they call a sea cordon, that is, they drop off till there is an interval of 5 or 6 miles between ship and ship, so that they cover something like a hundred miles of sea, and no merchant ship can escape them. For when any one corsair sights a vessel a signal is made by fire or smoke, and then the whole of them make for this, and seize the merchants and plunder them. After they have plundered them they let them go, saying: “Go along with you and get more gain, and that mayhap will fall to us also!” But now the merchants are aware of this, and go so well manned and armed, and with such great ships, that they don’t fear the corsairs. Still mishaps do befall them at times.12

  For Ibn Battuta and his luckless friends, the “mishap” occurred near a small island just south of Honavar.13 Caught in the corsair’s net, twelve ships suddenly converged on the lonely vessel and attacked at once. Clambering over the gunwales from all directions, the pirates quickly overpowered the hapless crew, and stripped the passengers of everything they had. “They seized the jewels and rubies which the king of Ceylon had given me,” Ibn Battuta remembers, “and robbed me of my clothes and provisions with which pious men and saints had favored me. They left nothing on my body except my trousers.”14 Then, with an encouraging word to their terrified victims to pass that way again sometime, the brigands politely dropped them all off on the nearby shore unharmed.

  Dispossessed and humiliated once again, Ibn Battuta did not walk the short distance up the Kanara coast to Honavar, probably concluding that it would be impolitic, if not thoroughly boorish, to appear before Jamal al-Din a second time in a state of destitution. Somehow he and his party managed to make their way back down the coast to Calicut — no details are given — where “one of the jurists sent me a garment, the qadi sent me a turban, and a certain merchant sent me another garment.”

  While recuperating in Calicut he learned through the port gossip that the other Jamal al-Din, the grand vizier of the Maldives, had died and that the pregnant woman Ibn Battuta had divorced had given birth to a son shortly after his departure the previous year.15 He also learned that his old nemesis, the vizier ’Abdallah, had married Queen Khadija and assumed the office of chief minister. By this time Ibn Battuta had given up any idea of returning to the islands at the head of the Ma’bar navy, but he did have an urge to claim his son, a right he had in Muslim law. Well knowing that ’Abdallah could make considerable trouble for him if he turned up on Male again, especially if the Ma’bar conspiracy had become known, he decided nonetheless to chance a visit. Sailing from Calicut, presumably no later than May 1345, he reached the atolls in ten days.16

  Landing first on Kinalos Island then sailing southward to Male, he found ’Abdallah reasonably well disposed toward him, though a bit suspicious. He dined with the vizier and was given lodgings near the royal palace, but he says nothing in the Rihla of renewing his political contacts. When his ex-wife learned that she was about to lose her son, probably for all time, she complained bitterly to ’Abdallah, who was nevertheless disinclined to stand in the father’s way. The father, however, was a man with a long history of abandoning we may only guess how many sons and daughters in various parts of the Muslim world. After seeing the little boy and, we might hope, responding to the pleas of his wretched mother, he “deemed it fit for him to continue with the islanders.” And so, after staying in the Maldives only five days, he boarded a junk bound for Bengal. He was not to return again, much to the relief, we may suppose, of all concerned.

  Sailing round the southern tip of Ceylon into the Bay of Bengal, Ibn Battuta was joining a surge of Muslim migration into the maritime lands of greater southeastern Asia. The fourteenth was a century of bright opportunities for any believer seeking career, fortune, or spiritual self-mastery out beyond the frontier of the Dar al-Islam, where the Sacred Law and the rightly guided society it embodied had yet to be introduced to benighted millions. It was the century when Islamic urban culture secured itself firmly in Bengal, when Muslim mercantile settlements took charge of the international trade through the Strait of Malacca, and when cosmopolitan Islam reached its zenith of influence and prosperity in China.

