Ibn Battūtah

Arab traveler

• Born: 1304
• Birthplace: Tangier, Morocco
• Died: c. February 24, 1377
• Place of death: Morocco

Driven by an exceptional wanderlust, Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah became the greatest Muslim traveler. His peregrinations through India, Russia, China, the East Indies, North Africa, and the Middle East were recorded in the most famous of all Islamic travelogs, the Riḥlah.

Early Life

Abū ՙAbd Allāh Muḥammad ibn-ՙAbd Allāh al-Lawātī al-Tanji ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah, who came to be known as Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah (IHB-uhn bat-TEW-tah), was born in Tangier, Morocco. His family had a long tradition of serving as religious judges, and his educational training prepared him for such a career. Well before he undertook the first of his many journeys at the age of twenty-one, Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah had studied Islamic theology and law in Tangier. His first journey, which commenced in June of 1325, took the form of a pilgrimage to Mecca, but it had much broader ramifications. In a fashion reminiscent of the grand tours which Europeans would undertake in later centuries to finish their education, his trip to Mecca supplied Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah with diverse opportunities.

Ever the astute observer and inquisitive intellectual, Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah talked and studied with scholars he encountered as he made an unhurried progress eastward. Evidently his family was an affluent one, with extensive connections throughout the Islamic world. Their belief a view seemingly shared by Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah was that his experiences would be ideally suited to the duties of a magistrate, which he was expected to assume on his return. His purse, personality, and contacts with powerful officials readily opened many doors for the young man, and his winning ways, together with a considerable degree of curiosity he aroused as an individual from the outer geographic reaches of Islam, stood him in good stead. He was greeted with hospitality wherever he went.

Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah’s initial journey was a momentous one in a number of ways. He traveled to Cairo, probably the greatest city of the time, making stops, en route from Tangier, in most of the major ports of the southern Mediterranean. He reveled in the time he spent in that renowned intellectual center of ancient times, Alexandria. His experiences in Egypt aroused in him an insatiable wanderlust. He reached Damascus in August, 1326, and it was there that he took his first wife. After a brief courtship and honeymoon, he joined a caravan of pilgrims wending their way to Mecca.

The pilgrims’ travels were arduous in the extreme. After passing through what is now Jordan and Syria, the faithful rested for several days at Al-Karak, for the ordeal of a desert crossing lay before them. They managed the crossing of the Wadi al-Ukhaydir Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah characterized it as the valley of hell by moving at night until they reached the Al-ՙUla oasis. Thence they moved onward to the holy city of Medina and then progressed to Mecca. As was the case with all of his peregrinations, Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah produced vivid accounts of his experiences in and impressions of Mecca. He departed from Mecca sometime in November of 1326, now a hajji (one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca) as well as a man determined to see much more of the world.

Life’s Work

The essence of Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah’s achievement lies in his wide-ranging travels. Yet there was much more to his repeated journeys than merely visiting strange and faraway places. The reader of Tuḥfat al-nuzŃzŃār fi gharaՙib al-amsar wa-ՙajaՙib al-asfar (1357-1358; Travels of Ibn Battuta, 1958-2000, best known as the Riḥlah becomes immediately aware of Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah’s keen eye for detail; clearly, he was a man of rare curiosity and intellect. Anything and everything interested him. From unusual religious beliefs to the economies of the regions through which he trekked, from methods of dress to the basics of diet, he noted the varied aspects of the lifestyles he encountered. Indeed, what Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah saw and reported is at least as important as where he went.

Returning with his two wives to Tangier, Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah tarried only a short time before succumbing again to his desire to travel. His next major undertaking was a second hajj, and this time he gave himself ample time to sense and savor all Mecca had to offer. His visit lasted for some three years. This must have been quite expensive, but evidently the family fortunes were ample to support such extended periods of travel.

Next, Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah decided to sail down the Red Sea to the renowned trading center of Aden. He provides a singular description of the strategically located seaport and the way in which it depended on great cisterns for its watersupply. After some time in Aden, he continued southward along the African coast and visited the important trade centers of Kilwa and Mombasa. On his return journey, he stopped in the major cities of Oman and Hormuz. In fact, in a fashion which was to become characteristic of all his endeavors, he attempted to visit every reachable site of major significance.

After touring the Gulf of Aden and its environs, he traversed the considerable breadth of Arabia while making the hajj for a third time. A trip across the Red Sea followed, with a risky, demanding journey to Syene (modern Aswān) and thence via the Nile to Cairo. By this juncture, Arabia, Africa’s Mediterranean coast, and the lower reaches of the Nile had become familiar territory, and, not surprisingly for a man of his inclinations, Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah began to look farther afield.

He passed through the various Turkish states in Asia Minor, crossed the Black Sea to reach Kaffa (modern Feodosiya, the first Christian city he had seen), and moved northeastward into Kipchak. This Russian region was then under the control of Khan Muḥammad Özbeg, and Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah joined his peripatetic camp. In this way he was able to visit the outer reaches of Mongolia, where he marveled at the brevity of summer nights.

On leaving the khan’s camp, Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah linked his travel fortunes to a Byzantine princess, whom he accompanied to Constantinople. There, in what he considered one of the most important moments of his career, he enjoyed an interview with Emperor Andronicus III Palaeologus. From the emperor’s court he journeyed eastward, crossing the steppes of southern Asia en route to Kabul and thence over the Hindu Kush. In September of 1333, he reached the Indus River. He had, in eight years of traveling, made three pilgrimages to Mecca, seen most of the southern and eastern Mediterranean, floated on the Nile, braved the desert sands of Arabia, and penetrated deep into Russia. It is at this juncture that he ends his first narrative, and by any standard of measurement his achievements had been considerable. Still, though he was probably the most traveled man of his time, the clarion call to adventure drew him as strongly as ever.

