Ibn Battuta

8 Key excerpts on "Ibn Battuta"

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  Re-mapping World Literature

  Writing, Book Markets and Epistemologies between Latin America and the Global South / Escrituras, mercados y epistemologías entre América Latina y el Sur Global

  • Gesine Müller, Jorge J. Locane, Benjamin Loy, Gesine Müller, Jorge J. Locane, Benjamin Loy(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Ibn Battuta spent long stretches of his life on a journey, the scope and signifi- cance of which can probably best be compared to that of the Venetian Marco Polo. In both cases, we are looking at journeys before the historical progression of those phases of acceleration that, in their totality, form the long-enduring process of globalization3. But for the first phase of accelerated globalization particularly, the journeys of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta were vitally important to the state of knowl- edge regarding what would later be called the “Old World”: in ways both direct and indirect, Christopher Columbus was to gather much of his information and impressions from these reports as seen in his annotated edition of Marco Polo’s journal (Gil 1987). A life of travel, but also a life constantly in search of the most current information possible: according to some accounts, Ibn Battuta, the man from Tangier, had departed from his home city in 1325, not to finally return to the region around modern Morocco until 1353 (Ibn Battuta 2015: 7). This son of Tangier advanced to become the veritable embodiment of the Arab explorer. Two years later, in 1355, his travel account (which was not only famous in the Orient, but would soon be in the Occident as well), as stated by Ralf Elger, the current editor of his work, was “completed by an Andalusian man of letters named Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi, at the behest of the Moroccan Sultan Abu Inan (d. 1358), according to the oral travel accounts of Ibn Battuta” (Ibn Battuta 2015: 7). There began a long reception history of this written and repeatedly edited travel account (a history that cannot be examined in the context of the line of inquiry followed here) in which the traveler, a native of Tangier, was to emerge as the (not uncontested) source and authority of Arab knowledge regarding Asia, Africa, and broad stretches of the southern Mediterranean.

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  One Thousand Roads to Mecca

  Ten Centuries of Travelers Writing about the Muslim Pilgrimage

  • Michael Wolfe(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Grove Press

    (Publisher)

  Probably, on leaving home, he had intended to return, after his Hajj, to take up a job at the Sultan’s court in Fez, but the journey changed him. Smitten by travel, sensing the very real opportunities before him, he traveled on. From Medina, he continued to Mesopotamia and Persia, then doubled back to Mecca and stayed a year. Next he visited Africa, then the Persian Gulf, performed the Hajj again, and set out for India, probably in 1332. He took the long way, through Syria and Asia Minor to Constantinople and the Asian steppes. In India for at least eight years, he rose to the post of grand judge in Delhi, then was appointed ambassador to the court of the Mongol emperor of China. After a shipwreck and several years in Ceylon and the Maldive Islands, he continued eastward, visiting Nepal, Burma, Sumatra, and perhaps China.

  Returning west in 1347, Ibn Battuta stopped off in Mecca one last time. He reached Tangier early in 1350. Three years later the Sultan at Fez commissioned him to set down his adventures. By then, he had been on the road for two and a half decades, had visited the equivalent of fifty modern countries, and had covered more than seventy-five thousand miles. “I have realized my deepest desire in this world,” he wrote, “which was to travel through it. In this respect, I have accomplished something no one else to my knowledge has done.”

