Ross E. Dunn and Abdur-Rahman Abou Almajd in dialog about Ibn Battuta.

Ibn Battuta (1304 -1369)

Hajji Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta or simply Ibn Battuta, also known as Shams ad–Din, he was a Moroccan Berber, Islamic scholar, and a traveler known for the record of his travels and excursions published in the Rihla (literally, "The Journey").

He is considered one of the greatest travelers of all time as his journeys spanned nearly thirty years and covered almost the entire known Islamic world and beyond, extending from North Africa, West Africa, Southern Europe and Eastern Europe in the West, to the Middle East, Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China in the East.

He traveled more than 75, 000 miles (121, 000 km), a figure unlikely to have been surpassed by any traveler until the coming of the Steam Age some 450 years later.

For centuries his book was obscure, even within the Muslim world, but in the early 19^th century extracts were published in German and English based on manuscripts discovered in the Middle East containing abridged versions of Ibn Juzay's Arabic text.

During the French occupation of Algeria in the 1830s, five manuscripts were discovered in Constantine, including two that contained more complete versions of the text.[61] These manuscripts were brought back to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and studied by the French scholars Charles Defrémery and Beniamino Sanguinetti. Beginning in 1853, they published a series of four volumes containing the Arabic text, extensive notes and a translation into French.

Western Orientalists still do not believe that Ibn Battuta visited all the places he described and argue that in order to provide a comprehensive description of places in the Muslim world, Some orientalists have also questioned whether he really visited China.

Many books are being written about Ibn Battuta, the Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century, Revised Edition, with a New Preface by Ross E. Dunn 2004, Ibn Battuta In Black Africa Said Hamdun (Author), Noel King (Author), Ross E. Dunn (Foreword) 2005, The Travels of Ibn Battuta 2009, The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta: Uncommon Tales of a Medieval Adventurer 2010 We shouldn’t forget Defrémery and Sanguinetti's printed text has now been translated into many other languages such as Reisen ans Ende der Welt 1325 - 1353. Das größte Abenteuer des Mittelalters. by Ibn Battuta and Hans D. Leicht 2001and Le Voyage d'Ibn Battuta 2002 while Ibn Battuta has grown in reputation and is now a well-known figure.

It is necessary to meet one of those writers, here is Ross E. Dunn is chosen not only because he is a famous writer but also because his book was translated into many western languages and because of Ross E. Dunn's 1986 retelling of these tales, however, was the first work of scholarship to make the legendary traveler's story accessible to a general audience. Now updated with revisions, a new preface, and an updated bibliography, Dunn's classic interprets Ibn Battuta's adventures and places them within the rich, trans-hemispheric cultural setting of medieval Islam.

Ross E. Dunn

Ross E. Dunn is an American historian and writer, the author of several books including The Adventures of Ibn Battuta 2004 and coauthor of the highly cited, History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past.

He is Professor Emeritus at San Diego State University. From 1993 to 1996, he served as Coordinating Editor of the National Standards for World History. He was senior author of a world history textbook for high school students titled World History: Links across Time and Place (McDougal Littell, 1986).

He is currently at work on a new world history textbook for college students to be published by McGraw-Hill. He is director of World History for us all, a project to provide middle and high school teachers with a web-based model curriculum for world history http://worldhistoryforusall.sdsu.edu.

This is a project of SDSU in cooperation with the National Center for History in the Schools (UCLA), where Prof. Dunn serves as Director of World History Projects. He is a past-president of the World History Association and a Life Member of Clare Hall, a Cambridge University.

Q: In 1325, at the age of twenty-one, Ibn Battuta set off from his native Tangier on the hajj to Mecca. He did not return to Morocco until 1349, what do you want to show in "The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century"?

Ross: Anyone who studies African and Islamic history, as I did in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin back in the 1960s, learns about Ibn Battuta.

My classmates and I spent our entire second year Arabic class reading selections from Ibn Battuta’s Rihla, or Book of Travels, especially the section on his journey to the Mali empire in West Africa.

In 1974 I introduced a course in world history for first year university students at San Diego State University. My students tended to think that all Muslims were Arabs and inhabitants of the Middle East.

