Person · Moroccan traveller
Ibn Battuta
Also known as Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Ibn Battutah, Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh al-Lawātī al-Ṭanjī
A Maghrebi legal scholar from Tangier who left for the hajj in 1325 and travelled for some thirty years, perhaps 117,000 kilometres, across Africa, Asia and Iberia. He reached the Indus in September 1333, served Muhammad bin Tughluq as a qadi in Delhi for about six years, then sailed from Calicut, judged in the Maldives and climbed Adam's Peak. His Rihla, dictated to Ibn Juzayy after 1354, is the only source for his journeys, and parts of it are borrowed from earlier travellers.
- Date
- 1304–1368/69
- Function
- Travel & migration
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
Put in charge of Muhammad bin Tughluq's embassy to the Yuan court in 1341, he lost it at Calicut when a storm sank one ship and the other sailed without him. He then spent nine months as chief qadi of the Maldives, where he took four wives.
Modern scholars doubt that he made every journey he describes: passages on Syria and Palestine were copied from Ibn Jubayr and al-Abdari, and his visit to China is questioned. The Rihla dates his departure from Delhi to 1342, which Ross Dunn reads as an error for 1341. He died in 1368 or 1369.
Connections (6)
- Court associationMuhammad bin Tughlaq
Ibn Battuta reached the Indus on 12 September 1333 and went on to Delhi, where Muhammad bin Tughluq, who patronised scholars, Sufis and judges to strengthen his rule, appointed him a qadi on the strength of his years of study in Mecca. For about six years he moved between favour and suspicion of treason, and was refused leave to go on another hajj. He got away only in 1341, when the sultan put him in charge of an embassy to the Yuan court of China.
- Worked atThe Maldives
Ibn Battuta meant only to pass through the Maldives, but the islands' rulers, recently converted from Buddhism to Islam and wanting a judge who knew Arabic and the Qur'an, loaded him with gifts while making it impossible to leave by ship. He served nine months as chief qadi, married into the royal family of Omar I and took four wives, and imposed penalties harsh enough to set the court against him until he resigned. His story of the islands' conversion contradicts their own official chronicle.
- Traveller routeKozhikode / Calicut
Leading Muhammad bin Tughluq's embassy to China, Ibn Battuta went from Khambhat by sea to Calicut, where he was the guest of the ruling Zamorin. While he was ashore at a mosque a storm sank one of the expedition's ships; the other sailed without him and was seized a few months later by a Sumatran king. Afraid to return to Delhi a failure, he stayed in southern India under the Nawayath ruler Jamal-ud-Din before turning to the Maldives.
- Traveller routeAdam's Peak / Sri Pada
From the Maldives Ibn Battuta crossed to Sri Lanka, where he visited Sri Pada, Adam's Peak, and the Tenavaram temple. The ship that took him off the island almost sank, and the vessel that came to rescue it was attacked by pirates, leaving him stranded ashore. He worked his way back to the short-lived Madurai Sultanate, spent some time at its court, and then returned to the Maldives to find a Chinese junk for the onward voyage.
- BirthplaceTangier
Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier on 24 February 1304, under the Marinids, into a Berber family of Maliki legal scholars of the Lawata clan. He set out from there at twenty-one for the hajj and did not return to Morocco for twenty-four years. The nisba al-Tanji in his full name ties him to the city, and a purported mausoleum of the man who travelled further than any other pre-modern explorer stands in Tangier today.
- Traveller routeColombo
Ibn Battuta visited Sri Lanka in the fourteenth century and referred to Colombo as Kalanpu, among the earliest notices of the port under a form of its present name. By then Arab traders had been settling there since about the eighth century, drawn by a harbour that controlled much of the trade between the Sinhala kingdoms and the outside world. The city's Moor community was long believed to descend from them, though their genetics are predominantly South Indian.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Ibn Battuta". Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (1986); H. A. R. Gibb (trans.), The Travels of Ibn Battuta (Hakluyt Society, 1958–1994); Tim Mackintosh-Smith (ed.), The Travels of Ibn Battutah (2003).
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