The Travels of Ibn Battuta
The Travels of Ibn Battuta, also known simply as The Rihla, is the travelogue written by Ibn Battuta, documenting his lifetime of travel and exploration, which according to his description covered about 73,000 miles. Rihla is the Arabic word for a voyage or journey, and it is a genre of travel writing in Arabic literature.
History
Upon Ibn Battuta's final return to Morocco in 1353, he dictated his retrospective account of his travels to the Andalusi scholar Abū ʿAbdallāh Ibn Juzayy under the patronage of the Marinid Sultan Abū ʿInān Fāris, who commissioned Ibn Juzayy to receive and edit the account. Ibn Juzayy, son of the Granadan jurist Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbī al-Gharnāṭī, also added his own poetic contributions. The work was completed in 1356, 31 years after Ibn Battuta began his journey.Battuta's travels
Ibn Battuta may have travelled significantly farther than any other person in history up to his time; certainly his account describes more travel than any other pre-jet age explorer on record.Ibn Battuta's first voyage began in 1325 CE, in Morocco, when the 21 year old set out on his Hajj, the religious pilgrimage to Mecca expected of all followers of Islam. During this time period, it would normally take pilgrims a year to a year and a half to complete the Hajj. However, Ibn Battuta found he loved travel during the experience, and reportedly encountered a Sufi mystic who told him that he would eventually visit the entire Islamic world. Ibn Battuta spent the next two decades exploring much of the known world. Twenty-four years after departing Morocco, he finally returned home to write about his travels.
The Hajj
He travelled to Mecca overland, following the North African coast across the sultanates of Abd al-Wadid and Hafsid. He took a bride in the town of Sfax, the first in a series of marriages that would feature in his travels.In the early spring of 1326, after a journey of over, Ibn Battuta arrived at the port of Alexandria, at the time part of the Bahri Mamluk empire. He met two ascetic pious men in Alexandria. One was Sheikh Burhanuddin who is supposed to have foretold the destiny of Ibn Battuta as a world traveller saying "It seems to me that you are fond of foreign travel. You will visit my brother Fariduddin in India, Rukonuddin in Sind and Burhanuddin in China. Convey my greetings to them". Another pious man Sheikh Murshidi interpreted the meaning of a dream of Ibn Battuta that he was meant to be a world traveller.
At this point he began a lifelong habit of making side-trips instead of getting where he was going. He spent several weeks visiting sites in the area and then headed inland to Cairo, the capital of the Mamluk Sultanate and an important city. Of the three usual routes to Mecca, Ibn Battuta chose the least-travelled, which involved a journey up the Nile valley, then east to the Red Sea port of Aydhab. Upon approaching the town, however, a local rebellion forced him to turn back.
He returned to Cairo and took a second side trip, this time to Mamluk-controlled Damascus. He described travelling on a complicated zig-zag route across Palestine in which he visited more than twenty cities.
After spending the Muslim month of Ramadan in Damascus, he joined a caravan travelling the south to Medina, site of the Mosque of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. After four days in the town, he journeyed on to Mecca, where upon completing his pilgrimage he took the honorific status of El-Hajji. Rather than returning home, Ibn Battuta decided to continue traveling, choosing as his next destination the Ilkhanate, a Mongol Khanate, to the northeast.
Ibn Battuta then started back toward Iraq, but got diverted on a six-month detour that took him into Persia. Finally, he returned across to Baghdad, arriving there in 1327.
In Baghdad, he found Abu Sa'id, the last Mongol ruler of the unified Ilkhanate, leaving the city and heading north with a large retinue. Ibn Battuta joined the royal caravan for a while, then turned north on the Silk Road to Tabriz.
Second pilgrimage to Mecca
Ibn Battuta left again for Baghdad, probably in July, but first took an excursion northwards along the river Tigris. He visited Mosul, where he was the guest of the Ilkhanate governor, and then the towns of Cizre and Mardin in modern-day Turkey. At a hermitage on a mountain near Sinjar, he met a Kurdish mystic who gave him some silver coins. Once back in Mosul, he joined a "feeder" caravan of pilgrims heading south to Baghdad, where they would meet up with the main caravan that crossed the Arabian Desert to Mecca. Ill with diarrhea, he arrived in the city weak and exhausted for his second hajj.From Aden Ibn Battuta embarked on a ship heading for Zeila on the coast of Somalia. Later he would visit Mogadishu, the then pre-eminent city of the "Land of the Berbers".
Ibn Battuta arrived in Mogadishu in 1331, at the zenith of its prosperity. He described Mogadishu as "an exceedingly large city" with many rich merchants, which was famous for its high quality fabric that it exported to Egypt, among other places. He also describes the hospitality of the people of Mogadishu and how locals would put travelers up in their home to help the local economy. Battuta added that the city was ruled by a Somali sultan, Abu Bakr ibn Shaikh 'Umar, who had a Barbara origin, an ancient term to describe the ancestors of the Somali people. He spoke the Mogadishan Somali or Banadiri Somali language as well as Arabic with equal fluency. The sultan also had a retinue of wazirs, legal experts, commanders, royal eunuchs, and other officials at his beck and call.