  Arab and Iranian seamen of the eighth century had first introduced Islam in the Far East during bold, year-and-a-half trading voyages from the Persian Gulf to the South China coast and back again. Yet these missions were given up by the tenth century as the Abbasid state and the T’ang empire of China deteriorated simultaneously. The Arabo–Persian settlement at Guangzhou virtually disappeared, and the voyages left hardly any Islamic impress on eastern Asia. Historians used to suppose that the cessation of these direct, long-distance links between the Middle East and China was evidence of a protracted “decline” of Muslim trade with the farther East. On the contrary, the long run of commercial developments between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries involved a more or less steady increase in the variety, and no doubt volume, of goods exchanged along the chain of southern seas, as well as proliferation of ports and local hinterlands incorporated into the inter-regional system. By the eleventh or twelfth centuries a Muslim network of trust, friendship, and social expectation ruled the commerce of the western Indian Ocean. Since the sea routes from there through the Bay of Bengal to the China Seas had since ancient times constituted a continuum of commercial exchange, it was almost inevitable that the network should push out along the shores north and east of Ceylon in search of new bases of operation. Sharing as they did an unusual esprit de corps and monopolizing the routes leading to the markets of Africa, Persia, and the Mediterranean basin, upstart Muslim merchants had powerful advantages over Indian, Malay, or Chinese trading groups, who found themselves gradually superseded by or, more likely, coopted into the Muslim club.

  During the era of the two Sung dynasties (960–1279), China experienced spectacular economic growth. Agricultural and industrial output shot up, population soared, cities multiplied, and the internal network of roads and canals was vastly improved. A remarkable expansion of overseas trade accompanied these trends. Chinese nautical and naval technology was well in advance of the Arabian Sea tradition and could conceivably have been wielded to enforce a monopoly over the eastern sea routes. In fact, the Sung emperors embraced a dual policy. They encouraged Chinese merchants to trade directly to India (or in some isolated instances as far west as the Red Sea). But at the same time they invited foreign traders, notably Muslims, to establish, or in the case of Canton re-establish, settlements in the cities of South China.

  Moreover, Chinese overseas mercantile operations tended to be hampered by the Sung government’s insistence on close regulation and control. By contrast, the alien Muslim trading groups were fluid, versatile, and unimpeded by any central bureaucratic authority. They could therefore move goods across the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea more speedily, more efficiently, and probably at lower cost than could the Chinese junk masters. Thus, the “commercial revolution” of Sung China stimulated the expansion of Muslim shipping east of Malabar and the growth of busy, multinational settlements in Quanzhou (Zaitun), Guangzhou (Canton), and other south coast ports. Muslim mercantile communities even sprang up in Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Sung Dynasty (1127–1279), and other major towns along the interior land and water routes. Indeed, a significant proportion of Chinese merchants in the international trade appear to have converted to Islam, improving, as it were, their credit rating.

  The Mongol invasion of China and overthrow of the Sung only reinforced these trends. The Yuan dynasty was the only one of the four great Mongol khanates whose rulers never converted to Islam. Nevertheless, the khans of the early Yuan period, distrusting, as well they might have, the loyalty and commitment of the sullen, hyper-civilized class of Chinese scholar-bureaucrats, brought in numerous foreigners of diverse orig
ins and religions and placed them in responsible, even powerful, positions of state. These men depended completely on their Mongol masters to protect them and promote their careers and were expected to give unquestioning loyalty in return. The influence of foreign cadres reached its peak in the reign of Khubilai Khan (1260–94), when hundreds of Muslims of Central Asian or Middle Eastern origin (not to mention a few European adventurers such as Niccolo Polo and his son Marco) held jobs as tax-collectors, finance officers, craftsmen, and architects.

