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

or as articles in anthologies and scholarly journals.
    The numerous translations of the
Rihla
, together with the extensive corpus of encyclopedia articles, popular summaries, and critical commentaries on Ibn Battuta and his career that have accumulated since the eighteenth century, are a tribute to the extraordinary value of the narrative as a historical source on much of the inhabited Eastern Hemisphere in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. The book has been cited and quoted in hundreds of historical works, not only those relating to Islamic countries but to China and the Byzantine empire as well. For the history of certain regions, Sudanic West Africa, Asia Minor, or the Malabar coast of India, for example, the
Rihla
stands as the only eye-witness report on political events, human geography, and social or economic conditions for a period of a century or more. Ibn Battuta had no professional background or experience as a writer of geography, history, or ethnography, but he was, as Gibb declares, “the supreme example of
le géographe malgré lui
,” the “geographer in spite of himself.” 8
    The Western world has conventionally celebrated Marco Polo, who died the year before Ibn Battuta first left home, as the “Greatest Traveler in History.” Ibn Battuta has inevitably been compared with him and has usually taken second prize as “the Marco Polo of the Muslim world” or “the Marco Polo of the tropics.” 9 Keeping in mind that neither man actually composed his own book (Marco’s record was dictated to the French romance writer Rusticello in a Genoese prison), there is no doubt that the Venetian’s work is the superior one in terms of the accurate, precise, practical information it contributes on medieval China and other Asian lands in the latter part of the thirteenth century, information of profound value to historians ever since. Yet Ibn Battuta traveled to, and reports on, a great many more places than Marco did, and his narrative offers details, sometimes in incidental bits, sometimes in long disquisitions, on almost every conceivable aspect of human life in that age, from the royal ceremonial of the Sultan of Delhi to the sexual customs of women in the Maldive Islands to the harvesting of coconuts in South Arabia. Moreover his story is far more personal and humanely engaging than Marco’s. Some Western writers, especially in an earlier time when the conviction of Europe’s superiority over Islamic civilization was a presumption of historical scholarship, have criticized Ibn Battuta for being excessively eager to tell about the lives and pious accomplishments of religious savants and Sufi mystics when hemight have written more about practical politics and prices. The
Rihla
, however, was directed to Muslim men of learning of the fourteenth century for whom such reportage, so recondite to the modern Western reader, was pertinent and interesting.
    As in Marco’s case, we know almost nothing about the life of Ibn Battuta apart from what the autobiographical dimension of his own book reveals. Aside from three minor references in Muslim scholarly works of the fourteenth or fifteenth century that attest independently to the Moroccan’s existence and to his achievements as a traveler, no document has ever come to light from his own age that mentions him. 10 To understand his character, his aspirations, his social attitudes and prejudices, his personal relations with other people and, finally, the way he “fits” into fourteenth-century Muslim society and culture, we must rely almost exclusively on the
Rihla
itself. Fortunately, by expressing here and there in its pages his reactions to events, his annoyances, his animosities, and the details of his personal intrigues, he reveals something of his own character.
    Western writers have sometimes characterized Ibn Battuta as a brave explorer like Marco Polo, risking his life to discover
terra incognita
and bring knowledge of it to public attention. In