The Travels of Ibn Battuta
Seventy-three thousand miles. One hundred seventeen thousand kilometers. In an age when most people died within a day's walk of where they were born, Ibn Battuta spent twenty-nine years in motion, and then sat down in Fez to dictate it all to a young Andalusian scholar named Ibn Juzayy. The resulting manuscript, known most commonly as the Rihla, is the single source for his adventures. There is no indication he kept a journal. When he came to tell it, he told it from memory, and sometimes from other people's books. The travelogue is imperfect, possibly plagiarized in parts, and irreplaceable. It is the closest thing we have to a fourteenth-century witness to the Muslim world from Morocco to China.
The Pious Men of Alexandria
In the early spring of 1326, after a journey of over 3,500 kilometers from Tangier, Ibn Battuta arrived at the port of Alexandria. He was twenty-one. He met two ascetic men there who set the shape of everything that followed. Sheikh Burhanuddin told him: 'It seems to me 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, Sheikh Murshidi, interpreted a dream to confirm Ibn Battuta's fate as a world traveler. Whether the prophecies came first and shaped the journey, or the journey produced the prophecies in retrospect, is impossible to say. From Alexandria he took the least-traveled of three routes toward Mecca, up the Nile and then east toward the Red Sea port of Aydhab, only to be turned back by a local rebellion.
East African Coast
On his second pilgrimage, Ibn Battuta kept going south. From Aden he sailed to Zeila on the Somali coast, then to Mogadishu, which he described as an exceedingly large city in 1331 at the height of its prosperity. Mogadishu exported high-quality fabric to Egypt. Its sultan, Abu Bakr ibn Shaikh Umar, spoke Mogadishan Somali and Arabic with equal fluency. Battuta marked him as Barbara, the medieval Arabic term for the ancestors of the Somali people. South again, past Mombasa, to Kilwa on the island in present-day Tanzania, where the gold trade ran through beautifully built wooden houses roofed with dis reeds. His descriptions of these East African cities are among the earliest extensive accounts to survive from a Muslim traveler, and they show that medieval Islam had reached deep into the Swahili coast long before European ships would arrive.
Delhi's Erratic Sultan
Ibn Battuta reached the Indus River on 12 September 1333. In Delhi he became qadi, a judge, to the Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq, who was erratic even by the standards of the time. For six years Ibn Battuta lived a precarious life between high favor and suspicion of treason. The Sultan stymied his plan to leave on the pretext of another hajj. Escape came in 1341 when an embassy from Yuan China requested permission to rebuild a Himalayan Buddhist temple popular with Chinese pilgrims, and Ibn Battuta was given charge of the mission. En route to the coast his retinue was attacked by bandits. He was robbed and nearly killed, separated from his companions, but rejoined them within ten days. In Calicut, a storm sank one of his ships before he could embark. The other sailed without him and was later seized by a Sumatran king.
The Empire of Mali
In 1351 Ibn Battuta left Fez and set out for the kingdom of Mali. He bought camels in Sijilmasa on the northern edge of the Sahara, waited four months, and joined a caravan in February 1352. Twenty-five days later he reached Taghaza, where the houses and the mosque were built from slabs of salt cut by the enslaved workers of the Masufa tribe. Taghaza was awash with Malian gold but plagued by flies, and the water was brackish. From there the caravan crossed 1,600 kilometers of desert in two months, a Masufa scout running ahead to arrange water at Oualata. In the Malian capital Ibn Battuta met Mansa Suleyman, king since 1341. He journeyed on by camel to Timbuktu, then still small and relatively unimportant, before paddling down the Niger to Gao in a canoe carved from a single tree. On the way back he traveled with a caravan transporting 600 enslaved women. It is important to name what those caravans carried: not commodities, but people, stolen from their lives. Ibn Battuta's account is matter-of-fact about it, as his age's norms demanded, and the reader owes the same honesty.
Memory, Plagiarism, and Truth
When Ibn Battuta dictated the Rihla to Ibn Juzayy in 1354, he relied on memory and on books. Ibn Juzayy did not acknowledge his sources. Passages describing Damascus, Mecca, and Medina were copied from the Andalusian traveler Ibn Jubayr, written 150 years earlier. Palestine descriptions came from the thirteenth-century traveler Muhammad al-Abdari. Scholars doubt Ibn Battuta actually visited Bolghar on the Volga, Sana'a in Yemen, or possibly even China, where his descriptions show striking parallels to Marco Polo and earlier Arabic geographers. The Rihla was unknown outside the Muslim world until the nineteenth century, when German and Swiss travelers brought manuscripts to Europe. Ibn Battuta himself was appointed a judge in Morocco after his return and died in 1368 or 1369. The book remained. Imperfect, partially borrowed, occasionally implausible, it is still the most expansive first-person portrait we have of the fourteenth-century world seen through Muslim eyes.
From the Air
The article's location is given at 22.33 N, 36.49 E, on Egypt's Red Sea coast near the historic port of Aydhab, one of Ibn Battuta's early stops on the way to Mecca. The area is remote desert coast today. Nearest large airports: Marsa Alam International (HEMA) to the north, or Port Sudan across the border to the south. Cruising flights over the Red Sea pass directly above this coast.