  Ibn Battuta’s experiences abroad confirm the existence of a single, intercommunicating culture extending from the Atlantic Ocean to the South China Sea; not a narrow corridor spanned by a handful of trade routes east and west over which privileged figures traveled on official business but a global arena, an Afro-Eurasian zone actively crisscrossed by large populations of itinerant professionals who settled where they chose, furthered a career, and felt at home. Ibn Battuta was not unique in this milieu—he was representative. The roads of his time were filled with provincial scholars, judges, lawyers, teachers, businessmen, and traders from every corner of the earth who shuttled almost routinely among North Africa, Egypt, Persia, India, and Indonesia. Not only Muslims but Christians and Jews, too, took advantage of this trading network. They moved along lines that appear to have provided real support to a large class of mobile professionals. Ibn Battuta moved with them, working and traveling, recording a way of life that in certain ways prefigures the social flux of modern, free market capitalism. Bangladeshis at work in Silicon Valley, Iranian families thriving in Japan, would not have surprised Ibn Battuta. In fourteenth-century Damascus, he assures us, any Moroccan running out of money would be sure to find the means to earn his way. When he himself fell sick there, then went broke, benefactors appeared out of the woodwork. Later, in India, he met lawyers from around the world working at the sultan’s court in Delhi, earning handsome salaries and socializing with the upper classes. Still later, in China, as a guest of prosperous Egyptians in the huge city of Hang-chou, with whom should he cross paths in its large Muslim quarter but a neighbor from his own street in Tangier.

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  The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta

  Uncommon Tales of a Medieval Adventurer

  • Professor David Waines, David Waines(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  Ibn Battuta was no exception to this process. In his own day, there were those who also received his stories with reservation. At a gathering in the presence of his patron Abu Inan, Ibn Battuta spoke of the many marvels he had witnessed, dwelling at length upon his experiences in India. ‘ The ruler of the Delhi Sultanate, Muhammad Shah ,’ he said, ‘ was noted for his generosity to the public. When he embarked upon a military campaign each man, woman and child was given provision for six months while his return to the city was greeted by the entire populace upon whom sacks of money were catapulted .’ 8 Mutterings of disbelief at this tale spread among the assem-bly, resulting in Ibn Battuta being labelled a liar. A witness to the event was the young historian Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406). One day he conveyed his own concerns about Ibn Battuta’s veracity on India to the sultan’s wazir . He replied that incredulity often arises over reports, exaggerated or not, relating to the government of a country one has never personally visited. He said it was rather like the story of a high government official who had been imprisoned by his king for years together with his son who had grown up from infancy in the same confined environment. Now a youth, he asked his father what meat they were fed by the prison authorities. The father described a sheep which of course the boy had never seen and hence concluded that it must belong to the same species as the prison rats! Ibn Battuta’s reception in Europe Judging by the number of extant manuscripts of his travels, some 30 in all, Ibn Battuta had nevertheless posthumously enjoyed some popularity in the Middle East, especially in the Maghrib (present-day Morocco). In Europe his importance appears to have been first recognized only when two famous traveller-explorers to the Arab world, Ulrich Jasper Seetzen

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  Locating Maldivian Women's Mosques in Global Discourses

  • Jacqueline H. Fewkes(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2005 , p. 89).

  The historical accuracy of Ibn Battuta’s accounts is a subject of some debate. A few of Battuta’s contemporaries contested parts of his work, and a number of historical and contemporary scholars continue to do (Waines, 2010 , p. 6). Undoubtedly, a number of these historical critiques have arisen within Orientalist literature; classic early twentieth-century authors had difficulty accepting non-Eurocentric histories by non-European authors. More recent critiques of his work raise concerns about the validity of his reports on certain areas (e.g., Euben, 2006 , p. 65). At the same time, many historians see Battuta’s work as reliable, albeit with a strong sense of authorship in his writing. In this particular section, however, Battuta is careful to cite two Maldivian sources for this tale, something he does not do for every piece of information in his work (for more commentary on this see Gray, 2004 , p. 14; Vanoli, 2005 , p. 84). Two scholars of South Asian politics and policy who have written about the Maldives, Urmila Phadnis and Ela Luithui, support Ibn Battuta’s version, noting that the royal conversion occurred in 1153 AD and that Ibn Battuta claimed that al-Tabrizi was not yet alive then; they suggest that Bell was misled by local historians, a point emphasized to them in interview with Maldivian Government employees in 1981 (Phadnis & Luithui, 1985 , p. 4). Historian Hassan Ahmed Maniku has argued that the actual date of Islamic conversion in the Maldives was 1147–1148 AD, and that the

