Read Online The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century by Ross E. Dunn - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ross E. Dunn
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and intellectual sustenance from their scholarly counterparts in Cairo, Damascus, and the Holy Cities of the Hijaz.
For scholarly North Africans the
hajj
was almost always more than a journey to Mecca and home again. Rather it was a
rihla
, a grand study tour of the great mosques and
madrasas
of the heartland, an opportunity to acquire books and diplomas, deepen one’s knowledge of theology and law, and commune with refined and civilized men.
Literate Moroccans of the fourteenth century owed their greatest intellectual debt not to the Middle East but to the learned establishment of Muslim Iberia. Yet Andalusia’s time was fast running out, and beleaguered little Granada, despite a brave showing of artistic energy in its latter days, could no longer provide much cultural leadership. The Middle East, however, having somehow survived the dark catastrophes of the Mongol century, was experiencing a cultural florescence, notably in the Mamluk-ruled lands of Egypt and Syria. Gentlemen scholars of far western cities like Tangier could readily look there for civilized models, higher knowledge, and learned companionship. And though the road to Mecca was long and perilous, the internationalism of Islamic culture, continuously reaffirmed, held men of learning in a bond of unity and shrank the miles between them.
On 14 June 1325 (2 Rajab 725 A.H.) Ibn Battuta rode out of Tangier and headed southeastward through the highlands of the Eastern Rif to join the main caravan road that ran from Fez to Tlemcen. He was 21 years old and eager for more learning, and more adventure, than his native city could hope to give him. The parting was bittersweet:
My departure from Tangier, my birthplace, took place . . . with the object of making the Pilgrimage to the Holy House [at Mecca] and of visiting the tomb of the Prophet, God’s richest blessing and peace be on him [at Medina]. I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveler in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed byan overmastering impulse within me and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries. So I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones, female and male, and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests. My parents being yet in the bonds of life, it weighed sorely upon me to part from them, and both they and I were afflicted with sorrow at this separation.
He did not, it seems, set out from Tangier with any plan to join the
hajj
caravan, if there was one that year. It was not, in any event, a bad year for a young man to launch forth entirely on his own, for political conditions in the Western Maghrib were un-typically calm. Abu Sa’id (1310–31), the reigning Marinid Sultan of Morocco, was a pious and relatively unenterprising ruler and, unlike many of the kings of his line, not much interested in pursuing military adventures either in Iberia or North Africa. Around the end of the thirteenth century the pilgrimage caravans from Morocco had had to be suspended for several years owing to Marinid wars against their eastern neighbor, the ’Abd al-Wadid kingdom. 3 But less intrigued than his predecessors with visions of a neo-Almohad empire, Abu Sa’id permitted a de facto peace to prevail on his eastern frontier during most of his reign. Consequently, merchants and pilgrims could expect to pass between the two realms in relative security.
Riding eastward through Morocco’s mountainous interior and then onto the high plains that stretched into the Central Maghrib, Ibn Battuta reached Tlemcen, capital of the ’Abd al-Wadid state, in the space of a few weeks. Although Tlemcen was a busy commercial transit center and intellectually the liveliest city anywhere between Fez and Tunis, he did not linger there. For upon arriving he learned that two envoys from the Hafsid Sultanate of Ifriqiya had been in the city on a diplomatic mission and had just left to return home. The ’Abd al-Wadids, enjoying an
For scholarly North Africans the
hajj
was almost always more than a journey to Mecca and home again. Rather it was a
rihla
, a grand study tour of the great mosques and
madrasas
of the heartland, an opportunity to acquire books and diplomas, deepen one’s knowledge of theology and law, and commune with refined and civilized men.
Literate Moroccans of the fourteenth century owed their greatest intellectual debt not to the Middle East but to the learned establishment of Muslim Iberia. Yet Andalusia’s time was fast running out, and beleaguered little Granada, despite a brave showing of artistic energy in its latter days, could no longer provide much cultural leadership. The Middle East, however, having somehow survived the dark catastrophes of the Mongol century, was experiencing a cultural florescence, notably in the Mamluk-ruled lands of Egypt and Syria. Gentlemen scholars of far western cities like Tangier could readily look there for civilized models, higher knowledge, and learned companionship. And though the road to Mecca was long and perilous, the internationalism of Islamic culture, continuously reaffirmed, held men of learning in a bond of unity and shrank the miles between them.
On 14 June 1325 (2 Rajab 725 A.H.) Ibn Battuta rode out of Tangier and headed southeastward through the highlands of the Eastern Rif to join the main caravan road that ran from Fez to Tlemcen. He was 21 years old and eager for more learning, and more adventure, than his native city could hope to give him. The parting was bittersweet:
My departure from Tangier, my birthplace, took place . . . with the object of making the Pilgrimage to the Holy House [at Mecca] and of visiting the tomb of the Prophet, God’s richest blessing and peace be on him [at Medina]. I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveler in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed byan overmastering impulse within me and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries. So I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones, female and male, and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests. My parents being yet in the bonds of life, it weighed sorely upon me to part from them, and both they and I were afflicted with sorrow at this separation.
He did not, it seems, set out from Tangier with any plan to join the
hajj
caravan, if there was one that year. It was not, in any event, a bad year for a young man to launch forth entirely on his own, for political conditions in the Western Maghrib were un-typically calm. Abu Sa’id (1310–31), the reigning Marinid Sultan of Morocco, was a pious and relatively unenterprising ruler and, unlike many of the kings of his line, not much interested in pursuing military adventures either in Iberia or North Africa. Around the end of the thirteenth century the pilgrimage caravans from Morocco had had to be suspended for several years owing to Marinid wars against their eastern neighbor, the ’Abd al-Wadid kingdom. 3 But less intrigued than his predecessors with visions of a neo-Almohad empire, Abu Sa’id permitted a de facto peace to prevail on his eastern frontier during most of his reign. Consequently, merchants and pilgrims could expect to pass between the two realms in relative security.
Riding eastward through Morocco’s mountainous interior and then onto the high plains that stretched into the Central Maghrib, Ibn Battuta reached Tlemcen, capital of the ’Abd al-Wadid state, in the space of a few weeks. Although Tlemcen was a busy commercial transit center and intellectually the liveliest city anywhere between Fez and Tunis, he did not linger there. For upon arriving he learned that two envoys from the Hafsid Sultanate of Ifriqiya had been in the city on a diplomatic mission and had just left to return home. The ’Abd al-Wadids, enjoying an
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