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

by Ross E. Dunn

  In the autumn of 1351 the relentless traveler set out from Fez to visit Mali. He says nothing in the Rihla to explain why he felt impelled to cross the Sahara Desert. We may suppose he had the usual private plans to seek favor from yet another Muslim court. Obsessive traveler that he was, he may even have been urged on by the knowledge that the Sudan was the one important corner of the Dar al-Islam he had not yet seen.6

  Some modern historians have suggested that Sultan Abu ’Inan appointed him as a state envoy to the emperor. Both Mansa Musa and Mansa Sulayman had initiated diplomatic exchanges with Abu l’Hasan, Abu ’Inan’s father. Because of the Marinid campaign to conquer all of North Africa and thereby control the northern termini of the trans-Saharan trade from the Atlantic to Ifriqiya, the rulers of Mali had abundant reason to cultivate good relations with their northern neighbor. Abu ’Inan certainly knew that Ibn Battuta was making the journey and expected him to report in detail upon his return to Fez. Yet there is no convincing evidence that this Tangierian faqih, who was little known in Morocco’s official circles, had anything like the ambassadorial status he had enjoyed (with such disastrous results) under Muhammad Tughluq.7

  Traveling due south from Fez across the ranges of the Middle and High Atlas Mountains, he arrived in Sijilmasa, the pre-eminent desert port of the Western Maghrib, after a journey of eight or nine days. Sijilmasa lay in the midst of an immense oasis called Tafilalt, the last important outpost of sedentary life at the northern edge of the void. Today nothing remains of the city except an agglomeration of unremarkable ruins strewn among the palm groves. In the fourteenth century it was, according to al-Umari, a place “of imposing palaces, high buildings, and tall gates.”8 Tafilalt’s rich agriculture, fed by a river flowing down out of the Atlas 50 miles to the north, supported the urban population, including a large resident community of Berber and Arab merchants. From the perspective of Mali, Sijilmasa was the chief northern terminus of the trans-Saharan gold caravans. Here the products of the savanna and forest were off-loaded, stored in warehouses, and finally carried by camel, mule and donkey trains over the mountains to Fez, Marrakesh, Tlemcen, and the Mediterranean ports.

  Ibn Battuta spent about four months in Sijilmasa, waiting for the winter season, when the big caravans set out for Walata, their destination at the far side of the desert. During this time he purchased camels of his own and fattened them up. When he was in Ceuta some months earlier, he may have become acquainted with the al-Bushri family, whose kinsman he had met in China. For he lodged during his entire stay in Sijilmasa with one Muhammad al-Bushri, a legal scholar and brother of the al-Bushri of Qanjanfu. “How far apart they are,” he remarks blandly in the Rihla.

  In February 1352 (beginning of Muharram 753) he set out from Tafilalt with a caravan of “merchants of Sijilmasa and others.” The leader was a fellow of the Masufa Berbers, a herding people of the Western Sahara who appear to have had something close to a monopoly on the supply of guards, guides, and drivers on the entire route between Tafilalt and the Sahel. The twelfth-century geographer al-Idrisi describes the normal routines for traveling safely across “the empty waste” that yawned for a thousand miles south of Sijilmasa:

  They load their camels at late dawn, and march until the sun has risen, its light has become bright in the air, and the heat on the ground has become severe. Then they put their loads down, hobble their camels, unfasten their baggage and stretch awnings to give some shade from the scorching heat and the hot winds of midday . . . When the sun begins to decline and sink in the west, they set off. They march for the rest of the day, and keep going until nightfall, when they encamp at whatever place they have reached . . . Thus the traveling of the merchants who enter the country of the Sudan is according to this pattern. They do not deviate from it, because the sun kills with its heat those who run the risk of marching at midday.9

  A market in Tafilalt near the site of Old Sijilmasa.

  Photo by the Author.

  Ruins of Old Sijilmasa in the Tafilalt oasis.

  Photo by the Author.

  By tradition, the tomb of Ibn Battuta in Tangier.

  Photo by the Author.

