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'A pig in a turban'

Ibn Battutah: 14th century Jihadist, adventurer, traveller.

One hot afternoon in the spring of 1350, a Moorish mufti in Granada received a number of local notables in a shaded corner of his garden and served them, no doubt, peeled cucumbers and mint tea. He wanted them to meet two visitors who were staying with him. One was a poet, the other a traveller who said he had come to join the Jihad against the Christians. The latter, by the name of Ibn Battutah, was full of tall stories about his wondrous experiences in over two decades of travelling in Africa, Europe and Asia, from the Niger in the south to the Volga in the north and China in the farthest east. He had penetrated the heartland of the enemy and seen a gathering of 12000 bishops at conference in Constantinople.

The guests included a hardened old Islamic judge by the name of Ibn al-Balfiqi. Not used to being outshone by a 46-year-old nobody from Morocco whose grammar and syntax jarred on the nerves, Balfiqi kept a stern face but, later, behind the man's back, called him a liar. The judge's mood was not bettered by seeing the others present falling for the crook. A young man later wrote: "Abu Abdallah (Ibn Battutah) lifted our spirits".

Elsewhere, also, Battutah's reception was mixed. Crowds flocked to him to hear his tales as they did to the fishermen who owed their lives to a kindly whale in the Mediterranean. The more sophisticated were troubled. The man was full of the kind of detail that could not be made up easily, and he seemed consistent. Whenever he recalled, for example, how much he had been paid by the sultan of Delhi for a salary as an Islamic judge there, the figures, the names and the circumstances remained unchanged.

Back in his native Morocco, the sultan Inān found reason to trust Battutah. His informers told him that the man really had been away for a long time, he had written the occasional letter to his family about the places he had visited, and he came from a clerical family. So he appointed a secretary by the name of Ibn Juzay to write down the traveller's memoirs, with the emphasis on the rulers and poets and seers he had met. The process of dictation by Battutah and the embroidery and appendage by Juzay took a couple of years. The result was a Muslim equivalent of Marco Polo who had, incidentally, died a year before Battutah had left Tangier for the east in 1325.

His first name was Shams al Din, "the sun of the faith", his later title Abu Abdallah, the father of Abdallah. He had been born into the Lawāti clan of Tangier in 1304 and his extended family of minor clerics and landowners were known as the Ibn Battutah, 'sons of the duck'.

What made Battutah to set off on his hazardous journeys of some 75,000 miles remains a mystery. He himself says that, initially, it was to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. But, even so, it would have still been seen as pompous for a young man of 21 years to want to become a haaji so early in life. With the example of an earlier traveller in my mind, I suspect that Battutah was escaping from something. While Nasser Khosrow, the Persian traveller of the eleventh century, had given up a good job as a government secretary in his native Samarkand "for Mecca" – but really because he feared discovery as an Ismaili heretic – his north African counterpart may have suffered a more ordinary misfortune, such as being rejected by a richer family whose daughter he had coveted. Nasser Khosrow seems to have largely paid for his journey of seven years by copying and selling books. Battutah was a sycophant and milked his novelty as a foreigner to make sure of his free food and lodging. During some of his longer stays, especially in India, he became a wealthy man, with herds of horses, camels and "slave girls". But when he arrived back in Tangier in 1349 and decided to join the war against the Spaniards, he seems to have been poor again. "Oh, cursed be those Hindu infidels", he started to say. "They robbed me of the great wealth I had when I returned home by sea".

His most valuable possessions – from our point of view – had been the copious notes he had made over the previous two decades; which raises a question. How could his quoting of thousands of names and places be relied on if he only dictated them from memory. Indeed, given that the unabridged memoirs make over 900 pages, it would have been a feat beyond anyone. Battutah himself says that, after each such misfortune, he made up for the loss by re-writing while his memory was still fresh. We have to trust him. He could also have later consulted letters he had sent to friends and relatives. In addition, scholars have discovered evidence of plagiarism in his original Arabic from earlier travellers, while young Juzay's florid interventions and research stand out quite clearly in numerous places. The net result is mostly convincing and offers a rich and extensive source book for historians and anthropologists.

In places, Battutah is a pleasure to read. Take, for example, his recollections of the long coast of Malabar. Here, the Muslim zealot in him is forced to admit that, despite there being some 50 Hindu rulers living side by side, they did not fight one another.

Yet, in the next moment, his company becomes almost unendurable. We find him joining a Muslim army to kill and pillage those same Hindus, for which the victorious sultan gives him a 'slave girl'. Even more shocking is the realisation that he knows his cruelty towards non-Muslims will be applauded by his audience. He says of this hapless captive: "When her husband wanted to ransom her, I refused". She dies later during one of his absences and when he says that he is upset, it is only so because she had been pregnant with possibly a male child.

Indeed, in so many places I felt I wanted to throttle the animal. I felt as if it were my daughter he was abusing, as if I travelled with a pig in a holy man's turban. He buys or takes into possession boys and girls in their early teens and then, in some faraway village on his route, when he is tired of them and the poor creatures have lost all contact with their families, he sells them to other uncouth beasts like himself without the slightest twinge of conscience.

Just as repugnant is his attitude to the so-called 'peoples of the Book', Jews and Christians who follow the same god as he does. In Asia minor he comes across a Jewish physician whose skill is valued by the local ruler and who is allowed to sit above the reciters of the Koran in the ruler's presence. "Seeing this", he says, "my indignation flared and I said to the Jew, 'You God-damned son of a God-damned father, how dare you sit up there above the readers of the Qor'an, and you a Jew, and went on berating him in loud tones… When we took our leave, the doctor (of law) said to me, 'Well done, may God bless you. Nobody but you would dare to speak to him in that way, and you have let him know just what he is'".

If this man represents the high point of Moorish civilisation in the fourteenth century, then it probably deserved all the contempt that the reconquista heaped upon its head.

The full Travels, translated by the late Sir Hamilton Gibb and C. F. Beckingham, was published in five volumes by the Hakluyt Society between 1956 and 2000. In this shortened version*, Tim Mackintosh Smith, who has become something of a Battutah champion from his home in Yemen in recent years, presumably attempts to make the document more pleasurable to the general reader. As well as visits to some cities such as Nishapur – the birthplace of Omar Khayyam, which, for some reason, he has found obscure, he has dropped the accounts of numerous holy men. But I fear that he has failed. The central subject of the book, Battutah himself, still comes across as a loathsome, unfeeling bigot and, what is more, the volume does not even have an index, let alone any illustrations that might have shown us some of the scenery and buildings that still survived as Battutah had seen them. So if you are a travel writer or historian, you will need the full Hakluyt version. If, however, you are curious about the mentality of Islam in the fourteenth century as it watched Europe pulling ahead in leaps and bound without finding in itself the resources to keep up – a process which has continued to this day and is behind many of the outrages we witness daily- you will find this shortened version instructive enough.

*THE TRAVELS OF IBN BATTUTAH
Translated by Sir Hamilton Gibb and Charles Beckingham
Abridged and edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
( Picador, London, 2002, 325pp £20)

By Courtesy of the Literary Review, London, December 2002
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