by Nayab Naseer
Such societies were not unique to Anatolia. They existed in various forms and by several names throughout dar-us-Islam. Their social function was to institutionalize the sense of civic unity into a structure consistent with the ideals of the Quran but not addressed by the waqf.
The years of wanderings in Anatolia did not dilute Ibn Battuta’s goal of Delhi. Towards this end, he crossed the Black Sea to Crimea. His vessel sailed into a storm so rough that at one point one of his companions went topside to see what was happening, and returned to croak, "Commend your soul to Allah!" But Allah was merciful, and Ibn Battuta headed for the Mongol Kipchak Khanate, which rimmed the northern shore of the Black Sea.
The trade routes Ibn Battuta traversed north of the Caspian were less busy than those across Afghanistan and Iran. He made a lengthy side trip to Constantinople, traveling in the company of Princess Bayalun, daughter of the Byzantine emperor Andronicus, who had been married, for political and economic reasons, to the Muslim Ozbeg Khan of the Golden Horde, as his third wife. She was returning to Constantinople for the birth of her child. Ibn Battuta struck up a conversation with her, and on hearing his travels, she wept with pity and compassion.
Ibn Battuta did not stay long in Constantinople. He took the fabled Silk Route to Samarkand, where he spent fifty-four days with Tarmashirin, the Chagatay Khan sultan who had recently converted to Islam and was interested in what a worldly-wise qadi might tell him.
Ibn Battuta's exact path through Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush is uncertain, but once he descended the hot and sultry plains of India, he headed for Multan, the Delhi sultanate’s westward customs outpost. He made plans to impress Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughlaq sufficiently to win a sinecure — his first steady job.
It was very important to make a good first impression, for no one in Delhi knew anything about the new arrival's background or lineage. By the time Ibn Battuta reached Delhi, he knew the custom of the sultan was to reward every gift with a much greater one.
Ibn Battuta struck a deal with a merchant who offered to advance him a sizable stake of dinars, camels, and goods in exchange for a fat cut of the proceeds when the sultan's reward came. The merchant, clearly an early venture capitalist, also turned out to be a fair-weather friend, for Ibn Battuta says, he "made an enormous profit from me and became one of the principal merchants. I met him many years later at Aleppo after the infidels had robbed me of everything I possessed, but he gave me no assistance."
Ibn Battuta's long stays in Baghdad and Damascus studying law and discussing fiqh with fellow jurists served him well in Delhi. The much impressed Muhammad ibn Tughlaq appointed him qadi with the handsome compensation of twelve thousand silver dinars per year, plus a signing bonus of another twelve thousand dinars.
However Ibn Battuta soon discovered that he too could find himself on the wrong side of this mercurial ruler, whose character clearly fascinated him. He says: “When severe drought reigned over the lands of India and Sind...the sultan ordered that the whole population of Delhi should be given six months' supplies from the [royal] granary.... [Yet] in spite of all that we have related of his humility,...the sultan used to punish small faults and great, without respect of persons, whether men of learning or piety or noble descent. Every day there are brought to the audience-hall hundreds of people, chained, pinioned, and fettered, and those who are for execution are executed, those for torture are tortured, and those for beating, beaten.”
There were administrative errors as well. Once Tughlaq misconstrued Chinese texts about finance and decreed that since silver was in short supply, coins should thenceforth be made of copper. Such coins were backed by the sultan's gold, and copper was abundant. Counterfeiters had a field day at the expense of the sultan.
Ibn Battuta was eventually denounced at court for his association with a teacher whom Ibn Tughlaq suspected to be a plotter. Afraid for his life, Ibn Battuta disguised himself as a mendicant. The sultan’s agents nevertheless located him, and sent him "saddled horses, slave girls and boys, robes and a sum of money."
This was clearly a summons.
Ibn Battuta presented himself to Tughlaq, and he was no doubt thunderstruck to hear words he never forgot: “I have expressly sent for you to go as my ambassador to the king of China, for I know your love of travel."