  tarikh

  that support al-Tabrizi’s version are flawed (Maniku, 1986 /1987 , p. 80). Maniku places more value on evidence that supports Ibn Battuta’s version, found on the carved inscriptions of a fourteenth-century panel that hangs in the Friday Mosque in Malé (Maniku, 1986 /1987 ). Yet, linguist Jost Gippert notes that the Gan filā fatkolu , another inscription on a wooden board dating to the seventeenth century, supports the claims for al-Tabrizi. As Gippert aptly points out, however, this does not prove one version of the history, but does suggest that the al-Tabrizi version prevailed in the seventeenth century (Gippert, 2000

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  The Almohads

  The Rise of an Islamic Empire

  • Allen J. Fromherz(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  Indeed, it has often been argued that this journeying, this propensity to travel in search of knowledge, to see the holy places, in which so many people from such different backgrounds in Islam engaged, maintained the vitality and at least theoretical unity of the Islamic umma , the Islamic community as a whole. 38 Kings, rulers and princes both valued and feared experienced traveller-scholars like Ibn T ū mart, Ibn Ba ṭṭūṭ a and Ibn Khald ū n because of their uniquely articulate and free-minded spiritual and political views. Although travelling did not automatically make them revolutionaries, it did open their minds to new, varied and sometimes radical views on interpreting Islam. 39 THE ALMOHADS 28 Unlike most of his fellow travellers, in the North African sources Ibn T ū mart is described as having unique physical and personal traits of comprehension, concentration, eloquence and, perhaps more importantly, the ability to convince himself and others of absolute truths. The political establishment saw him as one of the more potentially dangerous wandering itinerant preachers and scholars. His life was often saved from danger in ways that might only be considered miraculous. Even his physical features were said to resemble those of the Prophet Mu ḥ ammad. 40 Regardless of whether or not this was the case, his alleged physical resemblance to the prophet served to legitimize Berbers in the eyes of the Arab world that the Almohads were intending to conquer. Even according to one later source that was critical of the Almohads, Ibn T ū mart had an upright stature, light complexion, aquiline nose, luminous eyes, a black mole and a full beard. 41 The Prophet Mu ḥ ammad was likewise reported to have an aquiline nose, white sun-tanned skin, a full beard and a light in his eyes. 42 In addition to his alleged physical resemblance to the prophet, many aspects of the Mahd ī ’s life would come to mimic that of the Prophet Mu ḥ ammad.

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  Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop

  • miriam cooke, Bruce B. Lawrence(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  16 When viewed in light of the solidarity that prevailed among the ulama , the low esteem in which most of them held the state, and their sense of entitlement as self-appointed guardians of Islam, Ibn Battuta’s atti-tudes toward personal loyalty and government service begin to make more sense. Sometimes, the supercilious demeanor of the ulama could be downright irritating. How could anyone expect a sultan such as Muham-mad ibn Tughluq not to react when a scholar such as Ibn Battuta’s friend Jamal al-Din al-Maghribi—who was on the sultan’s payroll—recited the following verses (Gibb –, :): ‘‘As for their Sultans, ask the clay about them / Those powerful heads are now but empty skulls’’? Given Ibn Battuta’s Opportunism  the precariousness of their positions at court, it is amazing how many of these scholars seem to have disregarded the danger of scorning, if not actu-ally biting, the hand that fed them. The military commanders upon whom Muhammad ibn Tughluq’s power depended were hard and brutal men, and they had to be kept under control by hard and brutal means. In order to keep the violence of these commanders in check, any infraction at court that involved physical harm to another was punishable by death. But even by resorting to such extreme measures, Ibn Tughluq was not able to quell all violence, nor was he able to protect all of the members of his family. In a short but poignant vignette, Ibn Battuta tells us that the sister of the sultan often complained to her brother about her mistreatment at the hands of her husband, a commander by the name of Mughith. Despite the fact that Mughith’s wife was the sis-ter of one of the most feared rulers in the Muslim world, Mughith’s violent nature eventually led him to beat his spouse to death. However, because of Mughith’s high rank as an ally, or ‘‘king,’’ of the realm, the most that Ibn Tughluq could do was banish him for his crime (:).