In my lectures I wanted to demonstrate to them that in the centuries after the Prophet (peace be upon him) Islam became not only a multicultural, “trans-hemispheric” religion but also a highly cosmopolitan system of cultural, social, and economic exchange.

Teaching the course in 1977, it occurred to me that Ibn Battuta wonderfully illustrated the grand sweep of the Muslim world in the fourteenth century, as well as the world-mindedness of educated Muslims.

I was not an academic specialist in the fourteenth century Muslim world. Rather I wrote about the modern history of North Africa. I decided to write a book about Ibn Battuta, not as a specialist well versed in fourteenth century texts, but as a teacher of world history.

Public understanding of Islam and Muslim history in the United States was limited back in the 1970s (and still is), and I hoped to help in some small way to rectify ignorance and misconception by writing about a past era of world history when Muslims participated in networks of commercial and cultural exchange that extended across Afroeurasia.

Ibn Battuta, a man of alluring personality who experienced all sorts of thrilling adventures, served as my archetype of the world-minded Muslim scholar.

Q: Taya Zinkin said "Professor Dunn's book is based on Ibn Battuta's own writings. . . . and provides a commentary on the society and places which he visited, making admirable use of the great increase of our knowledge over the last generation. The result is fascinating." we all agree but what would you add?

Ross: I’m not entirely sure what you are asking me. Do you mean, if I were to write the book today, what would I add? I updated the book in some respects for the second edition, which appeared in 2005.

In the past twenty years, scholarly research has yielded numerous details and new interpretations about the fourteenth century world. It has not yielded much about Ibn Battuta himself.

However, in his excellent three-volume work narrating his own travels in the footsteps of the great journeyer, Tim Mackintosh-Smith has uncovered some tantalizing, if somewhat speculative, details about Ibn Battuta’s life after he returned home to Morocco in 1355.

Q: Many of Ibn Battuta's interesting adventures, from being jailed in Delhi to trying as a judge to forbid Maldivian women going topless in public, Could you elaborate on that statement?

Ross: Ibn Battuta landed a job as a Qadi in Delhi in the 1330s. This was the era of the Delhi Sultanate. The reigning monarch Muhammad ibn Tughluq was something of an “unguided missile,” intelligent, educated, and pious but also capricious and sometimes brutal.

The Delhi royal court was a snake pit of competing officials and factions, all seeking favor with the sultan. Ibn Battuta did well for himself as a judge, but eventually he got into trouble by associating with a Sufi shaykh that the Delhi authorities did not like.

Our traveler could have been executed, but he was not. He was let go, and not only that Ibn Tughluq later appointed him leader of a diplomatic expedition to the Mongol ruler of China.

That mission ended in a disastrous shipwreck off the Malabar coast of India. When that happened Ibn Battuta decided it would be imprudent to go back to Delhi to report his failure.

He traveled in southern India for a while, then went to the Maldives Islands, where he got another job as a Qadi. Interestingly, the people of the Maldives practiced the same Maliki school of Islamic law that predominated in Morocco, where Ibn Battuta did his basic legal studies.

In several passages in the Rihla, Ibn Battuta reveals himself as a pious man with an acute sense of moral and social propriety. (Or at least this is the self image he appears to want to project in the Rihla.) This perhaps reflects the conservatism of the Maliki school but also his upbringing as a refined urban gentlemen, one who expected Muslim women conform to high standards of moral virtue. And virtuous behavior did not include appearing in public naked from the waste up as Muslim women were inclined to do in the Maldives! He reports in the Rihla that he tried to prevent women from appearing at his court sessions in such a state of undress. But he admits that he had little success.

Later in the Rihla he makes similarly rueful remarks about the women of Mali going topless or consorting too casually with men who were not their husbands.

He definitely intended his readers to regard him as a cultured and sophisticated urban Muslim who disapproved of deviations from the moral and social rules that anchored his life.

Q: Good maps, the maps are also tremendously helpful and some black and white photographs of places, could you show one of the maps and comment?

Ross: My book has twelve maps of Ibn Battuta’s routes of travel. The one included here shows his trans-hemispheric return journey from China to as far west as Tunis in 1346-49.

I spent a great deal of time developing the maps because the itinerary and chronology of Ibn Battuta’s travels are loaded with textual problems.

