Historic Alleys

Without a doubt, parts of the Rihla may have been borrowed from previously published accounts, sections from it document wild accounts of wonders, mysteries, and happenings prevalent in medieval Asia, and parts are products of vivid imagination and incredulous conclusions. When read these days, compared and analyzed using current moral standards, IP rights, and scientific criteria, it falls quite short. But in those days, it was a compilation set to prevalent style, though criticism circulated and ibn Battuta faced some ridicule, mainly due to the sheer extent of the travelogue.

Battuta and his Rihla

Between the storyteller and the scribe, a narrative took birth, complete with observations, opinions, hearsay, miracles, and oddities. Gaps were filled with borrowed descriptions from other travelers, a good dose of exaggeration and hyperbole at times, with personal anecdotes to effectively weld the seams of the narrative, while the scribe fitted it to the patron’s desire, styling it with poetic prose.

He loved gifts and wealth, had a voracious sexual appetite, and loved hobnobbing with the big and powerful. At the same time, he was at home with the pious and simple common man too, and took in the fakirs, the magicians, the thieves, and charlatans, and above all, desired to be recognized as a learned judge from Arabia, Prophet Mohammed’s land.

The critics

There are many who criticize Battuta, some say he copied sections from Marco Polo, while others assert that Marco Polo was a fraud. Some are at pains to point out that Battuta never traveled to China or other cities like Constantinople. There are some who harangue him without knowing the place names (as in Malabar) mentioned by Battuta or having visited those locales.  Some have made their Ibn Battuta investigations, a cornerstone of their armchair scholarship. There is also a neutral group that says that either Battuta or Juzayy used filler material from other travelogues such as Ibn Jubayr, to make the book complete and an entertainer as the King wanted it. Some others add that the chronology is out of whack, as it cannot be structured linearly.

But why did this one man venture out on such an odyssey? Was it just wanderlust? Tom Mackintosh-Smith who retraced Ibn Battuta’s route feels that it was all with a purpose, quite common today. Go where you are wanted, where you will be recognized, instead of wallowing in your own domicile. He said in a recent interview (Five books Feb 2012), and personally, I believe it was a superb analysis - He realized that he could make money and get jobs in the Islamic world, especially in areas that were newly Islamized, or its leaders were newly Islamized, like the ruler of India. Ibn Battuta thought, “I can get a job there,” being a card-carrying Arab Muslim scholar. So, he went further than the pilgrimage, partly to get jobs to make money and to hobnob with sultans, and partly because he had this total fascination with the world of Islamic mysticism – Sufis, and particularly Sufi holy men……. At some point he realized he was surfing this huge wave of Islam and that he could actually be the one who wrote about the Islamic world – his Rihla could be the Rihla to end all Rihlas. I think he probably realized that, consciously at some point.

His wives, concubines, slaves, and children

There are papers, theses, and book sections on Ibn Battuta’s many wives, children, and his many concubines and slave girls. Battuta is unapologetic about his desires and always used religious permissions and the Mut’ah marriage practices, to the maximum. Li Guo in her paper feels he married and divorced over twenty women and fathered and abandoned over seventy children, during his 30 years on the road. The Rihla itself mentions some 10 wives and 5 children, and numerous slave girls/concubines with whom he had sexual relations.

Ross Dunn, the scholar who has analyzed the Rihla in great detail and is a pleasure to read and refer to, mentions that Ibn Battuta had the desire to establish a social or political connection with prominent families, by marriage, as was popular in the Indian Islamic world. Interestingly, none of those alliances forced him to settle down, and when he set out back home, he was alone.

Then again, I do not believe that he settled down after the 1356 Rihla composition, all alone in a distant Moroccan town, as we shall soon see. I am sure he became a family man once again, though there is no account of it.

Battuta and Sufism

Sufism is the mystical expression of the Islamic faith, ascetic in nature, considered as the part of Islamic teaching that deals with the purification of the inner self. It was in the 11th century that it got codified. The renaissance of Sufism started in the 13th century and Ibn Battuta seems to have been a devote, though not a Sufi, perhaps trying to understand it all, journeying to a number of places, specifically to visit a saintly Sufi master or the tomb of a Sufi saint in order to obtain their divine blessings. As we saw earlier, his association with a Sufi almost got him killed, in Delhi.

Visited Calicut 7 times  

The first visit of Ibn Battuta to Calicut was in 1343. This was when he was deputed to China with the Chinese diplomats who were returning to China. He had a lot to write about the great port of Calicut, life there, the Al-Samiri, the Chinese ships, a Tsunami, and shipwreck, but strangely does not mention too much about bare-breasted women (which he would definitely have taken note of) or other pagan aspects. He transited Calicut seven times, the last time in 1347. I will cover Ibn Battuta’s stay in Calicut in a separate article.

The mysterious Kunji Kari

Ibn Battuta seems to have visited a place that he called Kunji Kari, while sailing to Quilon from Calicut, home to a number of Jews. Well, some authors have not been able to identify the place, but it is quite clear that this was Cochangadi was written as Cochan Gari – i.e., today’s Cochin. Mehrdad Shokoohy explains – In Arabic the sound ch is represented with the letter j, and Indian g or gh with the letter k; thus, the name may be read as Konchi Ghari. Ibn Battuta’s record of Konchi instead of Kochin may be an error of memory as he wrote his accounts some years later. Could also have been a transliteration of Kochi Karai, the shore of Kochi.

Final years

Ibn Battuta vanished after the Rihla was completed in 1356 and the scribe died. It remained so, until Tim Mackintosh-Smith uncovered a fascinating tidbit, recounted both by Ross Dunn in his 2012 edition preface (Refer Mackintosh-Smiths books for detail)

Dunn explains - One bit of evidence is a letter that the eminent Andalusian scholar Ibn al-Khatib wrote to Ibn Battuta in the early 1360s, that is, several years after the traveler had definitively returned home, on the mundane subject of a land purchase. From this testimony, we learn that the aging Ibn Battuta served as a judge in Tamasna, an old place name associated with the region around modern Casablanca.

While it is stated that Battuta worked as the local judge in Tamasna, it is also clear that Tamasna had by the 1360s lost its previous importance to the Marinids, and was simply used as pastureland, thus a remote outpost.  What is apparent is that Ibn Battuta did not quite win any favors from the King, perhaps due to the lack of popularity for his Rihla, and got shunted to this outpost. Nevertheless, there is a modest tomb in Tangiers, within its labyrinth medina, said to be his, but I doubt if it has anything to do with Ibn Battuta.

Today one can go to Fez and still wander around the vast and bustling Medina, check out the remains of the old Dar al-Makhzen palace, the many mosques, and madrasas, and imagine Ibn Battuta wandering among them, wondering afterward what he gained after all that travel.

References

In Part 2 – I will tell you about Ibn Battuta’s exploits in Malabar