Among Mohammedan pilgrims and travellers Ibn Batûta stands without a peer. He was born in a city which was once an extreme outpost of Roman rule in Africa, the Ancient Tingis, the modern Tangiers, in the Sultanate of Fez, 24th February, 1304. He devoted his youth to the study of the Koran and its exegesis; becoming thereby an expert in theology and jurisprudence. For, throughout the Mohammedan world the Koran is the living fountain of all law and of all piety: hence Moslem theology and law are inextricably intertwined.
“Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible sun within us,” is one of the quaint metaphors of Sir Thomas Browne. The old Norwich physician is writing of the body; but his remark is profoundly true of the soul of men. By the time that Batûta had reached the age of 21, he tells us that he was all aflame with “inner desire and determination to visit the Holy Places; tearing himself away from those who were dear to him, both male and female, and taking wing from home as a bird doth from its nest.” He started from his native city when not quite twenty-one years and four months old (14th June, 1325), making, first, for Tlemçen, the capital of a Moslem State 300 miles distant from Tangier. Tlemçen remains in the present writer’s memory as a gem set among the Algerian Mountains, remarkable for the ruins of Mansûra, which almost run up to its walls—a rival city built by a rival prince during a siege which dragged on longer than the ten years’ assault on Troy—remarkable also for a master-piece of decoration in that Thirteenth Century which was the great period of Moslem Architecture no less than of our own. In this beautiful city rested a Tunisian Embassy which had completed its mission and and was about to return; and this he joined. When he arrived at Bougie, he became a prey to fever; but the patient was a man of mettle and he pushed on. Fever was not the only foe. All North Africa was more or less unsafe, by reason of Nomadic Berbers and brigands; and hostilities were frequent between the States into which the great Empire of the Undivided Caliphate had broken up. The returning Embassy was exposed to danger on its journey “from the perfidy of Arabs.”
Arrived at Constantine, he received the first of those welcome donatives which it was incumbent on the Rulers of Islam to bestow. It was a scarf for head-gear; and tucked in its folds, with considerate delicacy, were two gold coins.
At Bona, the ancient Hippo, whereof once Augustine was bishop, fever again preyed on him, and he became so ill that he could only keep his saddle by taking his turban off and tying himself on with it; nor could he stand at all during the whole long journey to Tunis. When the Embassy arrived at its destination, the inhabitants came outside the walls to welcome the cavalcade. Weak, weary, and worn down by illness, unfriended and solitary, among strangers who were joyfully greeted by relatives and friends and fellow-countrymen; remote from all that was hallowed by family affection or endeared by early association, a terrible tempest of longing swept the bosom of our pilgrim. He saw all the others saluted: “there was no salutation for me” he says, “I knew no soul there. I burst into a flood of tears. A pilgrim saw this; he came forward and did me courtesy; nor did he cease to take me off my thoughts by his conversation until I was housed in the city.” This is the sole occasion on which we hear a word of home-sickness during a journey which lasted more than a score of years. The born traveller, like the born sailor, may feel the pang and have it renewed, but he brushes it aside. Moreover, we shall shortly find Ibn Batûta setting up a travelling-home of his own.
The Caravan for Mecca was about to start from Tunis; and we find our jurisconsult become its Cadi, or justiciary. A hundred bowmen accompanied it through a district always perilous by reason of marauding nomads, who lurk among its hills. It was the rainy season; the weather turned so wet and cold that the caravan halted at Sfax, and remained there some time, hoping for improvement. Ibn Batûta seized the opportunity to marry the first wife of whom we are told. She was a daughter of a syndic of Tunis; and probably this was his first, but far from being his last, entrance into matrimony. For he was a man of taste, and we shall find him, in the course of time, become an experienced Benedict, and by no means indifferent to the charms of his pretty slave-concubines. All delay was intolerable to Batûta; so, accompanied by his bride, he set off at the head of an armed band, bearing its standard. He soon entered a district notorious for brigandage even to-day, when conquering France and Italy hold the land and bestow sanguinary lessons on wild tribesmen and robbers-in-blood. Fierce nomads hovered around the little company, awaiting an opportunity to attack; but happily the caravan caught it up at one of those tombs of saint or warrior which the Moslem holds in such veneration. Probably Batûta’s father-in-law was in the caravan; for we are now told of dissensions between the two men, although there is silence as to the subject of dispute. If the Prophet granted the doubtful privilege of a plurality of wives, he mitigated the inconveniences of polygamy by extreme facility in divorce. Batûta availed himself of this, and sent his bride back to her father. The ill-luck, which so soon attended this first matrimonial venture, did not deter him from a second experiment: he lost no time in marrying a fellow-countrywoman, presumably also a fellow-pilgrim; she was the daughter of a dignitary of Fez. The pilgrims halted a whole day to indulge in wedding festivity. On the 3rd April, 1326, nearly ten months after Batûta’s departure from Tangier, the caravan drew up at Alexandria, and his long and not too safe journey along the southern coast of the “mid sea, moaning with memories,” was at an end.