Ibn Battuta continued by ship south to the Swahili Coast, a region then known in Arabic as the Bilad al-Zanj, with an overnight stop at the island town of Mombasa. Although relatively small at the time, Mombasa would become important in the following century. After a journey along the coast, Ibn Battuta next arrived in the island town of Kilwa in present-day Tanzania, which had become an important transit centre of the gold trade. He described the city as "one of the finest and most beautifully built towns; all the buildings are of wood, and the houses are roofed with dīs reeds".
Byzantium
After his third pilgrimage to Mecca, Ibn Battuta decided to seek employment with the Muslim Sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq. In the autumn of 1330, he set off for the Seljuk controlled territory of Anatolia with the intention of taking an overland route to India.From this point the itinerary across Anatolia in the Rihla is confused. Ibn Battuta describes travelling westwards from Eğirdir to Milas and then skipping eastward past Eğirdir to Konya. He then continues travelling in an easterly direction, reaching Erzurum from where he skips back to Birgi which lies north of Milas. Historians believe that Ibn Battuta visited a number of towns in central Anatolia, but not in the order that he describes.
When they reached Astrakhan, Öz Beg Khan had just given permission for one of his pregnant wives, Princess Bayalun, a daughter of Byzantine emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos, to return to her home city of Constantinople to give birth. Ibn Battuta talked his way into this expedition, which would be his first beyond the boundaries of the Islamic world.
Arriving in Constantinople towards the end of 1332, he met the Byzantine emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos. He visited the great church of Hagia Sophia and spoke with an Eastern Orthodox priest about his travels in the city of Jerusalem. After a month in the city, Ibn Battuta returned to Astrakhan, then arrived in the capital city Sarai al-Jadid and reported the accounts of his travels to Sultan Öz Beg Khan. Then he continued past the Caspian and Aral Seas to Bukhara and Samarkand, where he visited the court of another Mongolian king, Tarmashirin of the Chagatai Khanate. From there he journeyed south to Afghanistan, then crossed into India via the mountain passes of the Hindu Kush. In the Rihla, he mentions these mountains and the history of the range in slave trading. He wrote,
India
Ibn Battuta and his party reached the Indus River on 12 September 1333. From there, he made his way to Delhi and became acquainted with the sultan, Muhammad bin Tughluq.On the strength of his years of study in Mecca, Ibn Battuta was appointed a qadi, or judge, by the sultan. However, he found it difficult to enforce Islamic law beyond the sultan's court in Delhi, due to lack of Islamic appeal in India.
The Sultan was erratic even by the standards of the time and for six years Ibn Battuta veered between living the high life of a trusted subordinate and falling under suspicion of treason for a variety of offences. His plan to leave on the pretext of taking another hajj was stymied by the Sultan. The opportunity for Battuta to leave Delhi finally arose in 1341 when an embassy arrived from Yuan dynasty China asking for permission to rebuild a Himalayan Buddhist temple popular with Chinese pilgrims.
China
Ibn Battuta was given charge of the embassy but en route to the coast at the start of the journey to China, he and his large retinue were attacked by a group of bandits. Separated from his companions, he was robbed and nearly lost his life. Despite this setback, within ten days he had caught up with his group and continued on to Khambhat in the Indian state of Gujarat. From there, they sailed to Calicut, where Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama would land two centuries later. While in Calicut, Battuta was the guest of the ruling Zamorin. While Ibn Battuta visited a mosque on shore, a storm arose and one of the ships of his expedition sank. The other ship then sailed without him only to be seized by a local Sumatran king a few months later.In 1345 Ibn Battuta travelled on to Samudra Pasai Sultanate in present-day Aceh, Northern Sumatra, where he notes in his travel log that the ruler of Samudra Pasai was a pious Muslim named Sultan Al-Malik Al-Zahir Jamal-ad-Din, who performed his religious duties with utmost zeal and often waged campaigns against animists in the region. The island of Sumatra, according to Ibn Battuta, was rich in camphor, areca nut, cloves, and tin.
The madh'hab he observed was Imam Al-Shafi‘i, whose customs were similar to those he had previously seen in coastal India, especially among the Mappila Muslims, who were also followers of Imam Al-Shafi‘i. At that time Samudra Pasai marked the end of Dar al-Islam, because no territory east of this was ruled by a Muslim. Here he stayed for about two weeks in the wooden walled town as a guest of the sultan, and then the sultan provided him with supplies and sent him on his way on one of his own junks to China.
Ibn Battuta first sailed to Malacca on the Malay Peninsula which he called "Mul Jawi". He met the ruler of Malacca and stayed as a guest for three days.
In the year 1345 Ibn Battuta arrived at Quanzhou in China's Fujian province, then under the rule of the Mongols. One of the first things he noted was that Muslims referred to the city as "Zaitun", but Ibn Battuta could not find any olives anywhere. He mentioned local artists and their mastery in making portraits of newly arrived foreigners; these were for security purposes. Ibn Battuta praised the craftsmen and their silk and porcelain; as well as fruits such as plums and watermelons and the advantages of paper money.
He then travelled south along the Chinese coast to Guangzhou, where he lodged for two weeks with one of the city's wealthy merchants.
Ibn Battuta travelled from Beijing to Hangzhou and then proceeded to Fuzhou. Upon his return to Quanzhou, he soon boarded a Chinese junk owned by the Sultan of Samudera Pasai Sultanate heading for Southeast Asia, whereupon Ibn Battuta was unfairly charged a hefty sum by the crew and lost much of what he had collected during his stay in China.