  The Yuan “open door” policy on foreign recruitment, combined with their enthusiastic promotion of pan-Eurasian trade, attracted Muslim merchants into China’s vast, largely unexploited market as never before. They came not only to the China Sea ports and the cities of the populous south, but also across Inner Asia and through the gates of the Great Wall to found settlements in the northern towns, including even Korea. The largest communities were in Quanzhou and Guangzhou on the southern coast. These groups largely governed the internal affairs of their own city quarters, and Muslim merchant associations, called ortakh, even took loans from the Yuan government to capitalize their foreign trade enterprises. Mosques, hospitals, khanqas, and bazaars rose up in the Muslim neighborhoods of Ch’üan-chou and Canton, and qadis were appointed to adjudicate the Sacred Law in civil and business affairs.17

  Following Khubilai’s death in 1294, the appointment of foreigners to official posts trailed off as the Yuan emperors lost touch with the stout ways of the steppe, took up the habits of traditional Chinese potentates, and gradually brought the Confucian scholar-gentry back into government. The Sinicization of the dynasty, which was especially pronounced after 1328, does not seem to have much affected Muslim trading enterprise in the cities, which continued to thrive until the collapse of the Mongol regime in 1368. Until that time, a Muslim might travel the main roads and canals of China, finding in the major towns little clusters of co-believers always eager to offer hospitality and to hear news from the west. After 1368, however, the alien Muslim settlements along the south Chinese coast shrank or disappeared, perhaps partly because local Chinese Muslim merchants took over this commercial sector.

  The growth of Muslim commercial settlements in China in the Mongol Age was mirrored in similar developments along the coasts of Southeast Asia. The strategic link in the trade between India and China was the Strait of Malacca, connecting the Bay of Bengal with the South China Sea. Like the Malabar coast, the strait was a hinge in the monsoonal sailing system. Vessels crossing the Bay of Bengal eastbound on the summer monsoon could not normally reach China before the opposing northeast wind set in. Therefore they would winter in a port along the strait before continuing around the Malay Peninsula and across the South China Sea in April or May. Climatic reality encouraged India-based merchants to sell their goods in the strait towns, then return directly to Malabar on the winter wind. China shippers followed the same seasonal pattern of travel, only in reverse.

  By the thirteenth century local Malay rulers of the strait, men who practiced Hinduism or a combination of Hindu–Buddhist devotions, were avidly encouraging Muslim traders to settle in their ports owing to the obvious fiscal advantages of tying themselves securely into the southern seas’ commercial network. Wherever such communities sprouted, their members felt impelled to order their collective lives in accord with the demands of the shari’a to the extent the authorities permitted. Thus a call went out for the scribes, judges, Qur’anic teachers, mosque officials, craftsmen, and, since business was good, more merchants. In time, the Muslim population, with its universalist claims and its cosmopolitan connections, became large, rich, and prestigious enough to win over members of the Malay elite and ultimately to impress, intimidate, or manipulate the princely court into official conversion. This event in turn set off a new round of immigration from abroad, as enterprising, footloose men responded to what Marshal Hodgson calls the “drawing power” of new Muslim communities.18

  This process was only just beginning in Southeast Asia when Ibn Battuta came through. A Malay prince, ruler of the port of Samudra on the northwestern coast of Sumatra, converted to Islam sometime in the late thirteenth century, and his is the earliest Islamicized state in the region historians have been able to discover.19 Elsewhere in the Eastern Archipelago, that is, in the countries bordering the Java Sea and the “spice islands” further off to the east, Islam was still largely unknown in the first half of the fourteenth century. The subsequent three hundred years would be the crucial period of quiet, persistent conversion, ultimately transforming Indonesia into an overwhelmingly Muslim country.

  From the eleventh century, when the high age of Arab geographical writing had almost run its course, down to the end of the Islamic Middle Period, the Rihla stands alone as an eyewitness Muslim travel account of Eastern Asia. Yet the story of Ibn Battuta’s journey to China must be told briefly and in a spirit of uneasy skepticism. If we take his word for the itinerary he followed, insofar as we can make sense of it, this was the longest more or less uninterrupted trip of his career, spanning somewhere between 11,000 and 12,000 miles of travel by land and sea. Yet his narrative of the entire tour from the Maldives to Bengal, Sumatra, China as far north as Beijing, and back to Malabar occupies less than 6 percent of the Rihla text. And as both a descriptive account and a record of personal experience of what alleges to be a bold, arduous journey far beyond the frontiers of the Dar al-Islam, it is the least satisfying and most problematic section of the entire book.

