Stories from Islamic History (8 page)

One of the customs Ibn Battuta came to know
first hand was the
akhi
, the Turkish word for "generous" and
the Arabic word for "brother." The fraternal societies that adopted
the term clearly acknowledged both meanings. Ibn Battuta was
introduced to them in a bazaar in Ladhiq (Denizli). He recounts:
As we passed through one of the bazaars, some men
came down from their booths and seized the bridles of our horses.
Then certain other men quarreled with them for doing so, and the
altercation between them grew so hot that some of them drew knives.
All this time we had no idea what they were saying [Ibn Battuta did
not speak Turkish], and we began to be afraid of them, thinking
that they were the [brigands] who infest the roads.... At length
Allah sent us a man, a pilgrim, who knew Arabic, and I asked what
they wanted of us. He replied that they belonged to the
fityan...and that each party wanted us to lodge with them. We were
amazed at their native generosity. Finally they came to an
agreement to cast lots, and that we should lodge first with the
group whose lot was drawn [and then with the other].
”

Such societies were not unique to Anatolia.
They existed in various forms and by several names throughout
dar-us-Islam
. Their social function was to institutionalize
the sense of civic unity into a structure consistent with the
ideals of the Quran but not addressed by the
waqf
.

The years of wanderings in Anatolia did not
dilute Ibn Battuta’s goal of Delhi. Towards this end, he crossed
the Black Sea to Crimea. His vessel sailed into a storm so rough
that at one point one of his companions went topside to see what
was happening, and returned to croak, "Commend your soul to Allah!"
But Allah was merciful, and Ibn Battuta headed for the Mongol
Kipchak Khanate, which rimmed the northern shore of the Black
Sea.

The trade routes Ibn Battuta traversed north
of the Caspian were less busy than those across Afghanistan and
Iran. He made a lengthy side trip to Constantinople, traveling in
the company of Princess Bayalun, daughter of the Byzantine emperor
Andronicus, who had been married, for political and economic
reasons, to the Muslim Ozbeg Khan of the Golden Horde, as his third
wife. She was returning to Constantinople for the birth of her
child. Ibn Battuta struck up a conversation with her, and on
hearing his travels, she wept with pity and compassion.

Ibn Battuta did not stay long in
Constantinople. He took the fabled Silk Route to Samarkand, where
he spent fifty-four days with Tarmashirin, the Chagatay Khan sultan
who had recently converted to Islam and was interested in what a
worldly-wise
qadi
might tell him.

Ibn Battuta's exact path through Afghanistan
and the Hindu Kush is uncertain, but once he descended the hot and
sultry plains of India, he headed for Multan, the Delhi sultanate’s
westward customs outpost. He made plans to impress Sultan Muhammad
ibn Tughlaq sufficiently to win a sinecure — his first steady
job.

It was very important to make a good first
impression, for no one in Delhi knew anything about the new
arrival's background or lineage. By the time Ibn Battuta reached
Delhi, he knew the custom of the sultan was to reward every gift
with a much greater one.

Ibn Battuta struck a deal with a merchant who
offered to advance him a sizable stake of dinars, camels, and goods
in exchange for a fat cut of the proceeds when the sultan's reward
came. The merchant, clearly an early venture capitalist, also
turned out to be a fair-weather friend, for Ibn Battuta says, he
"made an enormous profit from me and became one of the principal
merchants. I met him many years later at Aleppo after the infidels
had robbed me of everything I possessed, but he gave me no
assistance."

Ibn Battuta's long stays in Baghdad and
Damascus studying law and discussing fiqh with fellow jurists
served him well in Delhi. The much impressed Muhammad ibn Tughlaq
appointed him
qadi
with the handsome compensation of twelve
thousand silver dinars per year, plus a signing bonus of another
twelve thousand dinars.

However Ibn Battuta soon discovered that he
too could find himself on the wrong side of this mercurial ruler,
whose character clearly fascinated him. He says:
“When severe drought reigned over the lands of India and
Sind...the sultan ordered that the whole population of Delhi should
be given six months' supplies from the [royal] granary.... [Yet] in
spite of all that we have related of his humility,...the sultan
used to punish small faults and great, without respect of persons,
whether men of learning or piety or noble descent. Every day there
are brought to the audience-hall hundreds of people, chained,
pinioned, and fettered, and those who are for execution are
executed, those for torture are tortured, and those for beating,
beaten.”

