William2's Reviews > The Travels of Ibn Battutah

Fascinating and repugnant by turns. In India Battutah reports on the ancient Hindu rite of sati (also suttee), in which the widow burns herself to death on her husband’s pyre. This is the first such description of the practice I’ve read. Usually, in my reading, sati is referred to as a superseded barbarity and universally deplored, but here Ibn Battutah describes its active practice.

When these three women...made a compact to burn themselves, they spent three days preceding the event in concerts of music and singing and festivals of eating and drinking, as though they were bidding farewell to the world, and the women from all around came to take part. On the morning of the fourth day each one of them had a horse brought to her and mounted it, richly dressed and perfumed. In her right hand she held a coconut, with which she played, and in her left a mirror, in which she could see her face. They were surrounded by Brahmins and accompanied by their own relatives, and were preceded by drums, trumpets and bugles. Every one of the infidels would say to one of them, ’Take greetings from me to my father, or brother, or mother, or friend,’ and she would say ‘Yes,’ and smile at them. I rode out with my companions to see what exactly these women did in this ceremony of burning. After traveling about three miles with them we came to a dark place with much water and trees with heavy shade, amongst which there were four pavilions, each containing a stone idol. Between the pavilions there was a basin of water over which a dense shade was cast by trees so thickly set that the sun could not penetrate them. This place looked like a spot in hell--God preserve us from it! On reaching these pavilions they descended to the pool, plunged into it and divested themselves of their clothes and ornaments, which they distributed as alms. Each one was then given an unsewn garment of coarse cotton and tied part of it round her waist and part over her head and shoulders. Meanwhile, the fires had been lit near this basin in a low-lying spot, and oil of sesame poured over them that the flames were increased. There were about fifteen men there with faggots of thin wood, and with them about ten others with heavy baulks in their hands, while the drummers and trumpeters were standing by waiting for the women’s coming. The fire was screened off by a blanket held by some men in their hands, so that they should not be frightened by the sight of it. I saw one of them, on coming to the blanket, pull it violently out of the men’s hands, saying to them with a laugh, ‘Is it with the fire that you frighten me? I know that it is a blazing fire.’ Thereupon she joined her hands above her head in salutation to the fire and cast herself into it. At the same moment the drums, trumpets and bugles were sounded, and men threw on her the firewood they were carrying and the others put those heavy baulks on top of her to prevent her moving, cries were raised and there was a loud clamor. When I saw this I had all but fallen off my horse, if my companions had not quickly brought water to me and laved my face, after which I withdrew. (p. 222-223)

But I rush ahead. We are at the start in the early 14th century traveling through the Holy Land with a Sunni Muslim gentleman who calmly describes the cities he comes to and their inhabitants. He’s good at pointing out fine examples of architecture, like the Umayyad Mosque in the Old City of Damascus (715 CE), still standing today. But I also like it when he points out a kindness, as when he came down with fever and the Maliki professor Nur al-Din as-Sakhalin kept him abed in his home while doctors treated him. He makes two trips to Mecca in the early pages, tours Yemen, where we learn something of the cities of San’a, and Zafar, then it’s on to Mogadishu, Somalia, where the fare is: “Rice cooked with ghee, which they put into a large wooden platter, and on top of this they set platters of kushan. This is the seasoning, made of chickens, flesh-meat, fish and vegetables. They cook unripe bananas in fresh milk and put this in one dish, and in another they put curdled milk, on which they place pieces of pickled lemon, bunches of pickled pepper steeped in vinegar and salted, green ginger, and mangoes.” (p. 124)

Interesting here is Ibn Battutah’s account of how much of life in the Islamic world went on despite the Crusades. He is in the Holy Land for only a portion of his travels. So occasionally it impinges on the periphery of his world, but mostly it goes unremarked upon. I’m astonished by the tradition of hospitality of the Akhi, who work by day solely that they may board and feed travelers by night. From Wikipedia: “The men of the brotherhood were generally very well-mannered and generous as they ascribed to the ideas of chivalry and virtue put forth in the Futuuwa. Ibn Battutah described them as ‘men so eager to welcome strangers, so prompt to serve food and to satisfy the wants of others, and so ready to suppress injustice and kill [tyrannical agents of police and the miscreants who join with them].’ Many of the brotherhoods formed their fellowship through documents similar to a ‘futuwwatnames' which preached virtues like modesty, self-control and [self] denial.” Interestingly, Ibn Battutah never describes the fellows he travels with. “We used to buy a quarter of fat mutton for two dirhams and bread for two dirhams— this would satisfy our needs for a day, and there were ten of us.” (p. 164) This seems to suggest the casual clubbing together of travelers for purposes of mutual self-protection and purchasing power.

His discussion of his purchases of slave girls and boys is disconcerting, but then one thinks, well, we are in the 14th century after all. But when the virgin Greek female slaves grow heavy with his own child one gives a shudder. These were reprehensible practices. They still are. The Muslim world is well known for its ongoing slave trafficking to this day. (See Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book Half the Sky, specifically the chapter “Emancipating 21st Century Slaves”.) Moving on, I enjoyed Battutah's description of the Greek Orthodox Hagia Sofia before it was turned into an Ottoman Imperial mosque. Of Constantinople, he writes “Most of the inhabitants of the city are monks, devotees, and priests, and it’s churches are numerous beyond computation. The men of the city, both soldiers and others, carry over their heads great parasols, both winter and summer, and the women wear voluminous turbans.” (p. 187) The chapter titled “Account of the sultan of Transoxiana” may be the most interesting to me so far. I was curious to see which of the antiquities written about by Robert Byron in his The Road to Oxiana were extant at the time if Ibn Battutah’s peregrinations. He was then in the Persian Empire, now Turkmenistan and Afghanistan. I know they both visited Samarkand (now Uzbekistan) 600 years apart.

He’s raised to the office of qadi (judge) by the sultan of Delhi. I find the largesse of all the Muslims he visits dazzling. He’s good at his various catalog of goods. Slave girls are often bought or exchanged. He signals his frank pleasure in fucking them. He must marry and leave a dozen women during the course of his travels. They are chattel. In the Maldives one can marry temporarily while in town, and then divorce the women when it’s time to leave. He goes to China which he traverses by way of an elaborate system of canals. He’s robbed by pirates on the Indian Ocean. He escapes catastrophic shipwreck. He returns home to Tangier, and then decides to join the fight against the infidel in the Iberian Peninsula, part of the reconquista. He describes the death of Alphonso IX of Castile from the Black Death while besieging Gibraltar, which must have felt like a big win.

This is an abridgment, 401 pages long, based on the Gibb-Beckingham translation, 5 volumes, Hakluyt Society.