We cannot identify at all some of the places he tells us he visited. He makes a number of confusing statements about the chronology and itinerary, and the Rihla almost certainly contains passages that describe places he did not visit at all (though not very many places).

In developing the maps I had a great deal of help from the scholars who have translated the Rihla or written commentaries on it, for example, H.A.R. Gibb, Charles Beckingham, Mahdi Husain, and Ivan Hrbek.

One interesting complication is the theory derived from certain passages in the Rihla that Ibn Battuta made a visit to Cairo that he never explicitly reported in the Rihla. He did, however, report several other visits to the city.

Q: A vast piece of world united under the Islam culture, ranging from the Atlantic shore of Morocco to the South China Sea and south to the Guinea Gulf coast, the interesting question is why did these same countries freeze, while Europe entered the Renaissance?

Ross: The origin of this notion that the Muslim world “froze” in some way—intellectually, culturally, or technologically—during the Middle Ages is nineteenth century European orientalism.

The idea that Islam had a “golden age” from the eighth to the eleventh century, then stagnated has been repeated so many times that it has attained the status of unquestionable truth.

In the United States, world history textbooks continue to include chapters on Islam’s “golden age” but little else about Muslim history until modern times. This is the case despite the blizzard of research showing that Islam and Muslim society certainly did not “freeze” in the Middle Ages.

The question of Muslim intellectual and technological development after the Abbasid Caliphate era justifies much lengthier discussion than is possible here.

I follow other world historians in the view that in the history of humankind in the past 5, 000 years or so, centers of particular intellectual, artistic, or technological brilliance have shifted from one part of the world to another over time.

Baghdad was certainly a center of particular brilliance in the eighth-to-eleventh centuries, so was Sung China in the eleventh-thirteenth centuries, Cairo in the thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, Samarkand-Herat in the fifteenth century, and Istanbul and Delhi in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries.

The Italian Renaissance was a brilliant episode, but in my view it represented a period when Western Europe first attained a level of literary and artistic sophistication comparable to what had already been achieved in other parts of Afroeurasia. But the European Renaissance did not inevitably lead to anything in particular in Europe. There was no direct line of development from the Renaissance to the industrialization of Britain.

There is much to be said about Muslim contributions to science, technology, and philosophical and moral thought after the so-called Abbasid “golden age.” Unfortunately, even some modern Muslim intellectuals have bought into the European myth that Islam “stagnated” in the eleventh century. In Ibn Battuta’s time, Islam was spreading rapidly across the Eastern Hemisphere as a spiritually, morally, and socially satisfying way of life. From those criteria alone, how could we say that the Muslim world was “frozen”?

Q: Another interesting part of Ibn Battuta's interesting adventures is how Europeans and inhabitants of the Middle East interacted in the 14th century. Battuta gives an anecdote about a stay in a Muslim town in the Crimean where Italian traders had an outpost. Hearing the Italian's church bells, which sounded to him like a diabolic cacophony, he and his friends immediately ran to the roof and began to make the muezzin call to prayer. Luckily, there was no violent conflict from this culture class, Could you elaborate on that statement?

Ross: Frankly, I have wondered about the authenticity of this rather melodramatic story. In any case Ibn Battuta protests a particular Christian practice that he doesn’t like or that he thinks is inappropriate in a city that was under Muslim sovereignty, even though it was crowded with Genoese sea merchants.

In the story about church bells, he does not display general animosity toward Christians or Christianity.

In fact, despite Ibn Battuta’s several encounters with both Christians and Jews, he makes no baldly hostile statements about either religion. Indeed as a pious Sunni scholar, he is much more personally critical of Shi’a belief and practice, even avoiding certain towns where most of the inhabitants were Shiites.

Q: Ibn Battuta may have been the single greatest traveler of premodern times, he logged over 70, 000 miles, some of it through dangerous regions, what is the difference between Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo, the Italian explorer who brought ice cream from China?

Ross: I did not know that Marco Polo brought ice cream from China to Europe. If so, we assume he brought only a recipe!

The comparison between Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo is interesting. Both Ibn Battuta and Polo collaborated with literary scholars to write their “memoirs.” Polo offers much practical information of particular interest to merchants and diplomats, but he remains something of a “stick man, ” a two-dimensional figure who has very little to say about himself as a human being, about his likes, dislikes, foibles, and prejudices.

