A047 - Ibn Battuta

 

Ibn Battuta
Ibn Battuta (Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Battuta) (Ibn Batuta) (Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Al Lawati Al Tanji Ibn Battuta) (February 24, 1304–1368/1369/1377).  One of the world’s most renowned travellers and authors of travel books.  Between 1325 and 1353, his journeys brought him from his native Tangiers to Egypt, Syria, Mecca, Iraq, the Red Sea and Yemen, Oman, Istanbul, Transoxiana, Afghanistan, the Indus, the Maldives, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Bengal, Sumatra and the Chinese port of Zaytun (Ts‘uan-chou), Sardinia, Granada, and across the Sahara to the country of the Niger. 

His “Travel-book” -- his Rihlah (Travels) --  is in fact a description of the then known world, and was translated into many languages.   Ibn Battuta’s Rihlah (Travels), which was finished in 1357, is thus an important source for the history and geography of the medieval Muslim world. 

Ibn Battuta was a Berber born in Tangiers into a family of lawyers.  His full name was Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Battuta.  Beginning with his first journey in 1325, a religious pilgrimage to Mecca, he covered some 120,000 kilometers (some 75,000 miles), extending from Spain in the West to China in the East, from Timbuktu, in West Africa, to the Steppes of Russia.  His book -- his Rihlah -- includes descriptions of the Byzantine court of Constantinople and the Black Death of Baghdad (c.1348).

At the age of 21 (in 1325), Ibn Battuta began his travels when he went on the pilgrimage (the hajj) to Mecca to fulfill his religious obligation and to add to his qualifications as a lawyer by consulting the scholars he met.  While at Mecca, he was seized by a desire for further travel, and for the next 25 years he wandered from Constantinople to China, and from the Crimea to the Maldive Islands.  During his first pilgrimage to Mecca he vowed never, so far as possible, to cover a second time any road that he had once traveled, and he certainly journeyed more extensively than any other recorded medieval traveler.

In 1331, he sailed down the east African coast, at least as far south as Kilwa.  His description of that region is the only extant first-hand account between the anonymous Periplus of the Erythraean Sea of the first century of the Christian calendar and Portuguese records of the early sixteenth century. 

On his third journey, Ibn Battuta spent two or three years in Mecca.  His interest began to turn from piety alone to an ethnographic interest in the cultures and peoples he saw.  He then traveled overland in North Africa and Syria, exploring Arabia, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Asia Minor.  With the assistance of various Muslim sultans and religious authorities, he made a journey by way of Constantinople (in the retinue of the khan of the Golden Horde) and Samarkand to India, where he resided almost eight years at the court of the sultan of Delhi, Muhammad ibn Tughluq, who deputed Ibn Battuta to China as one of his ambassadors in 1342. 

In all, Ibn Battuta’s third journey was an adventurous journey.  He was delayed in Calicut, the Maldive Islands, the Coromandel and Malabar coasts, Bengal, Assam, and Sumatra, landing finally in Zayton (Quanzhou, in Fujian), and then journeying to Beijing.  Ibn Battuta’s stay in China was relatively short.

During this journey, Ibn Battuta served as a judge in India, and served again as a judge, for 18 months, in the Maldive Islands, where he objected to the women’s scanty dress, which did not conform to Muslim standards.   Ibn Battuta was interested in all that he saw, but he seems to have been remarkably casual in practical matters.  In one place, he married a wife who bore him a daughter, but wanderlust soon possessed him again and he set off leaving wife and child behind. 

In 1347, he returned to the West by way of Sumatra and the Malabar coast, arriving in Tangier around 1350.  Later he went to Spain and traveled in West Africa.

During his last great journey in 1353, Ibn Battuta visited West Africa, leaving a vivid description of the Mali Empire.  At this professedly Muslim court, he saw the king present a delegation of visiting cannibals with an attractive young girl, who was promptly cut up and publicly eaten by the guests. 

Ibn Battuta retired to Fez in 1354 to put together the narrative of his travels.  His contemporaries regarded him as a romancer, but his reports, where they can be verified, are accurate.  Ibn Battuta dictated his travels to Ibn Juzayy, who put the work into literary style.  Ibn Battuta often conflated his experiences into a somewhat artificial itinerary.  The full text of his work was rediscovered in North Africa in the early nineteenth century. 

Between 1325 and 1354, Ibn Battuta visited and described in detail virtually every known Muslim region of the world, from Southern Spain and West Africa, to East Africa, Russia, India and China.  Ibn Battuta’s glowing description of India was treated with skepticism by contemporaneous Arabs but is, on the whole, borne out by comparison with works by Indian historians.  His account of his travels in China is not as detailed as much as the rest of his work, perhaps because he viewed his experiences in China as outside the cultural and social history of Islam. 

After returning home from his travels in 1354 and at the instigation of the Sultan of Morocco, Abu Inan Faris, Ibn Battuta dictated an account of his journeys to Ibn Juzayy, a scholar whom he had met previously in Granada. The account, recorded by Ibn Juzayy and interspersed with the latter's own comments, is the only source of information on his adventures. The title of the manuscript may be translated as A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling but is often simply referred to as the Rihla, or "The Journey".

After the completion of the Rihla in 1355, little is known about Ibn Battuta's life. He was appointed a judge in Morocco and died in 1368 or 1369 or 1377.


Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Battuta see Ibn Battuta
Ibn Batuta see Ibn Battuta
Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Abdullah Al Lawati Al Tanji Ibn Battuta see Ibn Battuta