  The itinerary is vague, possibly disordered, and sometimes baffling. Chronological information, except for what can be inferred here and there, is almost altogether lacking. Descriptions of places, events, and things observed are often muddled or patently inaccurate. The sort of precise personal witnessing that lends credibility to so much of the narrative, while not altogether lacking, is suspiciously spare. The fuzziness and obscurity of the story stands out uneasily against the rich, vivid, even introspective accounts of the years in India and the Maldives. Indeed, the deficiencies of this part of the book give the impression that Ibn Battuta remembered the details of his much earlier travels in Persia, Africa, or Anatolia better than he did the Far Eastern trip, which occurred less than a decade before the Rihla was composed. Moreover, an estimation of the probable starting date of the journey (that is, his second departure from the Maldives) and his own recollection of the month when he returned to Malabar suggest that he made the entire journey from the Maldives to Peking in the far north of China and all the way back to South India again in the space of about twenty months, including several leisurely rest stops. Since we can safely eliminate the possibility of his traveling by jet plane or speedboat, such a pace seems inconceivable, and if not that, then at least pointless. All of these difficulties have led some scholars to doubt that Ibn Battuta really traveled to China or even anywhere east of Ceylon, contending that this part of the Rihla may be a fabrication and the descriptive information it contains based entirely on hearsay.20

  No one, however, has made a completely convincing case that Ibn Battuta did not go to East Asia, at least as far as the ports of South China. The riddle of the journey probably defies solution since the Rihla, we must remind ourselves, is a work of literature, a survey of the Muslim world of the fourteenth century in narrative form, not a travel diary composed along the road. We have no way of knowing the precise relationship between Ibn Battuta’s real life experience and the account of it contained in the fragile manuscripts that have come down to us from his time. Moreover, the narrative of the China trip is by no means a collection of abstract reports or improbable tales. For all its sketchiness and ambiguity, it is still a story of countries and cities visited, events experienced, people talked to, and aspects of everyday life observed. And so, honoring Ibn Battuta with the benefit of the doubt, we follow him, albeit warily, to Bengal and beyond.

  Instead of sailing directly from the Maldives to the Strait of Malacca on some pepper ship out of Malabar, Ibn Battuta decided first to visit
Bengal. He probably had no trouble finding a vessel to take him there since the islanders carried on regular trade with that region, importing quantities of rice from the Ganges Delta, paid for in cowrie shells.21

  Like the Deccan, Bengal in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was a frontier of Turkish arms and Persian-style Islamic culture emanating from the Indo–Gangetic plain. But much unlike the central plateau, Bengal was a heavily populated, water-soaked garden of immense fertility. In the early thirteenth century the region was annexed to the Sultanate of Delhi. As Muslim governors and garrisons occupied the important delta towns, immigrants streamed in from the northwest, making Bengal the eastward overland terminus for the class of skilled and literate refugees and their descendants who had introduced Arabo–Persian civilization to India. By Ibn Battuta’s time, a number of Bengali cities had madrasas and important Sufi lodges, and the conversion of Hindu or Buddhist peasant folk that would prove so successful in subsequent centuries was already getting under way.

  The sultans of Delhi, however, found it exasperatingly difficult to hold the mastery of their eastern frontier. Unlike the northern plains, Bengal was extremely unaccommodating to the operations of cavalry. Jungles and mountains obstructed the routes in from the capital, and rivers were numerous and unfordable. Consequently, the local Turkish lords, who built up riverine navies to ensure their own purely regional power, repeatedly rebelled against Delhi. Muhammad Tughluq succeeded in placing governors over his delta provinces early in his reign, but when the pretense of his vast subcontinental empire became exposed, Bengal was one of the first provinces to bolt. In 1338, the eastern half of the region broke away when Muhammad’s governor died, prompting an obscure Turkish officer named Fakhr al-Din Mubarak Shah to seize the main chance and proclaim a kingdom of his own. Two years later West Bengal seceded under similar circumstances.