The Adventures of Ibn Battuta - A Muslim traveler of the fourteenth century
by Dunn, Ross E.
pub by - University of California Press, Berkley and Los Angeles, California, USA 1986 - isbn 0-520-05771-6 - - LCCN = 86-5249 - - Contents p. vii - - Maps (list) p. viii - - Preface p. ix-xii - - Acknowledgements p. xiii - - The Muslim Calendar p. xiv - - A Note on Money p. xv - - Abbreviations Used in Footnotes p. xvi - - Introduction p. 1-17 - - Glossary p. 321-323 - - Bibliography (partially broken down to chapters it supports) p. 325-342 - - Index p. 343-357 - - total book length 357 p.
Abu Abdallah Ibn Battuta (Ibn Battuta) was born in 1304 in Tangier, Morocco. He died in 1368 or 1369 in Tangier, Morocco. He traveled from Tangier, Morocco eastward to coastal China, north partially up the Volga river into what is now Russia and as far south as Zanzibar in Africa, Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), the Maldive Islands, the island of Sumatra (near modern Singapor), and Mali in west Africa, south of the Sahara. After these travels he settled back in his home town of Fez. The local king asked Ibn Battuta to write a Rhila which is a formal description of his travels. Battuta took on Ibn Juzayy to be his secretary to assist with the writing. (Battuta had met Juzayy in Granada when Battuta was in southern Spain.) This book is a modern presentation of that Rhila. It was finished in December 1355.

His travels have been compared with those of Marco Polo. The Polo family traveled to the orient and eventually China starting in 1271 returning to Venice in 1295 nearly 50 years before Battutas travels. One major difference is that for the Polo family all travel with in lands where the customs and language were totally different from their own and their travel was largely a commercial venture, while Battuta traveled within lands where there was at least a strong Islamic presence, if not under some sort of Islamic rule, and was travel for the sake of travel. Battuta traveled in a pan-Islamic area was called Dar al-Islam.

He was raised in a family of legal specialists and was educated to be a qadi which is a Muslim judge. He was sometimes considered a faqih which is a specialist or jurist in Islamic law. There are four major schools of Sharia law, the version he was trained in was Maliki which was prevalent in western north Africa, an area commonly called the Maghrib (curently the modern countries of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.)

When Ibn Battuta was 21 years old he decided to do the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca and perform the rites of pilgrimage there. The Hajj is generally performed in a certain season of the Muslim calendar (a lunar calendar set by lunar phases each of the 12 months of 29 or 30 days for a total of 354 days per year and thereby is not bound as the western solar calendar where the seasons are bound to particular months.) Travel on the Hajj may start at any time, but the Hajj ceremonially begins on the eighth day of Zul-Hijjah - the 12th month of the Muslim lunar calendar.

He left home in Tangier and traveled east more or less paralleling the coast of the Mediterranean, stopping along the way at various places. He made a long stop in Cairo, Egypt, then traveled on to Damascus (Syria) where he made a long stop studying at a local school. After some time the huge caravan going to Mecca for the Hajj made up and he traveled with it across the Arabian desert to Mecca.
Wherever he stopped he was welcomed by the local high level rulers and clergy, particularly the Sufi and provided with a place to stay, food, funds, clothing (often a ceremonial robe), even transportation (a camel or horse) and sometimes one or more slaves for him to own. In Damascus he married for a short time, then divorced when he proceeded on the Hajj. (He married a few more times in the 29 years of his travels.)
He traveled south the length of the Arabian peninsula and from Yemen sailed on a dhow to east Africa, visiting as far south as Zanzibar and Kilwa before returning to central Yemen and north to Oman and acros the Persian gulf to Persia (modern Iran) then back across the Persian gulf and across the Arabian desert to make the Hajj a second time in Mecca.
His travels included going through Turkey, across the Black Sea, along its northern coast and up part of the Volga river. He made his way south from there across part of Afghanistan into India which after the Mongols swept through and retreated was ruled by an Islamic leader with a largely Hindu population at the edge of revolt. After working as a qadi for several years he was sent as an ambassador to China. The formal expedition ended in shipwreck and later after reforming on a more modest scale was beset by pirates in the Indian Ocean. Nevertheless Battuta managed to get to an outpost of Islamic merchants in Chittagong in what is now Bangladesh, near Burma. From there he sailed south to Samudra (not on modern maps) on the island of Sumatra and another outpost of Islamic merchants then after some time sailed in a Chinese style junk around the southern tip of the Malay peninsula, where modern Singapore exists on north to China. He certainly visited Quanzhou, China's major port for foreign traders, known as Zaiton in the 1300s. There were Islamic merchants in China who he stayed with,including the family of a merchant he had met years before in Morocco only 40 miles from his home in Tangier. He did not write much about his time in China. It was a very foreign society not influenced by Islam and had customs which were offensive to his Islamic sensibilities. From China he decided to return home to Morocco. Battuta had been traveling for over 25 years. It took him 2+ years more, retracing his route more directly with fewer side trips to Fez, Morocco. While on his travels he survived plague which killed of high percentages of the population in Egypt and other places. His father had died years before and his mother died just a few months before he arrived home in Tangier. He made a short visit to southernmost Spain in the parts still held by Islamic leaders. (The Spanish Chrisitian reconquista had been making strides and only the southern tip of Spain was still ruled by Muslims.
To complete his travels of Dar al-Islam he traveled south from Morocco to Mali, a gold rich country south of the Sahara desert where he was not so warmly welcomed by the ruler. He passed through Timbuktu on this trip and crossed the Niger river several times before returning to Morocco across the western Sahara.
Ross E Dunn, the author, is a masterful history teacher. In this book he not only has the Rhila in amplified translation he also sets the story in its place in history, rather like creating a beautiful setting for a jewel. Each place where the narrative takes Battuta is described in its place during the time that Battuta visited/lived there also the history of how the place got to the situation of the time (invasions and leaders) and as needed what happened shortly after Battuta left. Often enough things changed dramatically as the 14th Century progressed.
Read this book. It is well written, I doubt you will fall asleep while reading. It will give you a decent appreciation for the time and places in a readable manner that you will not easily find elsewhere.
~ 2018-09-08 ~

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