By David Waines
Ibn Battuta used to be, definitely, one of many world's actually nice visitors. Born in fourteenth-century Morocco, and a latest of Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta has left us an account in his personal phrases of his awesome trips during the Islamic international and past: trips punctuated by means of experience and peril, and stretching from his domestic in Tangiers to Zaytun in remote China. even if sojourning in Delhi and the Maldives, wandering throughout the mazy streets of Cairo and Damascus, or contesting with pirates and shipwreck, the indefatigable Ibn Battuta brings to shiny lifestyles a medieval global brimming with wonder and secret. conscientiously gazing the good variety of civilizations which he encountered, Ibn Battuta shows an omnivorous curiosity in such concerns as food and drinks, spiritual modifications (between Christians, Hindus and Shi'a Muslims), principles approximately purity and impurity, affliction, ladies and intercourse. Recounting the various miracles which its writer claims to have skilled in my view, his "al-rihla" or "Travelogue" is an interesting mosaic of mysticism and reportage delivering a prototype magic realism. David Waines discusses the subtleties of the "al-rihla", revealing the entire wonders of Ibn Battuta's global to the trendy reader. this can be a gripping remedy of the existence and occasions of 1 of history's such a lot bold, and whilst such a lot human, discoverers.
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Additional resources for Odyssey of Ibn Battuta
Sample text
Travel Tales, Their Creators and Critics 15 followed by the northward journey across Arabia to Kufa in southern Iraq; here Ibn Battuta adds the technique of compressing Ibn Jubayr’s material. Finally, the route from Kufa to Baghdad, then north to Nasibin and Mardin, is described using all these methods, especially compression and, as Mattock reiterates, this section is taken almost entirely from Ibn Jubayr. Mattock has little doubt that Ibn Battuta did actually visit the places mentioned, yet the extent of the borrowing is conscious and involves to some extent an effort to disguise the fact.
The precaution was necessary, for as they passed through dense reed marshland, some stragglers were picked off by Arab brigands and stripped of their possessions, including shoes and wooden bowls. The thieves then vanished into the vast fortress of reeds. In Wasit, Ibn Battuta was guest of the founder and head of the city’s largest madrasa, who supplied him also with dates and money. He took advantage of the caravan halt to visit the tomb of a famous saint, a day’s ride away, but found upon his return that his party had just left for Basra, obliging him to chase after it.
Why do others, like al-Balawi, al-Abdari and Ibn Battuta (or perhaps Ibn Juzayy), borrow from Ibn Jubayr, with some passages acknowledged, others not? Why does Ibn Battuta openly borrow from Ibn Jubayr at times, but pass over al-Abdari in silence? It has also been suggested that there may exist a relationship between Ibn Battuta’s travel narrative of Mali in central Africa and passages from a massive work by the famous writer-administrator Ibn Fadl Allah al-Umari (d. 1349). In the present state of our understanding of these texts, answers to these questions are not forthcoming.