  Twenty-five days out of Sijilmasa the caravan reached the settlement of Taghaza, the main salt-mining center of the Western Sahara. The paradox of Taghaza was the grim, treeless desolation of the place set against its extreme importance to the entire interregional commercial system. All the southbound caravans took on loads of slab salt, since no product was in greater demand in the Sudan. “This is a village with nothing good about it,” Ibn Battuta complains. “It is the most fly-ridden of places.” Then he goes on to speak of the enormous amounts of gold that changed hands there.

  The caravan stayed in the village for ten days, giving him an opportunity to watch wretched slaves belonging to Masufa proprietors dig slabs out of the open mine and tie them against the sides of the dromedaries. He also had the curious experience of sleeping in a house and praying in a mosque made entirely of salt blocks, except for the camel-skin roofs. The water of Taghaza was brackish, and every bit of food for the laborers, except for camel meat, had to be brought in from either Morocco or Mali. More than a century and a half later the Granada-born traveler Leo Africanus would visit Taghaza and find conditions little changed:

  Neither have the said diggers of salt any victuals but such as the merchants bring unto them: for they are distant from all inhabited places, almost twenty days journey, insomuch that oftentimes they perish for lack of food, whenas the merchants come not in due time unto them: Moreover the southeast wind doth so often blind them, that they cannot live here without great peril.10

  Between Taghaza and Walata lay the most dangerous stretch of the journey, almost 500 miles of sand desert where the average annual rainfall is a scant five to ten millimeters and where only one watering point exists, a place called Bir al-Ksaib (Tasarahla).11 If rain fell at all in the region, it usually came in late winter.12 Ibn Battuta and his fellows were, according to his chronology, traveling south from Taghaza sometime in March. Fortunately, the rain had come that year, leaving pools of water here and there along the track, enough in fact for the caravaners to wash out their clothes. Yet there was danger enough in this wilderness for all that:

  In those days we used to go on ahead of the caravan and whenever we found a place suitable for grazing we pastured the beasts there. This we continued to do till a man named Ibn Ziri became lost in the desert. After that we neither went on ahead nor lagged behind. Strife and the exchange of insults had taken place between Ibn Ziri and his maternal cousin, named Ibn ’Adi, so that he fell behind the caravan and lost the way, and when the people encamped there was no news of him.

  Arriving safely at Bir al-Ksaib minus Ibn Ziri, the caravan stopped for three days to rest and to repair and fill the water skins before navigating the trek across the vast sand desert called Mreyye, the final and most dangerous stage of the trip. Keeping to the usual procedure, the company hired a Masufa scout called the takshif, whose job it was to go on ahead of the caravan to Walata. If he did not lose his way among the dunes, or run out of water, or fall prey to the demons which Ibn Battuta tells us haunted those wastes, he would alert the people of the town to the caravan’s approach. A group of Walatans would then be sent four days’ journey north to meet the caravan with fresh water.

  The Masufa takshif earned the 100 mithqals of gold the caravaners paid him, for on the seventh night out of Bir al-Ksaib they saw the lights of the Walata relief party. A few days later, sometime in the latter part of April 1352 (beginning of Rabi’ I 753), they reached the sweltering little town. Its mud brick houses lay along the slope of a barren hill, a scattering of palm trees in a little wadi below. The site was bleak, but as the main southern terminus of the camel trains the town nonetheless supported a population of two or three thousand.13 It ranked as a provincial capital of Mali and had an important community of educated men of Berber and Sudanese origin.

  By a letter entrusted to the takshif Ibn Battuta had
arranged to rent a house through the good offices of a “respectable” Moroccan trader named Ibn Badda’, who resided in the town. Yet as soon as he arrived, he found cause to regret having come at all. Walata was the most northerly center under the jurisdiction of the mansa. Following custom, the members of the caravan went immediately to pay their respects to the farba, or governor. They found him seated on a carpet under a portico, surrounded by lancers, bowmen, and warriors of the Masufa. Though he sat very close to the visitors, he addressed them not directly but through a spokesman. In Mali this was proper ceremonial procedure symbolizing the sacred character of the mansa, in whose name the farba held his authority. Ibn Battuta, however, thought the governor’s behavior a shocking display of bad manners, misinterpreting it as a show of contempt for the visiting “white men.”14 Later, the newcomers all went to receive hospitality from one of the governor’s officials. The welcome turned out to be a bowl of millet with a little honey and yogurt.