Alexandria was, at that time, one of the great commercial centres of the world. Shipping from all Christendom and North Africa were to be found in its haven. Batûta tells us that it surpassed all ports he ever saw, excepting Colon and Calicut in India, the Italian settlement in the Crimea, and Zaitun (Thsiuan-Cheu) at that time the great port of China. Alexandria was almost as remarkable for Moslem piety as for trade. Batûta made a point of visiting a learned and pious person there, who, like all Mohammedan saints, was reputed to possess miraculous powers. The saint’s acuteness penetrated into the character of his visitor: he perceived a born-wayfarer in the prescriptive pilgrim, and told him that he had a taste for travel. “‘Yes,’ was my reply,” says Batûta, “although at that time, I had formed no project of distant travel. ... ‘You will see my brother in Sind, another brother who is in India, and yet a third who is in China, and will bear my salutations to them.’ I was astounded at what he said, and made up my mind to visit these countries; nor did I give up my resolve until I had beheld all three men.” “Only strongly impassioned men may achieve great results,” says Mirabeau. We shall see what Batûta’s passion was and what he accomplished.
His keen eye noted the glories of Alexandria; the great lighthouse of Ptolemy, in the last stage of decay, and that great column of Diocletian, mis-called Pompey’s Pillar. Stung more than ever by a divine gadfly, he must run all over Lower Egypt, visiting every living saint of renown and every relic of the past, especially such relics as were the tombs or dwellings of departed saints. The attention which holy men paid to their dreams and the confidence with which they interpreted them recall the Hebrew Scriptures. Batûta tells us that he visited an unusually gifted and eminently holy seer; and from that time “good fortune attended me throughout my travels.” But our traveller was no mere inattentive dreamer: the minuteness and accuracy of his observations are remarkable; and his statements are fully confirmed in the literature of contemporary and later travel, and other records of the age in which he lived.
Among the places he visited, we find him at Damietta, where was preserved the cell of the Chief of the Calenders. The very name Calender recalls one’s youth and those fantastic fables of the “Arabian Nights” which delighted it. A Calender was a Moslem under vow to deliver himself from the allurements of earth and to consecrate his life to things spiritual. It was the usage of all Calenders to shave off beard and eyebrow; and Batûta supplies us with a story to account for their disfigurement. The founder of the sect was a personable man, and a certain lady fell in love with him and pursued him in every conceivable way. But all her lures and devices coming to nought, she contrived a still more ingenious stratagem. She got an old woman, who, of course, could not read, to stop the beloved one, who was as good-natured as he was devout, when on his way to the mosque, and ask him to read a letter which she said she had received from her son. He complied, and then quoth the old woman: “My son has a wife who dwells in yonder house. Will you be so good as to read it in the passage so that she may hear what her husband says?” He agreed to this also; but no sooner had he crossed the threshold than the old woman clapped the door to, and the love-sick lady appeared, attended by her slaves, who forced him into an inner room. She cast herself at him, and began to take liberties with him. So he made the excuse that it was necessary for him to retire privately. No sooner was he alone, than he whipped out a razor which he had with him, and divested himself of beard and eyebrow. Then he presented himself before the enamoured woman, who was so disgusted at the disfigurement that she had him chased from the house. “Thus,” says Batûta, “by Divine Providence, his chastity was preserved, and his sect shaved eyebrow and beard from that time forward.”
This is one of the many anecdotes which Batûta thrusts into his narrative. It is much more amusing than most of them. All Orientals (and Moors are essentially Orientals) dote on pointless fable and wild romance. They are insatiate for marvel, and gulp down any stretch of fancy coloured by religion. Batûta’s farrago of stories is, for the most part, silly. Happily, these legends are short. He wrought diligently in hagiology; he was a-gape for yarns, remembered them all and carefully recorded them; for they suited his own taste and that of his nation and time. They are the gatherings of a man profoundly learned in the Koran and Mohammedan lore; one concerned, like the Pharisees of old, with minor questions of the Law and minutiæ of ceremonial observance; vexed, as it were, about tithes of small herbs. His main interest was his religion, and in his religion he was a meticulous pedant. He had a natural love of the miraculous, and religious credulity case-hardened it. Every mosque was a magnet to draw him from afar; he made a pilgrimage to every Mohammedan shrine he heard of; he cannot away without its legend. He reports wonders as dull as they are extravagant. They possess neither genius nor charm nor authority. Sometimes Oriental taste for the tawdry is to blame: sometimes he is flatly gulled. But, in mundane matters, restless impulses converted the credulous pundit into a man of the world. He records accurately what he actually saw and heard, or what he believed he saw and heard. He was interested in all that life had to offer; but supremely so in all that had to do with Islam.