Ibn Battuta, the qadi was caught unawares. He was to accompany fifteen Chinese envoys then in residence in Delhi and somehow oversee the transport and presentation to the king of China of a gift of a hundred thoroughbred saddled and bridled horses, one thousand two hundred pieces of various kinds of cloth, a hundred male slaves, a hundred singing-and dancing-girls, and fifteen eunuchs.
Ibn Battuta set forth on 17 Safar 743 AH (22 July 1342 CE), with an escort of a thousand horsemen. The plan was to reach Calicut by land and put the embassy on one of the Chinese dhows waiting there.
The trouble that was to dog him for the next five years began almost the moment he set foot outside Delhi.
In the Doab and downwards, Ibn Tughlaq's rule was breaking down rapidly. Rebels roamed the roads, sometimes as guerrilla armies, other times as brigands. Near the town of al-Jalali, the ambassador's retinue battled with about a thousand cavalry and three thousand foot soldiers. Sporadic skirmishes occurred over the next few days, and at one point Ibn Battuta fell from his horse and was separated from his retinue. He ran for his life—straight into the arms of one of the rebel bands. Their leader ordered Ibn Battuta executed, but for unknown reasons the rebels dithered and let him go. He hid in a swamp for seven days. The locals who saw him refused him food. A village sentry took away his shirt. He came to a well, tried to use one of his shoes as a bucket, and lost the shoe in the depths. As he was cutting the other in two to make sandals, a man happened along.
He asked Ibn Battuta in Persian who he was, and Ibn Battuta replied warily, "A man astray."
The man replied, “So am I."
He then carried Ibn Battuta, fainting with exhaustion, to a village where he recovered. In time, Ibn Battuta regained his caravan, and eventually reached Calicut.
The gifts and the slaves were put aboard the hired Chinese dhow while Ibn Battuta stayed ashore to attend prayers. Then he decided he was unwilling to travel on the dhow as the cabin was small and unsuitable. His personal retinue, including a pregnant concubine transferred to a smaller kakam that would sail with the dhow.
In the night, a storm came. Ibn Battuta says “.... We spent the Friday night on the seashore, unable to embark on the kakam and those on board unable to disembark and join us. I had nothing left but a carpet to spread out." The storm, rather than abate, increased.
Dhows are cumbersome in shallow, narrow harbors, and the dhow captain tried to make for deeper water where he might safely ride it out.
This dhow didn't make it.
Ibn Battuta had the ghastly experience of watching the dhow smash onto the rocks, killing everybody on board with it. When the crew of the kakam saw what had happened, they made haste in spreading their sails and be off, leaving Ibn Battuta alone on the beach.
Wrecked with the dhow was Ibn Battuta's Delhi career. He knew the first question Tughlaq would put to him was why he had failed to go down with his ship. This time, no show of mendicancy would be adequate atonement.
Despite the trauma of the incident, Ibn Battuta inserts in his account one of those factual and informative observations that makes his Rihala such a treasure today: “The [ruler of Calicut's] police officers were beating the people to prevent them from plundering what the sea cast up. In all the lands of Malabar, except in this one land alone, it is the custom that whenever a ship is wrecked, all that is taken from it belongs to the treasury. At Calicut, however, it is retained by its owners, and for that reason Calicut has become a flourishing and much frequented city.”
Ibn Battuta withdrew to the port of Honavar, where he spent some six weeks in solitude, prayer and fasting—perhaps to keep a low profile, perhaps to grieve for the loss of his child who was in the ill-fated dhow, and recon
ciling the end of a potentially exalted ambassadorial career. His retreat ended when he volunteered, exactly why he does not say, to lead the Honavar sultan's military expedition against the rival port of Sandapur.
Though briefly victorious, the attack was swiftly countered. He says "The sultan's troops abandoned us. We were reduced to great straits. When the situation became serious, I left the town during the siege and returned to Calicut."
Ibn Battuta now had no means left, no prospects of appointment anywhere, and one friend fewer in Honavar. He had literally run out of options.
With nothing better to do, he hopped on to a ship bound for the Maldives islands.