He wandered throughout the Sind and eventually moved on to Delhi at the invitation of the ruler, Muḥammad ibn Tughluq. This capricious, bloodthirsty monarch was a bit too much even for Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah’s eclectic tastes: “No day did his palace gate fail to witness the elevation of some abject to affluence and the torture and murder of some living soul.” Yet somehow he managed to get along with this extraordinary ruler, and he became qā (judge) of Delhi at a very high salary. He served in this capacity for the next eight years. Yet, far from prospering, he fell into considerable debt. Scholars have ascribed this to his extravagance, and his living beyond his means may have figured prominently in his eventual decline into disfavor.

Resilient soul that he was, however, Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah turned potential ruin into what to him must have been a glorious assignment. He was chosen to head a delegation which was paying a visit to the last Mongol emperor of China. Leaving in 1342, the group made its way to Calcutta en route to China. Here fate intervened, however, in the form of a shipwreck that completely destroyed the junk on which he and the other envoys were to travel. This was a disaster of the first magnitude, for Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah lost not only his personal possessions but also the lavish gifts he had been delegated to carry to China.

Accordingly, Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah remained in the region, visiting various cities on India’s western coast and also the Maldive Islands, where he rose to prominence as a judge and added four wives to his harem. Yet he did not tarry overlong, for August, 1344, found him leaving the Maldives for Sri Lanka. Further adventures followed, and eventually he reached Java after having stopped briefly in Burma (now Myanmar). From Java he finally made his way to China, where he visited Amoy (Xiamen), Canton (Guangzhou), and Beijing, among other major sites. Returning westward, he revisited Sumatra, Malabar, Oman, Persia, and a host of other locations. On reaching Damascus, he learned of his father’s death some fifteen years earlier. It was the first news of home he had had in that many years.

It was also during this period that Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah witnessed, at first hand, the ravages of the bubonic plague (sometimes called the Black Death ). His graphic reports on what he saw in Damascus, where more than two thousand unfortunate souls died in a single day, is one of the finest surviving accounts of the plague. Perhaps thereby reminded of his mortality, he then revisited Jerusalem and Cairo in the process of making a fourth hajj. Finally, having been away from home almost constantly for more than twenty-four years, he returned to Morocco on November 8, 1349.

Even then, his travels were not over. After spending a relatively short time in Tangier, he made his way to Spain and toured Andalusia. His final major journey was into central Africa. Journeying from oasis to oasis across the Sahara, he reached the fabled desert entrepôt of Timbuktu, where the mighty Niger River (which he wrongly called the Nile) begins its great westward sweep to the ocean. At this point, his king called him home, thereby bringing an end to nearly thirty years of travel encompassing an estimated 75,000 miles (120,000 kilometers). His final years were more settled; he was in his early seventies when he died in his native Morocco.

Significance

With the possible exception of the voyages of Marco Polo, there is nothing prior to the European Renaissance to compare with the nature and extent of Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah’s travels. He single-handedly made the world a smaller place, and thanks to his remarkable accounts modern knowledge of much of Asia during the fourteenth century is considerably richer than otherwise would have been the case. As the chronicler Ibn Juzayy, who recounted Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah’s travels by royal decree, stated:

This Shaykh is the traveller of our age; and he who should call him the traveller of the whole body of Islam would not exceed the truth.

Bibliography

Arno, Joan, and Helen Grady. Ibn Battuta, a View of the Fourteenth-Century World: A Unit of Study for Grades 7-10. Los Angeles: National Center for History in the Schools, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998. A seventy-three-page teacher’s manual for teaching both Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah and fourteenth century North Africa. Illustrations, maps, bibliographical references.

Cooley, William D. The Negroland of the Arabs Examined and Explained. London: J. Arrowsmith, 1841. Although there are some problems with Cooley’s transcriptions from the Arabic, this is a useful early English account of that portion of Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah’s travels devoted to the Sahara and Niger regions.

Dunn, Ross E. The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveller of the Fourteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. More than a dozen chapters outline BatŃtŃūtŃah’s travel’, including a dozen detailed maps. Glossary, bibliography, index.

Hamdun, Said, and Noël King, trans. and eds. Ibn Battuta in Black Africa. Foreword by Ross Dunn. Princeton, N.J.: M. Wiener, 1994. Illustrations, maps, bibliographical references, index. A selection of Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah’s writings during his two sub-Saharan trips his second, to Mali, being his last recorded adventure.

Hamilton, Paul. “Seas of Sand.” In Exploring Africa and Asia, by Nathalie Ettinger, Elspeth J. Huxley, and Paul Hamilton. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1973. The section titled “The Traveler of Islam” constitutes a useful, accessible account of Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah’s first journey to Mecca. Illustrated.

Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah. Travels of Ibn Battuta. Translated and edited by H. A. R. Gibb. 4 vols. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1958-2000. This careful, amply annotated translation is by far the most important English-language source of information on the man and his milieu. Gibb’s introduction and notes offer useful historical background.

Mackintosh-Smith, Tim. Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah. New York: Welcome Rain, 2002. Includes illustrations, maps, bibliographical references, index.

Rumford, James. Traveling Man: The Journey of Ibn Battuta, 1325-1354. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Color illustrations, maps. Designed for young readers, a semi-fictional biography.

Tucker, William. “Ibn-Battuta, Abu Abd-Allah Muhammad.” In The Discoverers: An Encyclopedia of Exploration, edited by Helen Delpar. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980. A succinct, useful summation of the high points of Ibn BatŃtŃūtŃah’s career. This volume includes short biographies of many other explorers as well. Bibliographies and an index.