The Travels of Ibn Battuta

Summary

The Travels of Ibn Battuta is the account of a Moroccan legal scholar who left Tangier in June 1325, aged twenty-one, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and did not settle at home again until 1349. Its Arabic title, given by its editor Ibn Juzayy, means A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling; it is usually called simply the Rihla, the Journey. Ibn Battuta dictated it at Fez, and Ibn Juzayy finished the text in 1355. The narrative crosses most of the Islamic world of the fourteenth century, which shared a faith, a sacred law and Arabic learning from Morocco to the Indies, and it shows how a scholar could travel within it as guest, pilgrim and judge. Samuel Lee's 1829 English version, used here, translates a later abridgement by Muhammad ibn Fath Allah al-Bailuni from manuscripts bequeathed to Cambridge by J. L. Burckhardt. The library's stored file contains Lee's first fifteen chapters. They begin with the journey along the coast of the Maghreb through Tlemcen, Bejaia, Tunis and Tripoli to Alexandria, where the holy man Burhan al-Din tells Ibn Battuta he must greet his brothers in India, Sind and China, and where another sheikh interprets his dream of being carried east on a great bird's wings. He sees Cairo and the Nile, goes up the river to the Red Sea port of Aidhab, turns back, and crosses Sinai to Palestine and Syria, visiting Hebron, Jerusalem, Damascus and Aleppo. He makes the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina in 1326, then travels with the Iraqi caravan to Najaf, Basra, Persia, Shiraz, Baghdad and Tabriz in the company of the Ilkhan Abu Said. Further chapters take him back to Mecca, down the Red Sea to Yemen and the East African coast, round Oman and the Persian Gulf with its pearl fisheries, through Anatolia's Turkish principalities, across the Black Sea to the steppe camp of Uzbek Khan of the Golden Horde, and to Constantinople in the train of a Byzantine princess married to the khan. He then crosses Khwarezm, Bukhara, Samarkand and Afghanistan to the Indus, describes India's courier posts and customs, reaches Delhi, and recounts the history of the Delhi sultans up to Muhammad ibn Tughluq. Lee's remaining chapters, not in the stored file, cover his years at Muhammad's court, his embassy toward China, the Maldives, Ceylon, Bengal, Southeast Asia and China, the return west through Damascus during the Black Death, a visit to Granada, and the journey across the Sahara to Mali. Lee's notes, comparing Ibn Battuta with Arabic geographers and European travellers, are interleaved in the OCR text.

Top Lessons

• A connected world of faith and law

  Ibn Battuta moves from Morocco to Delhi without ever being wholly a foreigner, because mosques, colleges, Sufi lodges and the courts of Islamic law spread a shared culture across thousands of miles. His welcome as a scholar shows how learning itself served as a passport in the fourteenth-century Dar al-Islam.

• Travel guided by holy men

  The journey is shaped by encounters with saints and Sufi masters: Burhan al-Din's prophecy, al-Murshidi's interpretation of the dream, the shrines of Damascus and Hebron. Ibn Battuta presents travel as both curiosity and devotion.

• Observing others honestly

  Ibn Battuta records customs that surprise him, such as the unveiled and highly respected Turkish women of the steppe, Byzantine court ceremonies and Indian postal couriers, and judges them by his own law and taste. Readers can learn both from what he saw and from how a medieval Muslim scholar framed it.

• A book shaped by many hands

  The Rihla was dictated years after the events, polished by Ibn Juzayy, abridged by al-Bailuni and translated by Lee from that abridgement. Each stage added or removed something, and scholars debate whether some journeys, such as the trip to Bulgar, really took place as told.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The book's chief medical interest is its witness to epidemic disease and communal response. In Damascus, Ibn Battuta describes the population praying together against plague and reports very high daily deaths; the full Rihla dates this to 1348, making it a first-hand Muslim account of the Black Death, though the abridgement Lee translated gives the year as 746 AH (1345). The prologue notes that Ibn Battuta's descriptions of the aromatic roots of India differ from those of the physicians, a reminder that travellers supplied the drug lore of medieval pharmacy. Other passages concern a well of poisonous water at Humaithira in the Egyptian desert, dream interpretation by Sufi masters, the city water supply of Delhi discussed in Lee's notes, and a Delhi sultan whose side became withered by an illness the physicians could not cure, which modern readers might suspect was a stroke, though the text gives too little to say. Ibn Battuta also reports, with disapproval, the burning of widows and religious drowning in the Ganges.

• Prologue (Chapter I)

  The abridger notes that Ibn Battuta's account of Indian aromatic roots differs from the physicians' and is probably correct.

• Chapter II (Alexandria)

  Sheikh al-Murshidi interprets the dream of the great bird as a prophecy of travels.

• Chapter II (Upper Egypt, Humaithira)

  Story of the Sufi master al-Shadhili, who dies at a desert station with a poisonous well after foretelling his own burial.

• Chapter V (Damascus)

  The people of Damascus gather at the Mosque of the Footprint to pray against plague amid thousands of deaths a day.

• Chapter XIV (India)

  Ibn Battuta describes the burning of widows and drowning in the Ganges as religious practices of some Hindus.

• Chapter XV (history of Delhi)

  Sultan Muizz al-Din Kaiqubad suffers a complaint that withers one side of his body and that the physicians cannot remedy.