The ruler of the Maldives, Queen Rehendi Kilege, locally called Khadija, was a puppet of her husband, the vizier. Despite Ibn Battuta's attempts to keep a low profile, the royal couple soon heard that there was a well-traveled qadi in the island, As they had no one in the islands filling the office of qadi at the time, they invited Ibn Battuta to take up the post, and made it clear that they would not take "no" for an answer. “So reasoning with myself that I was in their power and that if I did not stay of my own free will I would be kept by force, and that it was better to stay of my own choice, I said to his messenger, ‘Very well, I shall stay’”.
The next few months Ibn Battuta enjoyed perquisites of power while acting in the familiar function of qadi; punishing thieves and adulterers, adjudicating disputes, and trying quite unsuccessfully to require women to cover themselves more fully than the island custom dictated.
Ibn Battuta married into the royal family and soon found himself the husband of four wives, the full complement allowed under Islamic law. All of these matrimonial unions were at least in part political and it was not long before Ibn Battuta, whose Delhi credentials made him a big fish in this very small pond began to acquire a power base of his own among the local nobles.
The end result of these developments was Ibn Battuta’s hasty departure, under suspicion by the queen and his vizier, apparently well founded, of plotting a coup d'état. In a mere seven months Ibn Battuta had gone from a much courted qadi to qadi non grata
Ibn Battuta fled to Ceylon, and from there to the Coromandel Coast in East India. As he neared the coast, a fierce squall broke up the ship. Ibn Battuta got his wives safely aboard a raft, but there was no room on it for him, and he was not a good swimmer. He clung to the slowly sinking stern of the ship through the night. In the morning, just as it appeared to be going down for good, a boat load of local fishermen arrived. They set him on his way to the local sultan, and as fate would have it, the sultan was Ghiyath al Din, a brother of one of his former wife in Delhi — one of those coincidences that highlight the "small world" of 8th hijri century (14th century CE) nobility in dar-us-Islam.
Ibn Battuta and Ghiyath al Din plotted a joint expedition to the Maldives, accompanied by a military force that would carry out the unrealized coup. But it was not long before, in the coastal city of Patan, a plague suddenly claimed Ghiyath al-Din life and with it Ibn Battuta’s ambitions on Maldives.
Ibn Battuta set sail once more for Honavar, and once more lost everything, this time to a sea-cordon of pirate vessels. Their tactic was to disperse far out at sea but just within sight of each other. When a victim neared, they communicated with light signals and swarmed on their target en masse.
Ibn Battuta says “They took everything I had preserved for emergencies; they took the pearls and rubies that the king of Ceylon had given me, they took my clothes and the supplies given me by pious people.... They left me no covering except my trousers.” It speaks well of Ibn Battuta's resourcefulness and the brotherhood of the ummah that after coming ashore stripped of all his clothes and possessions, he was again well dressed by the end of the day and within weeks, had money to spend.
Ibn Battuta once again embarked on a boat headed for the Maldives, this time alone. It was a brief visit to see his son, he told the decidedly mistrustful vizier and queen. Five days later he was on his way back.
China has always been a tremendous attraction for travelers. From the 4th to 7th hijri centuries (10th to the 13th century CE), mutually reinforcing prosperity in the Islamic lands under the Abbasids, and in China under the Sung dynasty boosted Sino-Arab trade to heady heights. The Mongol Yuan Dynasty took China in 677 AH (1279 CE), and despite the Mongol devastations within dar-us-Islam, maritime trade continued unabated. Omani and other traders continued their arduous, eighteen month voyages as before.
Even though the Yuan never embraced Islam as other Mongol dynasties that controlled Persia and Central Asia did, they tended to trust Muslims more than they trusted their Chinese subjects. The Muslims the Yuans met were men of their word, merchants who did not err out of intoxication, and people whose behavior in the spirit of the Quran was laudable by the principles of Confucius. The Yuan's open-door policies filled their bureaucracy with Muslims of all origins.
Ibn Battuta was lured toward China for the same reasons he had been lured to Delhi: the prospect of employment. He also had persisting memories of Burhan al Din - a sage he met in in Alexandria, who two decades earlier had predicted Ibn Battuta would one day visit India and China.