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  The Formation of al-Andalus, Part 1

  History and Society

  • Manuela Marin(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Though the measure of my ability may be modest, I hope therefore to flesh out here the work done previous to my own efforts. The Itineraries of the Conquest according to Ibn al-Shabbat The published fragment of Diwiin ~ilat al-simt reveals a double character, part descriptive geography, part history. But what is really interesting about the text is the information that it provides with respect to the itineraries of the [54] Muslim conquest of al-Andalus, one of the most complex problems which modern historical criticism has posed. The chronicles or works which tell us of the conquest of Spain by the Muslims and of the early days of Is-lamic domination of the Peninsula are always precious, writes E. Garda Gomez, dealing as they do with an historical period that is exceedingly obscure and about which we have a very limited number of sources . 12 The chronicle which is the subject of the present study may be seen as yet one more which can help to swell this tiny cast, since, as I have suggested above, it offers us as leitmotiv, about which details of a different nature revolve, the account of the routes followed by Tariq and Musa in their expeditions of conquest in the lands of al-Andalus. It is this peculiarity of the chron-icle that has provoked my reflections. Henceforward, as a consequence, in attention. It was not Ibn al-Shabbat who was consulted by al-Nuwayri for his account of the history of Sicily. M. Amari's text, on which Sanchez Albornoz based his own, clearly states that it was Ibn al-Shaddad, a Tunisian historian of the twelfth century and author of a chronicle about Sicily. SeeM. Amari, Storia dei Musulmani de Sicilia, 1, p. 83. 11 A.M. al-'Abbadi, Ta'rlkh al-Andalus li-Ibn al-Kardabus wa-wa~fuhu li-Ibn al-Shabbat, Muqaddima, Revista del Instituto de Estudios Islrimicos en Madrid, 13 (1965-66), pp.

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  Islam, Orientalism and Intellectual History

  Modernity and the Politics of Exclusion Since Ibn Khaldun

  • Mohammad R. Salama(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  Ibn Khaldūn regards traditional Muslim historians as fanatical one-dimensional writers who see history and time only through the binary opposition between a before and an after established by the advent of Islam. Secondly, Ibn Khaldūn’s theory of history holds some grains of the connection between power and knowledge. In seeking to interrogate history within a broader epistemological framework, Ibn Khaldūn becomes the first historian to overtly criticize the Arab sense of ‘a ṣ abiyya (feelings of blood solidarity) and to expose the Arabs’ injustices. Ibn Khaldūn’s Kitāb al-‘ Ibar is ostensibly an apology to the Berbers who, while still having their own ‘aṣabiyya , had long suffered from the Arabs’ degrading view of them. To Ibn Khaldūn, the Berbers are brave people worthy of glory because “the strength that they have revealed throughout time makes them fearless; they are as brave and as powerful as the other nations and peoples of the world, such as the Arabs, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans.” 11 Through the example of the Berbers, Ibn Khaldūn manages to establish innovative and corrective principles for writing history. Ibn Khaldūn was driven to write his history in response to an existing crisis in Islamic his-torical thinking. In the Muqaddima , for example, he sets out to introduce rational criteria in writing history with a view toward promoting historiog-raphy based on a corpus of sociogeographical knowledge. This awareness helps avoid falling into myth that inadvertently leads to the perpetual burial of the referent and the death of the historical fact. In this “rationalization” process, Ibn Khaldūn’s main aim was to de-sacralize the dominant practice of history by exposing what appears to him to be the greatest distortions committed by Muslim historians. Ibn Khaldūn refers to these errors repeat-edly in the Muqaddima : The writing of history requires numerous sources and greatly varied knowledge.

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