Ibn Battuta ﵀
He traveled farther than anyone before him. He wrote more honestly than many after him. And when his prejudices clashed with what he saw, he let both stand — that is the reason we still read him today.
Life
Muhammad ibn Abd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Lawati al-Tanji — to us simply Ibn Battuta ﵀ — was born in 1304 in Tangier, on the northern coast of present-day Morocco, into a Maliki jurists’ family of the Berber Lawata tribe. He received the classical fiqh training of his time and would, without anything remarkable, have become a qadi of regional standing. In 1325, twenty-one years old, he set out for the Hajj. He would not return to Morocco until 1354. Between those two dates lie nearly thirty years and roughly 120,000 kilometers: Mecca and Medina, Damascus, Baghdad, Shiraz, Anatolia, the Crimea, Sarai on the Volga, Constantinople on an embassy, Central Asia, India where he was qadi for six years for sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq, the Maldives where he became qadi, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, China as far as Quanzhou.
In 1351, after his return home and a short journey to al-Andalus, he was commissioned by sultan Abu Inan Faris ﵀ of the Marinid dynasty for one final expedition: the Sahel. He set out in February 1352 from Sijilmasa with a caravan heading south. Twenty-five days of sand to Taghaza, the salt city where the houses were built of blocks of salt. Then on to Walata, the first city of the Mali Empire, where he reacted to the hospitality protocol with a mixture of appreciation and irritation. From there along the Niger route southward to Niani, capital of Mansa Suleyman, the brother and successor of Mansa Musa. There he stayed about eight months, from June 1352 to February 1353.
After Niani downstream by pirogue to Timbuktu — he stayed briefly and found the city, by the way, less impressive than expected — then on to Gao, the former Songhai capital that had been incorporated under Mali. Then eastward with a Berber caravan through Tuareg territory to Takedda, a copper-mine oasis where he received a letter from Abu Inan recalling him. The return journey via Tuat, Sijilmasa and Fez brought him home at the end of 1354. There he dictated his experiences to the young scholar Ibn Juzayy, who completed the text of the Rihla in the summer of 1355. Ibn Battuta ﵀ himself lived another ten years or so in relative obscurity, served as qadi in an unknown city, and died in 1368 or 1369.
Faith and culture
Ibn Battuta ﵀ is no detached ethnographer. He is a Maliki jurist, and he judges. That judgment varies, and precisely that variation makes the Rihla an exceptional source. In the Mali Empire he notes with sincere appreciation the justice of sultan Mansa Suleyman: “Of all peoples, the blacks are the furthest removed from injustice, and their sultan tolerates it from no one.” He praises how the roads are safe, how a traveler need fear neither thief nor robber. He names by name the qadi of Niani and describes with visible respect how the entire court performs the salat al-jum’ah with seriousness.
But the same Ibn Battuta ﵀ is shocked by what he experiences as breaches of Maliki adab. The women of Walata and Niani go unveiled, speak freely with men who are not their kin, keep awliyaa, male friends, who visit at their husband’s home. He cites customs around the sultan that seem unworthy to him: courtesans who throw dust over their heads as a greeting, the faraniya who rolls naked in dust before the ruler. He condemns. He calls it un-Muslim, or semi-Islamic, or mixed with “their old customs.”
This is the honesty that makes him useful for us. He does not write what we want to hear; he writes what he saw, filtered through his Tangier-Maliki spectacles. The modern reader can read through that filter. What Ibn Battuta ﵀ disapproves of as implicit non-Islam, we can recognize as a West African gender and court culture that had absorbed Islam in its own language without Maghrebi strictness. His disapproval is our ethnographic gold.
Legacy
The Rihla — official title Tuhfat al-nuzzar fi ghara’ib al-amsar wa 'aja’ib al-asfar, “The gift of those who contemplate the wonders of cities and the marvels of journeys” — is for the fourteenth-century Mali world the most important non-Mande source we possess. For everything al-Umari ﵀ recorded from afar in Cairo, Ibn Battuta ﵀ supplies an eyewitness counterweight. Without him the Mali court culture under Mansa Suleyman would remain in mist; with him we know the name of the qadi, the construction of the audience halls, the menus, the custom of throwing gold dust on guests, the geography of the road from Walata to Niani.
For West African historians he is indispensable and inconvenient at the same time. His geographical precision is variable — he confuses names of cities, sometimes places Takedda incorrectly, underestimates distances. His cultural commentary is biased. But he was there, he spoke with the people, and he wrote it down. In a field where primary sources are scarce, that is decisive.
His broader legacy lies outside West Africa. The Rihla was discovered and translated by French and British scholars in the nineteenth century; H.A.R. Gibb’s translation for the Hakluyt Society (1929-1994 in four volumes) is still standard. In the Arab-Islamic world he has been known longer, but the modern revaluation — Ibn Battuta ﵀ as Islamic Marco Polo, sometimes as a greater traveler than Polo — is equally a twentieth-century phenomenon. What counts: he is being read. He keeps being read. And every reader who meets him reads with him also the Mali of Mansa Suleyman that he recorded.
On the map
Follow with me his West African route. Sijilmasa, at about 31.28° north, 4.27° west, oasis in the south of the Atlas — here the caravan gathered in February 1352. Then 1500 kilometers of Sahara to Taghaza, at 23.5° north, 5° west, where salt was hewn in blocks. Walata, at 17.3° north, 7° west, first city of Mali, fifty days from Sijilmasa. Then Niani, capital, at 11.4° north, 8.4° west. Downstream by pirogue to Timbuktu at 16.77° north, 3° west. Gao, slightly further east, at 16.27° north, 0°. And finally Takedda, at about 17.7° north, 6° east, copper mine in Tuareg territory where the recall letter reached him. Four time zones between beginning and end. One traveler. One book.
Primary sources: Ibn Battuta ﵀, Rihla / Tuhfat al-nuzzar fi ghara’ib al-amsar wa 'aja’ib al-asfar (dictated 1354-1355 to Ibn Juzayy); H.A.R. Gibb’s English translation for the Hakluyt Society (1929–1994, 4 volumes); parallel reading via the French Defrémery-Sanguinetti edition of 1858.
Stage pronunciation: “Ibn Battuta” as ibn ba-TOE-ta; “Rihla” as RIH-la (soft h); “Tangier” in Dutch as tan-GIER (soft g, or French variant tan-ZJÉR); “Sijilmasa” as si-djil-MA-sa; “Taghaza” as ta-GHA-za (soft gh); “Walata” as wa-LA-ta; “Takedda” as ta-KED-da; “Mansa Suleyman” as MAN-sa soe-LEJ-man.
Uncertainties:
- Year of death 1368 or 1369: both dates appear in the Moroccan sources.
- Exact length of stay in Niani: eight months on the basis of his own chronology, but his dates are not always consistent.
- Identification of Takedda: archaeologically most likely Azelik in present-day Niger, but not definitive.
- Some distances and day-counts in the Rihla may have been stylistically smoothed by editor Ibn Juzayy — the text is a co-production, not a diary.