In 1325, Ibn Battuta, a young Muslim scholar began a brief pilgrimage that turned into a dramatic 29-year sojourn coloured by shipwrecks, kidnappings, political coups, royal meetings and the Black Death. When the Moroccan finally returned home, in 1354, he wove all these extraordinary real events into The Rihla, one of the most important travelogues ever printed.
Seven centuries on, he is hailed as one of the greatest heroes of the Islamic world. Travelling by horse, camel, donkey, wagon and ship, he traversed 120,000 kilometres.
He had many contacts and was welcomed into Islamic territories. Yet it was a miracle he managed to complete his 29 years of travel, says Ross E Dunn, professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University, and author of The Adventures of Ibn Battuta.
The adventurer survived an array of perilous scenarios, Dunn explains. He got lost in an Arabian Desert and caught in a snowstorm in Anatolia, and was kidnapped by bandits, wounded by an arrow and shipwrecked off the Indian coast. Not to mention almost being executed by the Sultan of Delhi, becoming embroiled in a plot to overthrow a Maldivian queen, and suffering multiple serious illnesses. He even kept travelling during the Black Death plague, a pandemic that killed more than 75 million people.
All of which began with that most significant of voyages for a Muslim: the Hajj pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest city, Makkah. In 1325, when he was just 21 years old, Ibn Battuta embarked on that pilgrimage from Tangier. Rather than boarding a boat, he set off overland on a donkey. He travelled east, along the North African coast, and by the time he reached Egypt, he was so besotted by travel that he vowed to dedicate his life to exploration.
He was in Tunisia when he joined a caravan of pilgrims following the trail to Makkah. Having come from a prestigious family of Muslim legal scholars, he broadened his knowledge by conversing with the other pilgrims about issues of law and religion.
Over the next three decades, this desire to understand Islam beyond the borders of Morocco motivated Ibn Battuta’s ceaseless wandering just as much as the sheer pleasure of travel. He studied under renowned Islamic scholars in Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. This, together with his impressive family background, helped him become an influential judge and adviser to dozens of leaders across the Islamic world.
In late 1326, Ibn Battuta slowly made his way across lands now called Iraq, Iran and Azerbaijan before venturing south along Africa’s west coast, through Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania. After a long stay in Anatolia (now Turkey), he headed west through what are now Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Finally, in 1334, he reached northern India, which then was dominated by the Delhi Sultanate, led by Muhammad bin Tughluq. It was in this Muslim kingdom that Ibn Battuta found a home, of sorts. Sultan Tughluq was trying to spread Islam and to do this he needed accomplished Islamic scholars and judges. So he hired Ibn Battuta.
The Moroccan stayed in India for seven years, living a luxurious life and becoming one of the sultan’s key advisers. But he also suffered under the mood swings of this violent monarch. To the extent that Ibn Battuta narrowly avoided being executed by Tughluq for being associated with a controversial Sufi holy man.
He left India in 1341 when the sultan asked Ibn Battuta to travel to China as his emissary, bringing gifts to the Mongol emperor who ruled China. But along the way, his caravan was robbed and he was kidnapped. He managed to escape and rejoin the caravan, only to arrive at the Indian port of Calicut to find two of the awaiting ships had sunk, and the third had already departed for China.
Ibn Battuta didn’t give up, deciding to travel solo to China. Along the way he visited Sri Lanka, where he had an audience with a king, and the Maldives, where he worked as an Islamic judge and became caught up in a plot to overthrow its Queen Khadija. In 1345, Battuta left for Bangladesh, from where he finally headed to China for a comparatively uneventful stay.
From China, he began the long journey home, during the peak of the Black Death, landing in Morocco in 1349. In the final five years of his explorations, Ibn Battuta visited Mali and modern-day Spain, before returning to Morocco to begin writing his epic travelogue.
Ibn Battuta’s Rihla greatly enhanced our knowledge of the Eastern Hemisphere during the 14th century, says Dunn. His travels across Africa, Asia and Europe helped chronicle an era when Mongol or Turkic rulers controlled swathes of those continents. The book offered crucial insight and descriptions of those rulers and their kingdoms, he says. It also documented political, social, cultural, and economic life in dozens of other societies.
“In its geographic scope and density of detail, The Rihla surpasses all other premodern travel accounts,” Dunn says. “Ibn Battuta’s most important gifts to us are his exclusive first-person reports of places and events that no one else of that period succeeded in recording for posterity. These include his descriptions of the Mongol Golden Horde empire north of the Black Sea, northern India under the rule of the Turkic monarch Muhammad Tughluq, the Mali empire in West Africa, and his passage through Syria and Egypt during the Black Death plague pandemic.”
Ibn Battuta’s other towering legacy is his chronicling of the wide, significant impact of Islam in the 1300s, Dunn notes. His book doesn’t only provide deep evidence of Islam’s influence as a major universalist religion. It also sketches a clear picture of how Islam helped forge a “cultural world system” held together by networks of Islamic scholars, merchants, artisans, diplomats and Sufi missionaries.
“Some schools in western countries still teach the traditional theory that Muslim societies experienced a 'golden age’ from the eighth to the 11th centuries, but then went into ‘decline’,” Dunn states. “This is nonsense. Ibn Battuta bears witness to Islam in the 1300s as a vibrant, creative cultural and social system rapidly growing in West Africa, East Africa, Inner Eurasia, northern India and maritime Southeast Asia.”
During his voyages, Ibn Battuta survived so many hardships due to the generosity he received from countless Muslim hosts. “No matter his situation, he could always count on the enduring Muslim obligation to provide for wayfarers with food and a place to sleep,” Dunn says. “He was also a legal scholar, a member of the Muslim learnt class, a status that earned him entry into the courts and residences of monarchs, governors, Sufi teachers, and wealthy merchants. In short, powerful people often sustained and protected him.”
Despite his extraordinary feats, Battuta is overlooked in the West, especially compared to Marco Polo, says Christian Sahner, associate professor of Islamic history at University of Oxford. This is largely due to language barriers and cultural disconnects.
“He’s traditionally been seen as an ambassador of North African Islamic culture, not European Christian culture, like Marco Polo,” Sahner says. “His travel account came on the radar of western readers relatively late: the first Arabic edition and French translation was published in the 1850s. Since then, though, his star has been rising around the world.”
Ibn Battuta is underappreciated even in the contemporary Middle East, says Ebrahim Moosa, professor in Islamic thought and Muslim societies at University of Notre Dame in the US. “Aside from one Ibn Battuta Centre and one museum, both in Morocco, there is little institutional focus on this remarkable figure,” Prof Moosa says. “That is a missed opportunity. His Rihla is not only a travel narrative, but also a window into the lived experience of Islamic cosmopolitanism in the 14th century. The neglect of Ibn Battuta calls for renewed, imaginative scholarship.
“As the great Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun warned, a civilisation that loses grip on its own history risks signs of decline. To remember Ibn Battuta is not only to honour a singular individual, but also to reclaim a global history that has long been eclipsed, and to build a future with optimism.”
