Across the universe

Recently I received a baingan-ka-bharta recipe from a friend, a carbon trading expert, via BlackBerry from Hong Kong airport. She was on her way from a smoggy week in China to a rainy week in London, and then on to presumably a sunny week in Brazil.

This Thomas Friedmanesque opening is not intended as a globalisation QED. It suggests that while people today travel more than ever before, what they do is hardly travel. History is full of (and indeed, it was partly created by) the kind of long-distance adventurers who shaped our notion of travel and all it entails.

That kind of traveller has always been rare "" and rarer still is the traveller who left behind a record of his journeyings.

True travel, in our essentially romantic understanding of the idea, involves submersion in unfamiliar environments, where safety and success depend on very sharp observation skills and an ecumenical spirit that overcomes one's natural conservatism.

The true traveller, real or fictional, combines scepticism with credulity, drama with fatigue, truth with lies, and adds a touch of the picaresque. Think of Don Quixote and Paul Theroux.

Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta was a true traveller, and his Rihla or "travels" is among the widest-known works of late medieval Islamic civilisation. Born in Morocco in the early 14th century, at the age of 22 he set off on pilgrimage to Makka.

He wasn't to return for 30 years, in the course of which he visited virtually every part of the Islamic world of the time, from Granada to China and Mali to the Mongol steppes. He may have travelled as much as 75,000 km altogether.

Plot his Rihla on the map, however, and it fails to convey much meaning. Modern maps don't reflect pre-modern reality, where what maps existed rarely showed actual travel information and travel happened in daily stages.

From Makka Ibn Battuta took lengthy trips to Persia, Egypt and down the east coast of Africa, in effect following his nose. He rarely bothers to inform readers of the reason for his choice of direction, which is exasperating but also admirable.

In Makka he heard of the generosity of Muhammad bin Tughluq of Delhi towards qualified immigrants. So he headed towards Delhi "" by way of Anatolia, the Mongol Golden Horde and Afghanistan! From early on in this journey he began to reap the rewards available to scholarly Muslim travellers of a certain station.

He met the local potentate and qadi at every major halt and, since he came with Makkan credentials and bearing tales, he was able to win hospitality and gifts of money, slaves, horses and costly robes. In this way we learn about the bonds of culture and commerce that tied the Muslim world together, a form of early globalisation.

We also learn a great deal that is in no other source about contemporary Anatolia, India (Muhammad bin Tughluq's court and character), the Maldives, Arab seafaring and so on. What we don't learn much about is Ibn Battuta himself.

This is not a diary, and Ibn Battuta was no writer. His story was written up by Ibn Juzayy, a scholarly amanuensis in the sultan of Morocco's service. The Rihla reflects these origins, and scholars still struggle to separate Ibn Battuta's words from Ibn Juzayy's flourishes and interpolations.

In this elegant little book, L P Harvey, a historian of late Muslim Spain, reviews the immense Rihla thematically, weighing its information and attitudes and then taking up specific themes such as the finance of Ibn Battuta's travels, natural history, women and children, and the overarching religious framework of the contemporary Islamic world.

Harvey is generous and judicious in the face of a challenging if not overly sophisticated source, which has (some, and incomplete) answers to just about every question that can be thrown at it. He is ready to stick his neck out for a hypothesis (why was Ibn Battuta appointed bin Tughluq's ambassador to China?), which is refreshing.

Harvey's book is part of an ongoing series from the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Others include books on Umar, the second caliph; Bukhari and Abu Hanifa, both early and great Islamic scholars; Subawayhi, the Arabic grammarian; and Muhammad Iqbal of the Pakistan movement.

---

IBN BATTUTA
AUTHOR L P Harvey
Publisher OUP
PAGES viii + 128
Price Rs 225