There were administrative errors as well.
Once Tughlaq misconstrued Chinese texts about finance and decreed
that since silver was in short supply, coins should thenceforth be
made of copper. Such coins were backed by the sultan's gold, and
copper was abundant. Counterfeiters had a field day at the expense
of the sultan.

Ibn Battuta was eventually denounced at court
for his association with a teacher whom Ibn Tughlaq suspected to be
a plotter. Afraid for his life, Ibn Battuta disguised himself as a
mendicant. The sultan’s agents nevertheless located him, and sent
him "saddled horses, slave girls and boys, robes and a sum of
money."

This was clearly a summons.

Ibn Battuta presented himself to Tughlaq, and
he was no doubt thunderstruck to hear words he never forgot: “I
have expressly sent for you to go as my ambassador to the king of
China, for I know your love of travel."

Ibn Battuta, the
qadi
was caught
unawares. He was to accompany fifteen Chinese envoys then in
residence in Delhi and somehow oversee the transport and
presentation to the king of China of a gift of a hundred
thoroughbred saddled and bridled horses, one thousand two hundred
pieces of various kinds of cloth, a hundred male slaves, a hundred
singing-and dancing-girls, and fifteen eunuchs.

Ibn Battuta set forth on 17 Safar 743 AH (22
July 1342 CE), with an escort of a thousand horsemen. The plan was
to reach Calicut by land and put the embassy on one of the Chinese
dhows waiting there.

The trouble that was to dog him for the next
five years began almost the moment he set foot outside Delhi.

In the Doab and downwards, Ibn Tughlaq's rule
was breaking down rapidly. Rebels roamed the roads, sometimes as
guerrilla armies, other times as brigands. Near the town of
al-Jalali, the ambassador's retinue battled with about a thousand
cavalry and three thousand foot soldiers. Sporadic skirmishes
occurred over the next few days, and at one point Ibn Battuta fell
from his horse and was separated from his retinue. He ran for his
life—straight into the arms of one of the rebel bands. Their leader
ordered Ibn Battuta executed, but for unknown reasons the rebels
dithered and let him go. He hid in a swamp for seven days. The
locals who saw him refused him food. A village sentry took away his
shirt. He came to a well, tried to use one of his shoes as a
bucket, and lost the shoe in the depths. As he was cutting the
other in two to make sandals, a man happened along.

He asked Ibn Battuta in Persian who he was,
and Ibn Battuta replied warily, "A man astray."

The man replied, “So am I."

He then carried Ibn Battuta, fainting with
exhaustion, to a village where he recovered. In time, Ibn Battuta
regained his caravan, and eventually reached Calicut.

The gifts and the slaves were put aboard the
hired Chinese dhow while Ibn Battuta stayed ashore to attend
prayers. Then he decided he was unwilling to travel on the dhow as
the cabin was small and unsuitable. His personal retinue, including
a pregnant concubine transferred to a smaller kakam that would sail
with the dhow.

In the night, a storm came. Ibn Battuta says
“.... We spent the Friday night on the seashore, unable to embark
on the kakam and those on board unable to disembark and join us. I
had nothing left but a carpet to spread out." The storm, rather
than abate, increased.

Dhows are cumbersome in shallow, narrow
harbors, and the dhow captain tried to make for deeper water where
he might safely ride it out.

This dhow didn't make it.

Ibn Battuta had the ghastly experience of
watching the dhow smash onto the rocks, killing everybody on board
with it. When the crew of the
kakam
saw what had happened,
they made haste in spreading their sails and be off, leaving Ibn
Battuta alone on the beach.

Wrecked with the dhow was Ibn Battuta's Delhi
career. He knew the first question Tughlaq would put to him was why
he had failed to go down with his ship. This time, no show of
mendicancy would be adequate atonement.

