Ibn Battuta ﵀

He traveled farther than anyone before him. He wrote more honestly than many after him. And when his prejudices clashed with what he saw, he let both stand, which is the reason we still read him today.

Life

Muhammad ibn Abd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Lawati al-Tanji, to us simply Ibn Battuta ﵀, was born in 1304 in Tangier, on the northern coast of present-day Morocco, into a Maliki jurists’ family of the Berber Lawata tribe. He received the classical fiqh training of his time and would, without anything remarkable, have become a qadi of regional standing. In 1325, twenty-one years old, he set out for the Hajj, and he would not return to Morocco until 1354. Between those two dates lie nearly thirty years and roughly 120,000 kilometers: Mecca and Medina, Damascus, Baghdad, Shiraz, Anatolia, the Crimea, Sarai on the Volga, Constantinople on an embassy, Central Asia, India where he was qadi for six years for sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq, the Maldives where he became qadi, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, China as far as Quanzhou.

In 1351, after his return home and a short journey to al-Andalus, he was commissioned by sultan Abu Inan Faris ﵀ of the Marinid dynasty for one final expedition: the Sahel. He set out in February 1352 from Sijilmasa with a caravan heading south. Twenty-five days of sand, some 1500 kilometers of Sahara, brought him to Taghaza, the salt city where the houses were built of blocks of salt. Then on to Walata, fifty days out from Sijilmasa, the first city of the Mali Empire, where he reacted to the hospitality protocol with a mixture of appreciation and irritation. From there along the Niger route southward to Niani, capital of Mansa Suleyman, the brother and successor of Mansa Musa, and there he stayed about eight months, from June 1352 to February 1353.

After Niani he went downstream by pirogue to Timbuktu, staying briefly and finding the city, by the way, less impressive than expected, then on to Gao, the former Songhai capital that had been incorporated under Mali. Then eastward with a Berber caravan through Tuareg territory to Takedda, a copper-mine oasis where he received a letter from Abu Inan recalling him. The return journey via Tuat, Sijilmasa and Fez brought him home at the end of 1354, and there he dictated his experiences to the young scholar Ibn Juzayy, who completed the text of the Rihla in the summer of 1355. Ibn Battuta ﵀ himself lived another ten years or so in relative obscurity, served as qadi in an unknown city, and died in 1368 or 1369.

Faith and culture

Ibn Battuta ﵀ is no detached ethnographer but a Maliki jurist, and he judges. That judgment varies, and precisely that variation makes the Rihla an exceptional source. In the Mali Empire he notes with sincere appreciation the justice of sultan Mansa Suleyman: “Of all peoples, the blacks are the furthest removed from injustice, and their sultan tolerates it from no one.” He praises how the roads are safe, how a traveler need fear neither thief nor robber. He names by name the qadi of Niani and describes with visible respect how the entire court performs the salat al-jum’ah with seriousness.

But the same Ibn Battuta ﵀ is shocked by what he experiences as breaches of Maliki adab. The women of Walata and Niani go unveiled, speak freely with men who are not their kin, and keep awliyaa, male friends, who visit at their husband’s home. He cites customs around the sultan that seem unworthy to him: courtesans who throw dust over their heads as a greeting, the faraniya who rolls naked in dust before the ruler. He condemns, and he calls it un-Muslim, or semi-Islamic, or mixed with “their old customs.”

This is the honesty that makes him useful for us, since he does not write what we want to hear but writes what he saw, filtered through his Tangier-Maliki spectacles. The modern reader can read through that filter. What Ibn Battuta ﵀ disapproves of as implicit non-Islam, we can recognize as a West African gender and court culture that had absorbed Islam in its own language without Maghrebi strictness. His disapproval is our ethnographic gold.

Legacy

The Rihla, official title Tuhfat al-nuzzar fi ghara’ib al-amsar wa 'aja’ib al-asfar, “The gift of those who contemplate the wonders of cities and the marvels of journeys”, is for the fourteenth-century Mali world the most important non-Mande source we possess. For everything al-Umari ﵀ recorded from afar in Cairo, Ibn Battuta ﵀ supplies an eyewitness counterweight. Without him the Mali court culture under Mansa Suleyman would remain in mist; with him we know the name of the qadi, the construction of the audience halls, the menus, the custom of throwing gold dust on guests, and the geography of the road from Walata to Niani, fifty days of it out of Sijilmasa.