  I said to them: “Was it to this that the black man invited us?” They said: “Yes, for them this is a great banquet.” Then I knew for certain that no good was to be expected from them and I wished to depart.

  He soon got the better of his urge to retreat back to Morocco, but the inclination of the Sudanese to combine Islamic practice with regional custom was no end of irritation to him. His prejudice, if he were to try to explain it, had nothing directly to do with race. It was a matter of the failure of the Malians to conduct themselves according to the normative standards that pious Muslims from North African cities might expect of virtuous officers of state. Such standards did not include rulers speaking to fellow believers through ritual heralds or entertaining visiting ’ulama with small dishes of porridge.

  The incident, unfortunately, was to be only the first of many occasions when Ibn Battuta, the sophisticated Maliki jurist, would find the Sudanese coming up short in their attention to moral and legal niceties. He admits that the scholars of Walata treated him warmly during his sojourn in the town, but he found their failure to subscribe to what he regarded as the civilized rules of sexual segregation even worse than the practices of the Central Asian Turks. On one occasion he appeared at the house of the qadi to find him seated in casual conversation with a young and beautiful woman. That a woman should be present in the reception room of a Muslim’s house when a male guest arrived was bad enough. But the judge’s explanation, that it was all right to come in because the woman was his “friend,” made the visitor recoil in shock. On another occasion Ibn Battuta paid a call to a Masufa scholar and found this worthy’s wife chatting with a strange man in the courtyard. When he expressed profound disapproval of such goings-on, the scholar replied insouciantly that “the association of women with men is agreeable to us and a part of good conduct, to which no suspicion attaches. They are not like the women of your country.” Unpersuaded, Ibn Battuta left the house at once and never came back. “He invited me several times,” he tells us, “but I did not accept.”

  He stayed in Walata several weeks, then started out for the capital of Mali in the company of three companions and a Masufa guide. He remarks that he did not need to travel in a caravan because “neither traveler there nor dweller has anything to fear from thief or usurper” owing to Mansa Sulayman’s firm government. Nor did he have to carry a large stock of supplies. As he moved southward from the Sahelian steppe into the grassy plains, giant baobab trees rising stalk-like on the horizon, he encountered village after village of Sudanese farming folk. In them he and his comrades offered glass beads and pieces of Taghaza salt in return for millet, rice, milk, chickens, and other local staples. After two weeks or more on the road by way of Zaghari (which may be identified with the Sokolo area in modern Mali), he reached the left bank of the Niger River at a place he names Karsakhu.15 He calls the river the Nile (Nil), following the mistaken notion of medieval Muslim geographers that that great river was a branch of the Egyptian Nile. Whatever his error, the crocodiles here were as dangerous as the ones he had seen in Egypt:

  One day I had gone to the Nil to accomplish a need when one of the Sudan came and stood between me and the river. I was amazed at his ill manners and lack of modesty and mentioned this to somebody, who said: “He did that only because he feared for you on account of the crocodile, so he placed himself between you and it.”

  The traveler’s precise route from Walata to the Malian capital is a puzzle because we do not know for certain where the town was. The Rihla gives neither a name to the place nor a very useful topographical description of it. The chief seat of royal power may have changed location from one period to another, indeed more than one “capital” may have existed at the same time. Some modern scholars identify the site, at least at that time in Mali’s history, with the village of Niani, located south of the Niger in the modern Republic of Guinea. But the town may also have lain north of the river somewhere east of Bamako.16 About ten miles from his destination Ibn Battuta crossed what he calls the Sansara River on a ferry (he never mentions crossing the Niger). If the capital is to be identified with Niani, that river would have been the Sankarani, a southern tributary of the Niger.