Ibn Battuta made his way to China all right, but his reports do not flatter the land. He derides the severity of Chinese maritime customs inspections: “They order the ship's master to dictate to them a manifest of all the merchandise in it, whether small or great. Then everyone disembarks and the customs officials sit to inspect what they have with them. If they come upon any article that has been concealed from them the dhow and whatever is in it is forfeit to the treasury. This is a kind of extortion I have seen in no country, whether infidel or Muslim, except in China.”
After a sojourn of less than a year in China “a rebellion broke out and disorders flared up," giving Ibn Battuta a welcome excuse to quit the country. He left aboard a friend's India-bound dhow. But in India, he met only ghosts of his past. "I wanted to return to Delhi, but became afraid to do so." He sailed on to Oman, and finding himself having fought his way to a dead end once again, made his fourth hajj.
It was late spring in 748 AH (1348 CE), in Damascus that Ibn Battuta learned that a son he had fathered there died twelve years earlier and that his own father had died fifteen years earlier. But a fellow Berber reported his mother still alive. Ibn Battuta resolved to see her.
On his way back to Tangier Ibn Battuta found that the good days were over in Cairo. Ibn Battuta describes the city as a “honeycomb without honey.” The great builder, Mamluke sultan al-Nasir Muhammad Qala'un had fallen nine years earlier to a cabal of rivals, under whom the city's administration all but collapsed.
In Taza, near Fez, Ibn Battuta learned death had knocked on his mother's door before he had been able to return. The purpose for which he had returned no longer present, having no family in Tangier, and having nothing worthwhile to occupy himself, he set his sights on taking part in jihad to defend the frontier of dar-us-Islam against Christian Spain.
The one strong leader in the region, Abu al-Hasan had consolidated central maghrib and sent an expedition to retake Gibraltar, now under the suzerainty of the king of Spain. Emboldened by the success of this move, he was preparing another expedition to drive Christian knights out of Castile.
Ibn Battuta’s descriptions of al-Andalus (Spain) are no less copious and rich than the rest of the Rihala. The scenery has changed today only in that the tracks he walked are now paved roads and in towns television antennae clutter what were then unbroken roofscapes of red tile.
The jihad eventually took place at Rio Salado, but the sultan lost much of his army. Ibn Battuta nevertheless came home unscratched.
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Ibn Battuta had traversed the entirety of dar-us-Islam except that part almost the closest to his home, but which, because of the difficulty of getting there was in practical terms farther away than the rest.
On 1st Muharram 752 AH (28 February 1351 CE), Ibn Battuta accompanied a caravan, to cross the Sahara and reach
Mali and bilad al-sudan, "the country of the blacks." Today Tuareg guides in their indigo blue still make that camel trek, from Goulemine in Morocco, near his departure point of Sijilmasa - then prosperous but now deserted. The crossing takes sixty three days.
It was not out of casual curiosity that Ibn Battuta went in this direction. Central West Africa was in the midst of an unusual boom. Mali produced more than half of the world’s supply of gold. Had the demand for gold from dar-us-Islam been all there was, Mali would have maintained a prosperous but stagnant economy. But there was far greater demand for gold. The Christian lands of Europe were converting to stable but foreign gold from local but volatile silver. The effect on Mali was an economic boom.
The caravans of camels that carried gold to Morocco also carried the region's other exports, such as hides, nuts, ostrich, ivory and salt. In the opposite direction went cotton textiles, spices, finished jewelry, grain, dried fruit, horses and the metals West Africa lacked: silver, copper, and iron.
The Mali-Morocco trade was dominated by Berber merchants, who had settled in the savannas south of the gold fields. Muslim traders arrived, settled among the locals, built masjids and called people to prayer. Muslim concepts of fair trade and philanthropy not only attracted people to Islam but also brought order to what was hitherto a free-for-all chaos. Mansa Musa, the king of Mali became a legend by distributing so much gold in Cairo en route to hajj in 724 AH (1324 CE) that he depressed the market.