Ibn Battuta is the more “modern” travel writer in the sense that the “I” of the author is constantly present.

He has personal opinions about everything, and he reveals much, much more about his personal life and experience than Polo does.

Ibn Battuta likes the way one prince treats him but loathes the way another one does. He never says much about the women he married (several of them over the course of his travels) but quite a lot about slave girls he owned.

There’s nothing like that in Polo’s account. Polo’s books is of course an immensely valuable historical text, and it became something of a “best seller” in Europe in a way that Ibn Battuta’s did not in the Muslim cities of North Africa—at least we do not know who and how many people likely read the Rihla in the century after it appeared. The lives of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta overlapped, Polo dying in Venice about the time that Ibn Battuta set out on his first journey to make the hajj.

Q: No doubt some Western readers might also gain from your great book is a greater appreciation and understanding of the Muslim world in general and the Arab world in particular, could you tell us about impression some of readers?

Ross: I said in response to an earlier question that I was not (and have never been) and academic specialist in the premodern Muslim world. While I was writing the book, I worried quite a bit that the experts in the Arabic, Persian, another literatures of the fourteenth century would dismiss my book as the work of an “amateur” who did not know what he was talking about. On the contrary, some of the experts who reviewed The Adventures of Ibn Battuta congratulated me for writing a book about the medieval Muslim world that was likely to reach a fairly wide public and student audience, rather than only other experts.

That was certainly my goal, and indeed the book has had a long shelf life, including a second edition in 2005.

Certainly, I made mistakes in the first edition that reviewers and other scholars pointed out to me. I tried to correct them in the second edition.

The book has also provided many opportunities to speak to students and educators about Ibn Battuta and his world. And I have had the pleasure of consulting on two film projects, the Imax production Journey to Mecca, which appeared a couple of years ago, and a dramatic feature film about the traveler that is still in process.

Q: You are an Islamic Studies professor who obviously knows his stuff. What do you think the difference is between Travels of ibn Battutah, edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith and The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century?

Ross: The book by Tim Mackintosh-Smith that you refer to is in fact an abridged translation of the four volume English edition of the Rihla by H.A.R. Gibb and C.F. Beckingham.

For readers who want Ibn Battuta’s journeys in his own words (or the words of his literary collaborator Ibn Juzay), the Mackintosh-Smith book is an excellent choice because it emphasizes the passages in which Ibn Battuta describes his own experiences and leaves out some of his observations and disquisitions of less interest to modern readers.

I would also recommend Mackintosh-Smith’s three-volume narrative about his own travels in the Asian and African world in the past decade and more. Mackintosh-Smith, who lives in Yemen, offers wonderful insights on Ibn Battuta and his times, juxtaposing that era against the early twenty-first century.

Q: What do you think of his literary collaborator Ibn Juzayy?

Ross: We don’t know a great deal about the life of Ibn Juzayy, which was a short one. He died at about the age of thirty-seven, just two years after he finished his work with Ibn Battuta.

He came from Granada, but scholars traveling between Granada and Fez, where the Rihla was composed, would have been a common occurrence in the fourteenth century.

We will never know the precise personal and literary relationship between Ibn Juzay and Ibn Battuta. Ibn Juzayy states that he wrote down Ibn Battuta’s words as he heard them and only engaged in appropriate “pruning and polishing” of the narrative.

We also know that some descriptive passages in the Rihla are copied from the earlier work of the travelers Ibn Jubayr, Al-‘Abdari, and maybe one or two others.

Did Ibn Battuta know about and approve of this use of other authors (in descriptions of Mecca, Medina, and several other places in the Middle East)? Did Ibn Juzay do it on his own? We will never know.

The Rihla also reports Ibn Battuta’s trips to a few places (the upper Volga River valley, northern China) that in fact he probably never saw.

In the Rihla descriptions of these places tend to be vague and brief. But did Ibn Ba ttuta and Ibn Juzay decide together to include “fake” journeys to these places to make the traveler’s “coverage” of the Asian world more complete? Did Ibn Juzay slip them in without Ibn Battuta knowing? Did a later copyist of the manuscript add them? Again, the mystery will endure.

Abdur-Rahman: thank you very much.