For West African historians he is indispensable and inconvenient at the same time. His geographical precision is variable: he confuses the names of cities, sometimes places Takedda incorrectly, and underestimates distances, while his cultural commentary is biased throughout. But he was there, he spoke with the people, and he wrote it down, and in a field where primary sources are scarce, that is decisive.

His broader legacy lies outside West Africa. The Rihla was discovered and translated by French and British scholars in the nineteenth century, and H.A.R. Gibb’s translation for the Hakluyt Society (1929-1994 in four volumes) is still standard. In the Arab-Islamic world he has been known longer, but the modern revaluation, Ibn Battuta ﵀ as Islamic Marco Polo, sometimes as a greater traveler than Polo, is equally a twentieth-century phenomenon. What counts is that he is read, that he keeps being read, and that every reader who meets him reads with him also the Mali of Mansa Suleyman that he recorded.

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Uncertainties:

The year of death is given as 1368 or 1369, and both dates appear in the Moroccan sources. The exact length of his stay in Niani rests on his own chronology, which yields eight months, although his dates are not always consistent. The identification of Takedda is archaeologically most likely Azelik in present-day Niger, without being definitive. And some of the distances and day-counts in the Rihla may have been stylistically smoothed by his editor Ibn Juzayy, since the text is a co-production rather than a diary.

Sources

• Ibn Battuta ﵀, Rihla, with the full title Tuhfat al-nuzzar fi ghara’ib al-amsar wa 'aja’ib al-asfar, dictated to Ibn Juzayy: his own account of the journey of 1352–1353, with Taghaza, Walata and the farba, the court of Mansa Sulayman, Timbuktu, Gao and Takedda, as quoted in Gomez, pp. 113, 125, 135, 147–148, 160, and in the Tarikh al-Sudan, translation Hunwick, p. 11, and Houdas, pp. 15–16.
• Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2018, pp. 113, 123, 125, 135, 138, 140–141, 145, 147–148, 158, 160, 163–164.
  • pp. 113, 123, 125, 135: Taghaza as a village where only the slaves of the Masufa dig the salt; Takedda as a copper mine; the two months from Sijilmasa to Walata, the first district of the Sudan, with Farba Husayn as the sultan’s deputy; the arrival in the town of Mali in 753/1352, his silence about the capital and the debate over Niani, and the towns he does and does not name.
  • pp. 138, 140–141, 145: the qubba and the mashwar as the audience halls of the court; the supplicant who strips and sprinkles dust on his head and back; the stay in Mali from July 1352 to February 1353, spanning both Eid festivals; Mansa Sulayman as Musa’s brother and successor.
  • pp. 147–148: Ibn Battuta ﵀ as a Marinid emissary; Sulayman as a miserly king and the welcome gift of three loaves; the audience through the interpreter Dugha and the 33 and 100 mithqals of gold; Abu Inan as the recently installed Marinid sultan.
  • pp. 158, 160: the assiduity in prayer, the full Friday mosque and the qadi who fetters his children until they know the Qur’an; the slaveholding population of Takedda, the return to Morocco in 754/1353 and the naked slave girls and daughters of the sultan as disapproved customs.
  • pp. 163–164: his irritation at the protocol in Walata, the constant distinction between black and white and the remark about feeble intellect; against that his praise for Qadi Abd al-Rahman, Dugha and Farba Sulayman, his acknowledgment of the seriousness with which Islam was practised, and the more nuanced view with which he left Mali.
• John O. Hunwick (trans.), Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: al-Saʿdi’s Taʾrikh al-sudan down to 1613 and other contemporary documents, Brill, Leiden 2003 (2nd printing; 1st printing 1999), pp. xxix, l, lvi, 11.
  • pp. xxix, l, lvi: Hunwick’s placing of the royal city visited by Ibn Battuta ﵀ midway between Bamako and Segu; the editions of Defrémery and Sanguinetti and of Beckingham for the Hakluyt Society (1994); Timbuktu in 1352 with a predominantly Massufa population.
  • p. 11 (TS ch. 3): the biographical note: born in Tangier in 703/1304, travels between 1325 and 1353, the West African journey from February 1352 to December 1353, the Rihla dictated to Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi in 756/1357 under the title Tuhfat al-nuzzar; the visit to Timbuktu in 754/1353 and the tombs of as-Sahili ﵀ and Siraj al-Din.
• ʿAbd ar-Rahman as-Saʿdi ﵀, Tarikh es-Soudan, trans. Octave Houdas, Ernest Leroux, Paris 1900 (Arabic and French), pp. 15–16: the passages from the Rihla quoted by as-Saʿdi ﵀ and the visit to Timbuktu in 754/1353.