In Ross Dunn's The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century, famed Muslim traveler and legal scholar Ibn Battuta's account of his journeys is contemporized, updating this tale for a modern English audience. Starting from Tangier and traveling across Northern Africa and the Middle East, all the way to China. In this way, Battuta explores the "kingdom" of Islam, looking at each culture's Islamic practices and traditions, finding something new in each one. Ibn Battuta's journeys in the Muslim world demonstrate Islam's great religious diversity through his own sense of wonder: while Battuta travels much more than most Muslims of his time, it is a rare thing when he encounters the same culture twice.
When Ibn Battuta started his journey in 1325, he was only twenty years old; however, by the time he finished, 29 years had passed, he had traveled more than 75,000 miles, and had visited the vast majority of the Muslim world. Starting out in Tangier, Morocco, he started his hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) and traveled to the Holy House. However, by that point, it is clear to Battuta that he must travel even further. Mecca is revealed to be a place of great diversity - many Muslims of many different faiths are called to gather there, and it is speculated that his hajj inspired him to keep traveling and encounter the rest of the Muslim world. "Once there, did the Meccan bazaar, the exotic faces, the stories of strange sights and customs set his mind to some master plan for exploring the hemisphere?" (Dunn 79). In Basra, Battuta actually expressed disappointment in the contemporary state of the city's past splendor; according to him, the city had fallen into disarray and Muslim traditions had faltered: "In this town there is not a man left who knows anything of the science of grammar" (Dunn 92). This was a sentiment also expressed when he visited Baghdad; arriving at the former capital of the Abbasid Empire, he saw that the Mongols had ravaged it and its people, and was disappointed at these formerly great Muslim landmarks having fallen into ruin. When he arrived at Bukhara, he lamented that
During his travels, Ibn Battuta experienced a great deal of culture shock when encountering other Muslim cultures. When he visited the Mongols and the Turks, he would remark at his surprise that women were free to speak and behave as they pleased. Upon seeing a Turkish couple speaking plainly to each other, he assumed that the man was serving the woman - in fact, they were husband and wife. This was a dramatic change from the kind of Islam Battuta was used to, in which Muslim women were not allowed to speak. At the same time, he disliked how poorly the slave women were treated, as they are used for prostitution which Battuta finds morally repugnant. Conversely, in the Golden City of Shiraz, he actually very much appreciated how pious the women were - in those regions, women still covered themselves head to toe in order to mask every part of them. At the same time, one interesting custom that intrigued Battuta there was the women's tendency to gather in the thousands at the principal mosque. The treatment of women was a recurring source of fascination for Battuta during his journey; in Mongolia, he observed that "women of the court shared openly and energetically in the governing of the realm. Princesses, like their brothers, were awarded land which they ruled and taxed" (Dunn 168). He also noted the Khan greeting his wives with fealty and respect, without "any use of veils," something which shocked him frequently (168).
Battuta was always enamored of scholars during his travels; he tended to travel with those who excited his imagination and quest for knowledge. The Il-khan (great king) of Baghdad, Abu Sa'id, allowed Battuta to travel with him, Battuta becoming enamored of his great potential and knowledge. "Perhaps if he had reigned longer, he would have been a great builderAs it was, the political foundations he laid during his last eight years were not strong enough to ensure the survival of the regime, which utterly collapsed at his death in 1335, leaving Persia to face the remainder of the century in fragmentation and war" (Dunn 99). Battuta was a great lover of learning, and lamented the Mongolian destruction of civilization in Bukhara: "the mosques, colleges, and bazaars are in ruins There is not one person in it today who possesses any learning or who shows any concern for acquiring it" (Dunn 175-176).
The customs of Persia and Iraq elicited a complex response from Battuta; encountering the Lurs herding peoples, for instance, he was very impressed by the tribal barons/scholars called the atabegs, which contrasted with the "thoroughly brutish and heterodox" customs that Battuta encountered (Dunn 94). Here, Battuta also found Sufi Muslims, whose customs revolved around finding God through trancelike and transcendent experience, music, dance and poetry - this seemed to fascinate Battuta, with their animalistic dancing and rolling into fire (Dunn 91).
After a year of rest, and a long, dangerous trip by sea, Battuta finally made it to Turkey, where he found a large Muslim population coexisting with an also-substantial population of Christians; Battuta was very impressed by the attractiveness of the people, and the cleanliness of their food and dress (though he did also remark upon the women's unveiled nature). He was also intrigued by their hospitality, and their dedication to their faith as Sunny Muslims (not to mention their love of hashish). In the city of Adalia, he found a city where Muslims, Christians, Jews and Greeks all lived separately from one another, with Muslims in the main city while walls blocked off the other populations, showing a decidedly segregated Muslim world. Like in Persia and Iraq, the Sufis in Turkey also celebrated God through trancelike dancing.
Some of the most interesting discoveries for Battuta were in the areas with a minority Muslim population. For example, in the Genoese trading colony of Kaffa, only one mosque existed in the town due to the colony's Christian foundations; in anger at the call for Church services, Battuta and one Muslim friend went to the top of their house and started a call for Muslim prayer, which was soon stopped by other Muslims who wanted to avoid a religious conflict. From these towns, it was clear that, as Battuta got further and further away from the traditionalist Muslim world he knew, he became more of an outsider, and the Muslim populations he met were much more understanding of other religions and cultures. The Turks, for example, would drink horse milk and buza, a rudimentary type of alcoholic beer, considering it acceptable to drink even as Muslims - something which shocked the strict Battuta. These instances only grew in frequency as Battuta continued, demonstrating that Islam itself changed and shifted with the location in which it was practiced.
Ibn Battuta's accounts of his journeys are proof positive that the Islamic world is a richly diverse one. While Battuta himself was an ethnocentrist and had fairly prejudicial ideas about slavery, women and the adherence to Muslim traditions, it is clear that the world around him did not share his view, particularly as he traveled further from Morocco and throughout Muslim cultures that had to interact with other ways of life. Due to changing climates, traditions, resources and relationships, Muslims from Mongolia to Turkey and beyond all had their own ways of living, and some valued different cultural principles than Battuta, such as allowing alcohol or letting women speak freely and walk unveiled. The changing world of Islam, particularly as the Islamic scholarship he valued so much was destroyed in the wake of changing traditions and buildings being destroyed through bitter wars, allowed Battuta to see that his own notions of what constituted Muslim practice were not shared by the rest of the world. From the integration of differing cultures came the loosening of restrictions and the liberalization of religious practice, which intrigued Battuta as much as it unsettled him. The entire enterprise, however, revealed a refreshing and diverse array of religious practices that showed Islam to be a thoroughly adaptable religion, given the context in which it thrives.
Works Cited
Dunn, Ross. The Adventures of Ibn Battuta. University of California Press, 2005. Print.