Despite the trauma of the incident, Ibn
Battuta inserts in his account one of those factual and informative
observations that makes his Rihala such a treasure today: “The
[ruler of Calicut's] police officers were beating the people to
prevent them from plundering what the sea cast up. In all the lands
of Malabar, except in this one land alone, it is the custom that
whenever a ship is wrecked, all that is taken from it belongs to
the treasury. At Calicut, however, it is retained by its owners,
and for that reason Calicut has become a flourishing and much
frequented city.”

Ibn Battuta withdrew to the port of Honavar,
where he spent some six weeks in solitude, prayer and
fasting—perhaps to keep a low profile, perhaps to grieve for the
loss of his child who was in the ill-fated dhow, and reconciling
the end of a potentially exalted ambassadorial career. His retreat
ended when he volunteered, exactly why he does not say, to lead the
Honavar sultan's military expedition against the rival port of
Sandapur.

Though briefly victorious, the attack was
swiftly countered. He says "The sultan's troops abandoned us. We
were reduced to great straits. When the situation became serious, I
left the town during the siege and returned to Calicut."

Ibn Battuta now had no means left, no
prospects of appointment anywhere, and one friend fewer in Honavar.
He had literally run out of options.

With nothing better to do, he hopped on to a
ship bound for the Maldives islands.

The ruler of the Maldives, Queen Rehendi
Kilege, locally called Khadija, was a puppet of her husband, the
vizier. Despite Ibn Battuta's attempts to keep a low profile, the
royal couple soon heard that there was a well-traveled
qadi
in the island, As they had no one in the islands filling the office
of
qadi
at the time, they invited Ibn Battuta to take up the
post, and made it clear that they would not take "no" for an
answer. “
So reasoning with myself that I was in their power and
that if I did not stay of my own free will I would be kept by
force, and that it was better to stay of my own choice, I said to
his messenger, ‘Very well, I shall stay’”
.

The next few months Ibn Battuta enjoyed
perquisites of power while acting in the familiar function of
qadi
; punishing thieves and adulterers, adjudicating
disputes, and trying quite unsuccessfully to require women to cover
themselves more fully than the island custom dictated.

Ibn Battuta married into the royal family and
soon found himself the husband of four wives, the full complement
allowed under Islamic law. All of these matrimonial unions were at
least in part political and it was not long before Ibn Battuta,
whose Delhi credentials made him a big fish in this very small pond
began to acquire a power base of his own among the local
nobles.

The end result of these developments was Ibn
Battuta’s hasty departure, under suspicion by the queen and his
vizier, apparently well founded, of plotting a coup d'état. In a
mere seven months Ibn Battuta had gone from a much courted
qadi
to
qadi
non grata

Ibn Battuta fled to Ceylon, and from there to
the Coromandel Coast in East India. As he neared the coast, a
fierce squall broke up the ship. Ibn Battuta got his wives safely
aboard a raft, but there was no room on it for him, and he was not
a good swimmer. He clung to the slowly sinking stern of the ship
through the night. In the morning, just as it appeared to be going
down for good, a boat load of local fishermen arrived. They set him
on his way to the local sultan, and as fate would have it, the
sultan was Ghiyath al Din, a brother of one of his former wife in
Delhi — one of those coincidences that highlight the "small world"
of 8th
hijri
century (14th century CE) nobility in
dar-us-Islam
.

Ibn Battuta and Ghiyath al Din plotted a
joint expedition to the Maldives, accompanied by a military force
that would carry out the unrealized coup. But it was not long
before, in the coastal city of Patan, a plague suddenly claimed
Ghiyath al-Din life and with it Ibn Battuta’s ambitions on
Maldives.

Ibn Battuta set sail once more for Honavar,
and once more lost everything, this time to a sea-cordon of pirate
vessels. Their tactic was to disperse far out at sea but just
within sight of each other. When a victim neared, they communicated
with light signals and swarmed on their target en masse.

Ibn Battuta says “They took everything I had
preserved for emergencies; they took the pearls and rubies that the
king of Ceylon had given me, they took my clothes and the supplies
given me by pious people.... They left me no covering except my
trousers.” It speaks well of Ibn Battuta's resourcefulness and the
brotherhood of the ummah that after coming ashore stripped of all
his clothes and possessions, he was again well dressed by the end
of the day and within weeks, had money to spend.