  The seat of Mansa Sulayman was a sprawling, unwalled town set in a “verdant and hilly” country.17 The sultan had several enclosed palaces there. Mansa Musa had built one under the direction of Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, an Andalusian architect and poet who had accompanied him home from the hajj. Al-Sahili surfaced the building with plaster, an innovation in the Sudan, and “covered it with colored patterns so that it turned out to be the most elegant of buildings.”18 Surrounding the palaces and mosques were the residences of the citizenry, mud-walled houses roofed with domes of timber and reed.19

  Ibn Battuta arrived in the town on 28 July 1352 (14 Jumada I 753) and went immediately to the quarter where the resident merchants and scholars of Maghribi origin lived. He had written to the community in advance of his arrival, probably from Walata, and was relieved to learn that his letter had been received and a house made ready for him to occupy. Within a day, he made the acquaintance of the qadi, a Sudanese, as well as the other members of the Muslim notability. He was also introduced to the mansa’s “interpreter,” or griot, a man named Dugha. This official was a Sudanese of special social caste who performed a multiplicity of important state functions: master of state ceremonies, royal bard and praise singer, herald, confidant, counsellor, and keeper of the oral traditions of the Keita dynasty.

  Ibn Battuta no doubt expected to see the king promptly, but ten days after his arrival he fell grievously sick after eating some yams or similar root that may not have been cooked long enough to remove the poison from its skin.20 He fainted away during the dawn prayer, and one of the five men who had shared the meal with him subsequently died. Ibn Battuta drank a purgative concoction to induce vomiting, but he remained so ill for two months that he could not rouse himself to make an appearance at court.

  He finally recovered just in time to attend a public memorial feast for the deposed and deceased Moroccan sultan Abu l’Hasan, with whom Mali had had amicable diplomatic relations. The ceremonies of the mansa’s public sitting were not unlike the pageants the traveler had witnessed in dozens of Muslim courts, but elements of traditional Malinke chieftaincy were in evidence to be sure:

  [The sultan] has a lofty pavilion, of which the door is inside his house, where he sits for most of the time . . . There came forth from the gate of the palace about 300 slaves, some carrying in their hands bows and others having in their hands short lances and shields . . . Then two saddled and bridled horses are brought, with two rams which, they say, are effective against the evil eye . . . Dugha the interpreter stands at the gate of the council-place wearing fine garments of silk brocade and other materials, and on his head a turban with fringes which they have a novel way of winding . . . The troops, governors, young men, slaves, the Masufa, and others sit outside the council-place in a broad street where there are trees . . . Inside the council-place beneath the arches a man is standing. A
nyone who wishes to address the sultan addresses Dugha and Dugha addresses that man standing and that man standing addresses the sultan.

  If one of them addresses the sultan and the latter replies he uncovers the clothes from his back and sprinkles dust on his head and back, like one washing himself with water. I used to marvel how their eyes did not become blinded.

  The qadi and other scholars brought Ibn Battuta forward and presented him to the gold-turbaned monarch seated on his dais under a silken dome. There was nothing particularly special about a Moroccan faqih passing through the kingdom and this first meeting was perfunctory. Later, when Ibn Battuta had returned to his house, one of the scholars called to tell him that the sultan had sent along the requisite welcoming gift.

  I got up, thinking that it would be robes of honor and money, but behold! it was three loaves of bread and a piece of beef fried in gharti [shea butter] and a gourd containing yoghurt. When I saw it I laughed, and was long astonished at their feeble intellect and their respect for mean things.

  To make matters worse he spent almost another two months attending court before the sultan paid any further attention to him. Finally, on the advice of Dugha, he made an appeal to Sulayman, brashly raising the issue of the mansa’s prestige among the Muslim rulers of the world:

  I have journeyed to the countries of the world and met their kings. I have been four months in your country without your giving me a reception gift or anything else. What shall I say of you in the presence of other sultans?

  In all probability Sulayman could not have cared less what this wandering jurist said of him. At first he sublimely disavowed having even known that Ibn Battuta was in the town. But when his notables reminded him that he had received the Moroccan a few months earlier and “sent him some food,” the mansa offered him a house and an allowance in gold. Notwithstanding the sultan’s desultory effort to put things right, Ibn Battuta never got over the indifferent treatment he received, concluding in the Rihla that Sulayman “is a miserly king from whom no great donation is to be expected” and that Mansa Musa by contrast had been “generous and virtuous.”