The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century Read Online Free Page A

India, the Persian Gulf, Syria, and Egypt. After performing the ceremonies of the
hajj
one last time, he set a course for home. Traveling by both land and sea, he arrived in Fez, the capital of Morocco, late in 1349. The following year he made a brief trip across the Strait of Gibraltar to the Muslim kingdom of Granada. Then, in 1353, he undertook his final adventure, a journey by camel caravan across the Sahara Desert to the Kingdom of Mali in the West African Sudan. In 1355 he returned to Morocco to stay. In the course of a career on the road spanning almost thirty years, he crossed the breadth of the Eastern Hemisphere, visited territories equivalent to about 40 modern countries, and put behind him a total distance of approximately 73,000 miles. 2
    Early in 1356 Sultan Abu ’Inan, the Marinid ruler of Morocco, commissioned Ibn Juzayy, a young literary scholar of Andalusian origin, to record Ibn Battuta’s experiences, as well as his observations about the Islamic world of his day, in the form of a
rihla
, or book of travels. As a type of Arabic literature, the
rihla
attained something of a flowering in North Africa between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. The best known examples of the genre recounted a journey from the Maghrib to Mecca, informing and entertaining readers with rich descriptions of the pious institutions, public monuments, and religious personalities of thegreat cities of Islam. 3 Ibn Battuta and Ibn Juzayy collaborated for about two years to compose their work, the longest and in terms of its subject matter the most complex
rihla
to come out of North Africa in the medieval age. His royal charge completed, Ibn Battuta retired to a judicial post in a Moroccan provincial town. He died in 1368.
    Written in the conventional literary style of the time, Ibn Battuta’s
Rihla
is a comprehensive survey of the personalities, places, governments, customs, and curiosities of the Muslim world in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. It is also the record of a dramatic personal adventure. In the four centuries after Ibn Battuta’s death, the
Rihla
circulated, mostly in copied manuscript abridgments of Ibn Juzayy’s original text, among people of learning in North Africa, West Africa, Egypt, and perhaps other Muslim lands where Arabic was read.
    The book was unknown outside Islamic countries until the early nineteenth century, when two German scholars published separately translations of portions of the
Rihla
from manuscripts obtained in the Middle East. In 1829 Samuel Lee, a British orientalist, published an English translation based on abridgments of the narrative that John Burckhardt, the famous Swiss explorer, had acquired in Egypt. 4 Around the middle of the century five manuscripts of the
Rihla
were found in Algeria following the French occupation of that country. These documents were subsequently transferred to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Two of them represent the most complete versions of the narrative that have ever come to light. The others are partial transcriptions, one of which carries the autograph of Ibn Juzayy, Ibn Battuta’s editor. Working with these five documents, two French scholars, C. Défrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti, published between 1853 and 1858 a printed edition of the Arabic text, together with a translation in French and an apparatus of notes and variant textual readings. 5
    Since then, translations of the work, prepared in every case from Défrémery and Sanguinetti’s printed text, have been published in many languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Persian, and Japanese. In 1929 Sir Hamilton Gibb produced an abridged English translation and began work on a complete edition of the work under the auspices of the Hakluyt Society. 6 The last of the four volumes in this series appeared in 1994, and an index came out in 2001. 7 However, English translations of various portions of the
Rihla
have appeared in the past century as books