The Travels of Ibn Battutah

"I couldn’t not include him. His editor Ibn Juzayy says towards the end of the book that Ibn Battutah is “the traveller of the Arabs and if anyone says he is a traveller of this ummah [Islamic community], he would not be wrong”. That actually stands today. In a sense he hasn’t been bettered since that time [the 14th century]. The complete diversity of the Muslim world was put on the axis of a book by Ibn Battutah. Nobody afterwards could really do better. He is the traveller of the Islamic world. He was born in 1304. In 1325, when he was 21, he sets out on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He starts from Tangiers in Morocco, so it’s a long way from there to Mecca. It’s almost as far as you can go in the Arab world. Like other people doing that pilgrimage from his background, which was an educated background of judges and scholars, he would have hoped to do some studies along the way, probably in Cairo or Damascus, which is indeed what he did. But unlike most of these other people, he really got the travel bug. I think there are a number of reasons for this. One is that he realised that he could make money and get jobs in the Islamic world, especially in areas that were newly Islamised or its leaders were newly Islamised, like the ruler of India. Ibn Battutah 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. So he was really trying to collect sultans to make money from them, and he was trying to collect Sufi holy men, both dead and alive, as you could visit a tomb and be deemed to have visited that person, and collect their barakah [blessing]. So, he travelled for these different reasons and he kind of went on and on and on. If you read this book, it seems quite chaotic, but there is an underlying structure to it. I think there are two elements to this structure. When he is in Egypt he has this dream, which is interpreted by a holy man who says: “You will go to these different countries.” Another holy man he meets predicts he will meet his spiritual brothers in India and China. So part of the structure is fulfilling his fate, which has already been predicted. Another part of the structure is he talks quite early on about the seven great kings of the known world and they are obviously his ruler in Morocco, because he’s got to say nice things about him, and the Mamluk Sultan of Egypt and Syria, the Sultan of Delhi and then the four Mongol cousins – the Khan of the Golden Horde, the ruler of Iran and Iraq, the ruler of central Asia and the Chinese Emperor. All of those were Muslims, except for the Emperor of China. I think possibly what happened, and this is speculation, is that he sort of realised he didn’t actually get to see the Emperor of China so he added on a seventh great king who was a Muslim, and he was the Emperor of Mali, which was this great West African empire. And so he collected these seven great kings and uses them as a hook and that I think is the deep structure of his book. At some point he realised he was surfing this huge wave of Islam and that he could actually be the one who wrote about the Islamic world – his rihlah could be the rihlah to end all rihlahs. I think he probably realised that consciously at some point. He spent 29 years travelling overall. I’ll tell you the outer limits of his journey. He started in Morocco and he covered most of the known world between the middle of the River Volga to the north, down to almost what is now the border of Mozambique in the south; east as far as Guangzhou in China, and west, we don’t know quite how far, but probably not quite as far as Senegal but getting that way. If you think of the known world of his day, it almost sits within those outer limits. It is extraordinary. He wasn’t popular partly because of his style. He wasn’t a great stylist. His style could get a bit rough and these snotty-nosed literary sorts at the time didn’t like that. Also, it sort of went too far beyond their purview. He talks about the Sultan of Delhi catapulting bags of money from the backs of elephants. People actually said: “This is a lie.” What I have been trying to do with my books on him is trying to prove that he, in general, wasn’t a liar. He might have massaged things and heightened the colours, which we all do, but in general he wasn’t a fibber. So, because of style and literal outlandishness, people didn’t really take to it."

"Ibn Battutah, whose name can be translated as Son of a Duck, is my hero and is regarded as ‘the traveller of Islam’. He left his native city of Tangier in 1325 at the age of 21 with the intention of performing the pilgrimage to Mecca. But he continued beyond Mecca. Travelling by horse, mule, ox wagon, junk, dhow and on foot, he covered over 75,000 miles and visited over 40 countries. Wherever he went, he found it easy to get employment as a jurist, or a courtier or an ambassador. His journeys involve swashbuckling adventures and chases with concubines in tow. He is a riveting read. The interesting thing with Ibn Battutah is that travel for him was not just going from one place to another; it was living in a place. Wherever he went, he made his home. He had a house, he married and he got a job. This allowed him to learn about the place by living as a part of it. Then he would move on. It wasn’t until he returned to Morocco in his ripe old age, that he wrote down all his adventures. It’s got a wonderful title in full, The Precious Gift for Lookers into the Marvels of Cities and Wonders of Travels . You have to read Ibn Battutah to discover that. But what is important is that everywhere he went, although he could not perfectly merge with the cultures he encountered, he took a great amount of time trying to understand them. He treated each culture on its own terms, and didn’t impose his own values on them. I think that’s very important for any traveller – if you want to learn from a different culture, then you have to treat it with equality and respect. Only then will that culture become available to you. If you go there with too many of your own preconceptions, then you will limit your experience. Dialogue is obviously very important, but it has to be from a basis of knowledge, not from a basis of ignorance. And the only way you are going to develop knowledge about another culture is if you live in that culture for a considerable period of time. You simply can’t walk into a completely different city, with a different culture, and begin a reasonable dialogue. You can only learn so much from books; in order to really learn about a culture you have to live and see the world through its eyes. If you do this, then yes, it is acceptable to raise questions about how other people behave."